An End

As all good things must, the Williamstown Institute of International Politics came to an end. Two bursts of forensic fireworks and a deal of summing up marked the closing sessions.

P: M. Louis A. Aubert, political editor of the fortnightly Revue de Paris, rounded off his series of utterances by calling the World Court the "white hope" of World Peace but went on to say that it was ineffectual without dependence upon the League.

P: Oswald Garrison Villard, pacifist editor of the Nation, then drew much odium upon himself by assailing U. S. men and methods in the Government's Latin-American policy. The U. S. rules all but six Latin-American Republics "by bullets and bankers," the U. S. "dragooned" Mexico for U. S. oil interests, said Mr. Villard. "The blood of the 3,000 Haytians slain by our American marines, and of the 400 dead in Vera Cruz, mostly women and children, dishonors our good name, especially when involved with so sordid a business as debt collection!"

Cried Army and Navy officers: "Sit down!"

The New York Sun: "O. G. Villard grows fat on the proofs of his own error."

P: Yusuke Tsurumi, suave, patient young Japanese liberal, explained that the U. S. exclusion policy might well drive his countrymen into the dread Siberian morasses of Communism.

P: Boris A. Bakhmetev, onetime Russian (Kerensky) envoy to the U. S., hoped and believed that the future would link the U. S., England and Russia "in a belt of well-meaning Democracies encircling the globe." Others present, both anti-and proSoviet, agreed with him on this indefinite prediction. Colonel William N. Haskell, U. S. Russian Relief head, a second time urged a Russo-U. S. conclave.

P: The Rev. E. A. Walsh, of Georgetown University, Director General of the Papal Relief Mission to Russia, touched off the week's second pyrotechnical display by stating that the Soviet Government had officially admitted to the execution of 1,800,000 persons between 1917 and 1922. Arthur B. Ruhl, traveler and journalist, declared the figures "quite impossible." Dr. Harry A. Garfield, host of the Institute, also deprecated, suggested Father Walsh had meant to include all those killed in riots, street skirmishes and the like. Father Walsh stuck to his story, however, and received support from Sir Bernard Pares, English editor. The Russian discussion ended on a note of extreme condemnation of all things Soviet, fiery John Spargo, U. S. platform-socialist, joining in.

P: Professor Henry Pratt Fairchild, of New York University, reiterated his solemn warning to the world against overpopulation, urged an ethical birth-control and a curb upon migration. Rear Admiral William L. Rodgers, U. S. N., took the occasion to predict a clash of yellow and white men in Australia when America and the Orient overflow their Continents, and also pointed a finger of suspicion at Japan for the late Philippine disturbances. Suave Tsurumi avowed Japan's innocence.

On the final day, Woodrow Wilson's name was conjured with in Chapin Hall. Prof. Sidney Bradshaw Fay, of Smith College, said he has second-hand but reliable information that Woodrow Wilson died content that the League was gaining ground even without the U. S.

Claim was made by the Christian Science Monitor that its plan "to take the profit out of war," as put forward last November, "overshadowed" all else and was roundly supported at Prof. Fay's round table, the last of the Institute. This plan called for a U. S. Constitutional Amendment:

In the event of a declaration of war, the property, equally with the persons, lives and liberties of all citizens, shall be subject to conscription for the defense of the Nation.

The Press. As the 225 members of the 1924 Institute were shaking hands and catching trains, editors cogitated.

James Ernest King, correspondent for the Boston Transcript: "From all this wealth of words, has there resulted--only a confusion of counsel, a trackless waste of pros and cons? It is not fair to say so. . . . The Institute is proving itself a major propulsive force in the upbuilding of what broadly may be termed 'an American imperial mind. . . .'"

Christian Science Monitor: "The fourth session . . . has been notable for the strong tone of optimism. . . . The picture of a Continent [Europe] hurtling toward a bottomless abyss, limned [last year and before]in flaming colors by John Maynard Keynes, Frank A. Vanderlip and Signor Nitti, and in more restrained tints by Sir Philip Gibbs and many others, is authoritatively declared to be without relation to present conditions. . . .'

At 'Sconset

Where once fine horses tossed their manes

And champed their oats and hay,

Now daily flock the folks with brains,

To dine and talk and play.

So reads the shingle over the door of a little inn at Siasconset, Mass., on cool, sandy, windswept Nantucket Island. Within, the sessions of the 'Sconset Summer School have been going on for many weeks. The school was founded in 1922 as "The School of Opinion" by Frederic C. Howe, political economist, onetime U. S. Commissioner of Immigration. Its first three periods of the 1924 season were devoted to Psychology and Psychoanalysis, to Art and Literature, to Politics and International Affairs. Last week the fourth session, on Opinion, began.

Near the inn, in fishermen's dwellings, bungalows, and a row of neat Summer cottages, dwells the heterogeneous, shifting "student body." Coming and going, staying or leaving, are members of both sexes and various generations--novelists, doctors, lawyers, merchants, a playwright who challenges the lecturers, a Lucy Stone Leaguer, a judge from South Carolina who calls himself a "Freshman at 60" because he is going to school at the University of South Carolina.

They pay their fees, attend the lectures or not, as they see fit, sit in groups at the little inn over fish dinners and feasts of the intellect. During past weeks, among the lecturers have been: Sinclair Lewis (Bolshevism in books), Floyd Dell (psychology), Prof. Richard Swann Lull of Yale University (zoology).

Among the lecturers for September are announced: Horace M. Kallen and Everett Dean Martin speaking on the same day from different viewpoints of psychology; Dr. Albert Loyal Crane, of Chicago, on "the unusual child and other fields of applied psychology"; Sinclair Lewis on "literary idiocies"; Bruce Bliven, of the New Republic, on political aspects of the age of jazz, the jazz press, Church and State, wild youth--a gamut of subjects. Herbert Adams Gibbons, journalist-professor, will "do" the Near and Far Easts.

As in the past two months, extra lecturers are expected to drift in unannounced.

"Inefficient"

The Chinese Ministry of Education published an order advising provincial authorities against sending students to the U. S. "Their college courses are inefficient," said the Ministry. "Send your students to Europe." Notwithstanding this' advice, 118 Chinese students last week clattered up the gangway of the President Jefferson and sailed from Shanghai for the U. S.