This Famishing World

By Alfred W. McCann

§ 121 -- Labels and Standards

THE people of America need food standards that will really standardise. The wholesale jobbing trade have adopted standards as a commercial check against fraud, but the consumer is not considered in their application.

In a few cities milk is no longer just milk; it is Grade A milk, Grade B milk, or Grade C milk. Cheese is no longer "full cream" cheese. It is now whole milk cheese or skim milk cheese.

With these two exceptions the housewife has no means of knowing the quality, character or purity of the product purchased by her, all the food laws notwithstanding. Even the cheese standard does not tell her whether the milk entering it was clean or dirty.

The honest cheese maker who screens his windows to keep out flies, and who pays a premium for clean milk, has no advantage over his indecent competitor. Indecency is encouraged because it can show a larger profit in competition with decency.

Bread surely should be standardised. Some bakers use lard, some use compound, others use ill-smelling fats, rescued from ignominy by heroic processes. The baker who uses pure shortening enjoys no commercial advantage over his neighbour using imitations.

A label adequately describing some of the loaves now on sale would inspire as much mirth as a Charlie Chaplin picture. The following cake label illustrates the point:

THIS CAKE
Contains
Wheat Flour, Corn Syrup,
Uncertified Casein,
Chinese Egg Albumen, Egg-o-Sub,
Coal Tar Yellow, Alum, Sugar,
Coumarin, Vanillin, Tonca,
Water, Compound

If the cake contained a filler between the layers it would carry another label like this:

OUR FILLERS
Contain
Glucose, Sugar, Coal Tar Red
Chop, Skin and Core Juice
Phosphoric Acid, Sodium Benzoate

Pies under a standard system would be curiously labelled.

In New York City mince meat is made for mince pies from horse meat. The meat of a young healthy horse would not be objectionable, but a young healthy horse is worth on the hoof at least $150 so that its dressed meat would cost at wholesale 60 cents a pound.

There is no such thing as horse meat; it is really nag meat. Broken down nags are purchasable at from ten to twenty-five dollars each. Their flesh should lead to this label:

MINCED NAG PIE
Crust Shortened with Petroleum

In Missouri the use of alum is unlawful in food products; elsewhere it is extensively honored.

In Wisconsin the adulteration of food is not a misdemeanour, and no penalty can be collected for a first offence.

In Minnesota no man has a constitutional right to keep secret the composition of substances sold by him as food.

In the trade coal tar dye is known as "egg color," "tomato red," "strawberry red," etc.

In bonbons the use of dye is ornamental. In orangeade, strawberry soda, raspberry soda, fruit icings, cakes, jams, jellies, pie fillers, tomato soup, macaroni, ice cream, smoked fish, cordials, syrups, fruit juices, catsup and chili sauce it disguises inferiority and fraud.

Catsup made of sweet potatoes, pumpkins and other gourds has enjoyed a large sale by reason of "tomato red."

The grocers "best" pumpkin may be any one of the wholesale standards, "Fancy Golden," "Extra," "Choice," or "Good."

The grocer who sells "Good" as his best makes three times as much profit as the grocer who sells "Fancy Golden" as his best.

The housewife under present conditions does not know what the grocer knows, wherefore her ignorance can be juggled by trickery or protected by honesty, and she will never know.

John Philips Street, Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station, reporting to the governor on twenty-three samples of canned pumpkin, found they ranged from forty-one cents to $1.28 a pound.

When the housewife asks the grocer to send her a can of peaches she usually says, "Send me a can of your best peaches." She does not know that there are "Extra Regulars," "Extras," "Extra Standards," "Standards," and "Pies." She knows nothing of the density of the syrup or whether the peaches are Melbas, Yellow Clings, Yellow Frees, Extra White Clings, Extra White Heaths, Extra Yellow Crawfords, Extra Standard Yellow Clings or Second Yellows. The labels are mum.

The grocer knows because he pays a different price for each. One standard costs the grocer a dollar a dozen less than another. Because the standards are not passed on to the housewife she knows nothing of the difference between the cheaper grades and the better grades, and so is easily misled through "bargains."

All canned peas are peas, but the grocer buys them from the wholesaler as "Double Extras," "Extra Sifted," "Sifted," "Standards," "Soaks."

The law standardises gold so that we have 24 carets, 18 carets, 14 carets, and 10 carets, but canned tomatoes are simply tomatoes, though they may be "Fancy Red," "Hand-picked," "Fancy Hand-picked," "Whole Solids," "Regular," "Extra Quality," "Choice," "Standard," or just "Good."

Canned corn may be "Fancy Maine," "Fancy Choice," "Maine Style," "Maryland," or just "Corn."

The whole canned food family, from salmon to plum pudding, runs through a wonderfully complex system of trade standards, but leaves the housewife always in the dark. Does she not want light

§ 122 -- Standards and Label

Butter is wholly standardised as far as the wholesaler is concerned, and for each standard the retailer pays a different price, but usually the housewife has a choice of only two grades, butter and best butter.

The real standards are as follows:

Extra creamery	Renovated extras
Creamery firsts	Renovated firsts
Creamery under-firsts	Renovated lower grades
Creamery top-seconds	Ladles firsts
Creamery seconds	Ladles seconds
Creamery thirds	Ladles lower grades
State dairy, finest	Packing stock No. 1
State dairy, good to prime	Packing stock No. 2
State dairy, common to fair	Packing stock lower grades

This is why one grocer's worst butter may be another grocer's best and so on through a labyrinth of trickery for which the housewife in dismal ignorance pays the bill.

The most hopelessly unstandardised compound now to be seen in America is labelled "ice cream." Ice cream contains all the way from 2 percent fat to 14 percent. This fat may consist of any fat, including cream.

The ice cream maker to-day uses a homogeniser with which he incorporates lard, cocoanut fat or any form of animal or vegetable compound with skim milk powder and water, or sweet skim milk.

All commercial ice cream contains a bodifier, usually in the form of glue. Imitation flavors and colors add to its mystery. Honest ice cream made of Grade A whole milk, pasteurised, and so labelled, ought some day to establish the reputation of an honest man.

Why are there no standards to enlighten the housewife? In the first place until recently she had no vote. The political representatives of the food fakers did not consider her. They never will consider her until she serves notice that she is no longer ignorant of the subject of foods.

§ 123 -- Cheating Cattle

Millions of dollars are stolen annually from the farmer by manufacturers of dairy feed known as "balanced rations."

The adulteration of these feeding stuffs has grown constantly during the last twenty years. In the Fall of 1918 there were in New York State alone 1,760 separate and distinct brands of "mixed" feeds. The feed manufacturers had so monopolised the raw material, and had so dominated public officials, that the farmer found himself wholly unable to purchase straight feeds. He was obliged to buy them already compounded, notwithstanding the frequent exposure of the frauds they concealed.

The cost of producing milk, butter, cheese, eggs, poultry and beef have tremendously increased through the widespread distribution of these copyrighted "balanced rations," so many of which are actually worthless.

Despite this fact the officials, controlled by the manufacturers, have continued to ignore the shameful system although professing friendship for the farmer and consumer when seeking votes. They have known the truth; no defence of ignorance can excuse their failure to interfere with this nation-wide system of thievery.

In 1911 Dr. W. H. Jordan, director New York Agricultural Experiment Station, exposed the methods employed to conceal refuse by saturating it with molasses in the production of "balanced rations."

After describing the worthlessness of these adulterated feeds he informed the manufacturers that he was "utterly, out and out, the enemy, here and everywhere, of the worthless stuff entering into compounded feeds."

In 1916 the Wicks Investigating Committee examined Dr. Jordan, obtaining from him further information concerning the fraudulent character of these adulterated feeds as revealed by long, continuous analyses in the New York State Laboratory, Geneva Experiment Station.

These exposures were recorded for the benefit of all state and federal officials in Flour and Feed, page 34, December, 1911, and in the Wicks Committee Official Report, page 784, 1916.

The official analyses showed that the feeds included ground corn cob, oat hulls, screenings, oat clippings, elevator sweepings, shredded straw, peanut hulls, sawdust, weed seeds, dirt and sand, to the extent of 50 percent.

"The dairymen should avoid these prepared feeds," declared Dr. Jordan. "The molasses feeds have lent themselves to this sort of mixing because the molasses obscures the mixture. The oat refuse is worthless. It has no more feeding value than the straw refuse around the barn! Under the present law the manufacturer can put anything he wants to into these feeds, the price of which is actually higher than the market value of the ground grain which the farmer cannot now buy from the miller to mix for himself."

In 1912 the State of Indiana published an official analysis of "oat feeds" in contrast with oats. Oat groats, for instance, were found to contain fibre 1.97, ash 2.10 (normal and good), whereas oat straw contained 37 percent fibre and 5 percent ash; oat hulls 29.7 fibre and 6.7 ash; oat clippings 22.15 fibre and 15 percent ash (abnormal and bad).

The average of the mixed oat feeds examined disclosed the presence of 25.35 fibre and 6.56 ash, a total of 33 percent waste.

Dairy feed, containing this stuff, consists chiefly of wood and ash, mixed with black strap, the lowest by-product masquerading under the name of molasses. This black strap contains an additional 10 percent of ash, consisting of scale and the mineral residue of the chemical processes employed in the refining of sugar. Thus the percentage of inert waste matter is pushed still higher.

Notwithstanding the agitation against the use of these indigestible and non-nutritious feeds, Dr. J. K. Haywood, U. S. Department of Agriculture, assured the feed manufacturers, 1913, that it was no longer necessary to go to court to settle differences. (See Flour and Feed, December, 1913, page 60.)

The same year G. A. Chapman, president of a feed manufacturing concern, who in 1918 became head of the Feed Division of the U. S. Food Administration, said: "We feed manufacturers do not want to sell for less than we can get for our stuff." (See Flour and Feed, December, 1913, page 31.) This statement fairly reflects the attitude of the mixed feed crowd toward the farmer.

The same year Dr. Haywood, U. S. Department of Agriculture, sitting with the feed manufacturers, moved the adoption of the phrase "corn gluten feed" to cover the stuff known as "corn starch bi-product with corn bran," urging that the word "refuse" be dropped in describing chaff, empty hulls, immature oats and dust. (See Flour and Feed, December, 1913, page 35.)

The worthlessness of ground corn cob and rice hulls had become so generally recognised by 1914 that June 1st of that year State Commissioner of Agriculture Page prohibited their mixture in compound feeds sold in Arkansas. The government did not follow. Why?

The same year Dr. James W. Kellogg, chief chemist Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture, reported on 600 samples of feed analysed by him. Fifty of the molasses feeds contained water to the extent of 20.24 percent. He demonstrated that a single car of 20 tons of such feeds contains 3 tons of water. For this water the farmer in 1918 paid $60 a ton. He also paid the same price for the indigestible wood-fibre, scale, weeds, sand and refuse concealed in the only stuff he could buy.

By 1916 the New York State Feed Dealers' Association affiliated with the American Feed Manufacturers' Association, had become so bold in boycotting millers who dared sell unmixed feeding stuffs direct to the farmer that the attorney general, forced by the disclosures of the Wicks Investigating Committee, threatened prosecution.

To avoid prosecution the Feed Dealers' Association dissolved but immediately reformed under another name with the same members and the same officials.

Throughout all these years there have been no prosecutions. Apparently the farmer will always have to act for himself. He knows, or should know, that oat hulls, the outside shell which acts as a protecting overcoat for the grain within, whether it be oats, rice, wheat, barley or corn, are not in any manner similar to the sweet, tender, inner skin of the grain known as "bran."

Bran is essential to the health of dairy cattle as well as to the health of man. Hulls are essential only to the profit of the feed manufacturer.

§ 124 -- Pasteur and God

The handicaps of ignorance under which our grandfathers struggled, suffered and died, have been lifted from modern life through the application of many scientific discoveries, beginning with the achievement of that most brilliant, unselfish and idealistic of earth's benefactors, Louis Pasteur.

One does not have to go back fifty years to witness the typhoid epidemics that swept helpless communities to the grave. Yellow fever counted its victims by the thousands. Smallpox kept pace with this dread disease as a slaughterer of men.

Surgery knew nothing of antisepsis. Gangrene, blood poisoning and tetanus fought for the lives of those who were cut, mangled or bruised. Convulsions of infants with cholera-infantum destroyed hundreds of thousands. Child-bed fever, due to the ignorance of the medical world, was the nightmare of every physician.

It was not so long ago that piles of garbage, filth and decay were to be seen lying about in the camps, hamlets, villages, towns and cities of the nation. To-day every town has its health officer, every city its health department.

As much money is spent on public health in the United States as upon education. We control the sanitary conditions of floating baths, stationary pools, bathing beaches; we operate day nurseries; we promote the progress of industrial hygiene, regulating public laundries, disinfecting passenger cars and omnibuses, requiring the removal of harmful gases from work rooms. We compel the owners of marsh lands and sunken lots to fill in or drain them, to prevent the breeding of mosquitoes.

We look after the sanitation and ventilation of theatres, and oblige physicians to report occupational diseases and injuries.

We prevent persons suffering from communicable diseases from working in their homes on articles intended for general consumption.

We regulate the free distribution of vaccines, antitoxins, serums and cultures.

We conduct contagious disease hospitals and tuberculosis clinics.

We inspect slaughterhouses and control the disposal of their offal.

We condemn the use of the common drinking cup and the common towel.

Until Louis Pasteur arrived our ignorance was abysmal. He taught us the relationship of micro-organisms to disease. He unfolded for us the mysteries of fermentation, decomposition and putrefaction. His discoveries now permeate every province of practical life.

Until he came the world knew nothing of the complications of elemental reaction; of the growth and diseases of plants, of the nutritional and pathological processes of animals, of the canning, drying, refrigerating and spoiling of food, of the treatment of water supplies, of the disposal of sewage, of the manufacture of vaccines and serums.

Prior to the birth of this God-sent messenger there was no guiding hand to lead the way out of the wilderness of disease. Wine soured; silk worms died; food rotted; children perished; anthrax killed cattle; men succumbed to rabies; until Pasteur, with an almost intuitive insight into the operations of nature, gave to the world his knowledge of micro-organisms.

Cow's milk could not then be made safe, as it is now made safe, thanks to Pasteur, in a few cities like New York, Chicago and Washington.

Klein, inspired by Pasteur, had not yet wrestled with the fact that diphtheria is communicated through milk.

Koch had not yet discovered tuberculin. The toxic substances which microbial life produce, extending to the poisoning of food through decomposition, were not even hinted at in dreams.

Prior to the war, 1914, the terrors of the European herdsmen had been put to sleep. All these forces, glorified still further by the introduction of Lister's aseptic and antiseptic surgery, have fought death with a conquering hand. Infectious diseases no longer scourge the world. Yet -- it was only in the early "eighties" that they were traced to their origin; the organisms responsible for them isolated and studied in the light of prophylaxis.

Medicine in these few short years has grown out of an ignorant mysticism into a science, and public health has become a tangible reality. We even boast of a serum therapy for hog cholera and a vaccine for black leg.

Yet, notwithstanding the genius of Pasteur, who fought to preserve the life of man, many diseases are on the rapid increase.

In the past fifteen years typhoid has been reduced from 32.0 to 17.9, diphtheria from 29.6 to 18.8, but cancer has increased in the same time from 67.9 to 78.9; diabetes from 11.5 to 15.3; heart disease from 124.2 to 138.6; ulcer of the stomach from 2.9 to 4.0; Bright's disease from 87.4 to 92.5.

Why do these diseases increase? Alas, Pasteur, the idealist, who refused to profit commercially through his genius, who worked alone for God and man, who made no retort when the German scientists who afterwards established Pasteur Institutes in his honour, mocked him, flaunted him and sneered at him, is dead, and the scientific world to-day, profiting by all his achievements, stands in humiliation as unbridled disease laughingly gallops before their eyes in its ride to death.

As if looking into the future at those dreadful years, 1914-1918, Pasteur, in 1889, at the dedication of the Pasteur Institute, said: "Two opposing laws seem to be now in contest. The one, a law of blood and death, opening out each day new modes of destruction, forces nations to be always ready for battle. The other, a law of peace, work and health, whose only aim is to deliver man from the calamities which beset him. The one seeks violent conquests, the other the relief of mankind. The one places a single life above all victories, the other sacrifices millions to the ambitions of a single individual. The law of which we are the instruments, strives even through the carnage to cure the wounds due to the law of war. Which of these two laws will prevail, God only knows. But of this we may be sure, that science, in obeying the law of humanity, will always labor to enlarge the frontiers of life."

This great Pasteur knew nothing of the forces of the soil that step upward to the higher life of vegetation and then on into that loftiest triumph of physical creation, the flesh of man, contributing their energies even beyond the flesh, which is but an instrument of the soul, but he did know the soul and its relation to its Maker.

"Happy the man," he wrote, "who bears with him a divinity, an ideal of beauty and obeys it; an ideal of art, an ideal of science, an ideal of country, an ideal of the virtues of the Gospel."

Above his tomb in the Institute Pasteur these words are graven.

It was Pasteur who wrote: "These are the living springs of great thoughts and great actions. Everything grows clear in the reflection from the Infinite. The more I know the more nearly is my faith that of the Breton peasant. If I could know all I would have the faith of a Breton peasant woman."

He could not understand the failure of scientists to recognise the manifestations of God that lie everywhere in the world around us. Because he thought that his work was like that of St. Vincent de Paul, who did so much for suffering children, he asked upon his death-bed that the life of the saint be read to him.

He, the believer in God, whom pagan science deifies as it has deified no other human genius, could see God in the laws of life.

His benefactions emerged from his spiritual vision.

To-day, in spite of his science, death continues to reap its harvest, because his successors have not only stopped where he left off, but in their pride have dismissed God from their equations, smiling when Pasteur is devoutly described as "a child of God."

If modem science would bow its head it would ask these questions: "With epidemics stamped out, why do we point with pride at the mortality records of the present day, when they disclose to us that in spite of all our wisdom, in spite of the army of public health workers who devote their lives to the control of disease, we permit the deaths of 400,000 children under ten years of age in the United States every year?

"Why are diabetes, Bright's disease, appendicitis, cancer of the stomach, heart disease, constantly increasing, when Pasteur, the author of our glories, placed in our hands the weapons that conquer death?

"Why do tuberculosis, malnutrition, anemia, nervous prostration and constipation still destroy hundreds of thousands annually?

"What would have been the vigor of our grandfathers had they possessed the scientific knowledge that Pasteur placed at our disposal?

"In their day man's food was not denatured.

"With all the influence now at work in his behalf, what would be the effect upon his health if it were not denatured to-day?

"In giving man his food, is it possible that God prescribed? Why, then, do we tolerate the distortion of His prescription?

"Shall we go on, baffled in our wisdom, or like that child of Faith, Pasteur, shall we journey back to God?"

§ 125 -- Whence Came Life?

Evolutionists have pretended to trace the origin of man to the monkey by way of a "missing link," no trace of which, in spite of never-ending search, has yet been found outside the imagination of a solitary group of theorists.

From the monkey ever downward they journey into successively lower circles of life, passing through countless thousands of years until they reach the tadpole stage.

Still lower they descend into the dim realms of an unrecorded history, reaching at last a single cell of living protoplasm, the Beginning of Life on Earth.

There they stop!

How did that protoplasm, the source of all life on this planet, as they contend, get here?

Pasteur saved millions of lives by demonstrating that "spontaneous generation" does not take place. What then, if it did not generate itself, can they say to explain the presence of protoplasm as the first link in their chain of life?

They are certain they have found the first link even though at the centre of their chain a missing link breaks the circle. Protoplasm! How came it to earth?

"Ah," they explain, "protoplasm originally immigrated from interplanetary space, after floating through starry regions perhaps for ages. Arriving at last, free and unincluded, upon the surface of the earth it found conditions accidentally favourable for its development and entered at once into that vast series of overlapping cycles whose glory is now manifested through millions of living creatures ranging in dignity from the protoplasmic cell in the belly of a jelly fish to a Woodrow Wilson or a Ferdinand Foch."

Loath to credit God with creation they choose rather to spin their tenuous filaments of hypothesis, until the thin web of speculation, hanging from supports of thinner nothingness, will no longer sustain the mote out of which are ravelled endless reams of biologic despair.

Rent after rent and tear after tear have ripped the reaches of their scientific gossamer until now its tattered remains are less visible than the skeletal fragments of the "missing link," of which not a single vertebra has yet been found.

In the year 1911, Truth tore another gap in the shreds and patches still fluttering in the winds of pagan unrest. B. S. Shattock and L. S. Dudgeon reported the results of experiments conducted to ascertain whether nonsporing bacteria, dried in a vacuum and kept there would survive those dried in air, or die more quickly.

They tested the action of sunlight, of heat and of cold, upon bacteria dried in an airless space in order to learn how far such solar and interplanetary conditions might be deadly to dried bacteria, if such bacteria could be supposed present in a free state beyond the limits of terrestrial atmosphere.

The Bacillus coli died on the fourth day both in vacuum and in air. The solar light and ultra-violet rays were fatal to these organisms in less than one hundred hours.

The Bacillus typhosus perished almost as rapidly.

The Staphylococcus pyogenes aureus survived from four to fifteen weeks, then died.

The Bacillus pyocyaneus was killed by exposure to bright sunlight in a vacuum in six hours. Nothing living can remain alive in the vacuum of sunlit space.

Science knows at last that dry bacteria, even if free to wander through the interplanetary vacuum, could not survive the solar rays. While journeying earthward (by any conceivable or inconceivable medium) through hundreds of millions of miles of vacuum separating planet from planet, they would be killed, if such a thing were possible, a hundred times over.

As Sir James Dewar's experiments have demonstrated that the ultra-violet rays will kill undried bacteria while frozen, at the temperature of liquid air, what becomes of the hypothesis that living protoplasm on the earth originally immigrated from the heavens? Dried or undried, in vacuum or in air, in heat or in cold, sunlight is fatal to the lowest forms of life and vacuum alone kills all its higher forms.

The earth was once a flaming sun in which no organic life of any form could exist. When it cooled sufficiently, passing from the gaseous to the solid state, conditions favourable to the support of life were developed.

Then life appeared. How did it appear?

The assumption that a wandering cell drifted from star to earth breaks down when it is seen that such cell could not have arrived in a living state, if it could have arrived at all.

But -- though it could have found a sun-proof shield to protect it from the solar shafts and some other device for resisting the attack of the celestial vacuum how came it originally to the star from whence it migrated to earth? That star too, was once a flaming sun, an incandescent incinerator, a steriliser of life.

The answer is: "Spontaneous generation" has died a scientific death. Pasteur pasteurised the lie.

"Interplanetary migration" has died a scientific death, shattockised, dudgeonised and dewarised.

Even if protoplasmic life existed among the stars it had to be placed there, but under no conditions could it come away.

With drifting immigration and self-creation gone, to whom shall the scientist go to explain his protoplasmic life if not to God? All else has failed him. To be satisfied with failure is Death.

To whom shall he go for a formula to nourish his child? What God has given man suffices Life. What man makes of God's gift destroys life. Wherever he looks he sees the folly of seeking to explain creation as a protoplasmic accident. He sees a design, yet, with back to God, he smashes that design only to hear his children wail.

Oh, food of man, had you soul to match his soul, well might you ask, with all other things of God, to be let alone.

§ 126 -- Patriotism

In the Seventh century the ducal states of Germany were disintegrated by the corrupt administration of the counts who, as officials in charge of the territorial districts, were not supervised by central authority. The complete disintegration of the states was brought about by a group of selfish interests that conspired to control all their economic interests and to exercise arbitrary powers over their politics.

This hidden power was, of course, invisible to the plain people until the crash ensued.

In America, during the canned beef scandal of 1898, and continuing progressively until the almost thwarted probe of the Federal Trade Commission, ordered by President Wilson, February 7th, 1917, complaints increasing in number and gravity were constantly heard in connection with the growth of a great invisible power in the United States. This power, like the German counts, sought to control economic interests and to exercise arbitrary powers over politics.

The poison that destroyed the ducal states was at work in the new world. Much evidence had been adduced to indicate that this invisible power threatened to dominate visible government -- to become greater than government.

The two questions that had to be answered were: "Is the safety of democracy threatened by the unmolested growth of this invisible power?" "Has it already destroyed the functions of many democratic institutions, and does it menace them all ?"

The answer to these questions involves the very essence of patriotism.

The packers, who paid vast sums for the use of white space on which their declarations of patriotism were given to America at war, were involved in the system of invisible government that President Wilson wisely determined to examine.

The investigation of the Federal Trade Commission has done much to clarify the meaning of patriotism. Heretofore the public has known little, if anything, of the motives which inspired and controlled that investigation.

As one of the examiners of the Commission I believe my conferences with its members and staff have qualified me to describe the principles by which its activities were guided. Those principles were based on a conception of patriotism for which millions of American boys have been ready, without question, to lay down their lives.

Certainly the meaning of the word as it has been understood by the Federal Trade Commission is of interest to those boys. To the Commission as it exists in 1917 and 1918 patriotism means much more than love of country. It means love of right government extending even into foreign countries. The man who loves only one little spot of ground may be a poor patriot and a dangerous citizen, even though he boasts of loyalty and courage.

The father who loves only his own children, disregarding the children of his neighbour, may, in the narrowness of his interests, permit a condition to develop among his neighbor's children that will some day react upon his own to their destruction.

The Kaiser was looked upon in Germany as the very father of German patriotism, but the world now knows that his patriotism, narrow and selfish, was crammed with ruin for his own people. He cared nothing for the happiness or the rights of other nations. His selfishness in disregarding the interests of all his neighbours not only plunged them into anguish and desolation, but it brought anguish and desolation home to his own.

The Kaiser was a bad patriot and a bad citizen because he neither loved right government in his own country, nor right government in any country.

This attitude toward society, because it clashes with all the laws of God and man, is described not only as uncivilised but as barbarous; yet the same principle execrated and reprobated in the person of the Kaiser applies to every individual and group of individuals in the world, when their interest in life is confined to selfish pursuits.

It was this brand of selfish patriotism that brought decay to civilisation in the valley of the Nile. The Egyptians could weld copper, an art lost to the modern world. The Egyptians who built their magnificent temples, their mausoleums, their pyramids, employing mechanical devices that have become extinct, were reaching out for universal democracy. Selfish patriotism undermined the Egyptian ideal, and to-day the land of the Pharaohs is dead, never to be born again.

Selfish patriotism brought decay to Greece and Rome. Greece flourished in glory, producing Plato, Aristotle and Socrates, three of the clearest thinkers the world has ever known. Our American museums are graced with fragments of the art of her sculptors. Even her songs have been preserved, but because selfish patriotism followed in the wake of her luxury ancient Athens is no more.

Socrates cried out against the decay that threatened Greece but the masters of her wealth would not listen to him. They gave him hemlock and sent him to his death.

Well has it been said that when a nation crucifies its thinkers, that moment that nation dies.

Rome, mistress of the world, stretched her boundaries as far north and west as Scotland. Her galleys sailed every sea, carrying her laws to all parts of the known world, returning with tribute, power and luxury to pour into her lap. Steeped at last in the dregs of narrow patriotism and brute selfishness, she awoke to find that decay had sapped her strength. When the barbarians came down from the North with their battering rams they smashed her gates, demolished her statues and pillaged her libraries. Departing with her wealth, they left her lying prostrate on the sands of time.

Out of the wreck of the Roman Empire the Germanic states developed, and among them was born what is said to be one of the first democratic assemblies of Europe.

The new commandment, "Love one another," had not yet been applied by the patriots who posed as her rulers, statesmen and economic princes, but slowly the new philosophy of life, based on that commandment, crept into the hearts of the people, where it was dumbly cherished even though still unheeded by their rulers.

Eventually the new philosophy pushed its way westward as far as England. Men began to clamour for liberty, the very essence of democracy. Some of them became bold enough to advance the proposition that it was not true that a king could do no wrong. So clamorous became their cries that finally at Runnymede the Magna Charta was drawn up and signed. That document, although it contained the seeds of America's Declaration of Independence, still provided too much protection for selfishness and special privilege. There was cockle among its wheat, and King John held much the same contempt for democracy as that cherished by Napoleon and Wilhelm Hoheuzollern.

At last, from England and Holland, stalwart men who loved freedom though they had not yet formulated its principles, came to America, where the foundations of democracy in time were established on soil consecrated by blood and sacrifice.

Wealth came, and with wealth, danger. The growth of selfish interests threatened the institutions that had cost so much.

Then Lincoln spoke, and after two millions of lives had been snuffed out in again uniting two peoples as one people under one flag and one law, the fools of their day killed the railsplitter. With his death the last slave that will ever tread America's shores was free.

Again wealth threatened. Riches began to pour down from the mountains and up from the plains. Our rivers could not carry it so we built cars of steel and rolled them over rails from ocean to ocean. With riches came sick ideals.

Finally we received the first of many shocks. Little Belgium, protected by treaties, was crushed like an eggshell. The liberties of the world were in the balance. America was again divided. Blinded by easy living and the gushets of her wealth, she was unable to see as a united nation the difference between right and expediency. Thus divided she could not interfere.

The bleeding little victim of selfishness incarnate stood the raiding monster off a little while, but in that moment of tragedy a better world was born. At last, chastened by the sufferings of others, the scales fell from our eyes, and our nation, united once more in a lofty ideal of patriotism, sent her boys forth to mingle their blood with the blood of a ravaged world, that true patriotism might again inflame the souls of men, not on any one little spot of ground, but all over the earth.

Through the deaths of millions, some of whom we once foolishly thought we held in contempt, characterising them always as "foreigners" when they sought liberty at our gates, even as our own fathers, who were also "foreigners," sought it before us, we have learned that in America there are not two or three sets of laws, but one law, and that under that one law there cannot flourish two or three kinds of citizens, but one kind of citizen.

The time had finally come for our government to say to any man who lives under the shadow of our flag: "You will remain here a true patriot, or you shall be sent away an outcast and an ex-patriot forever. The measure of your patriotism is not found in what you are able to gouge out of life, but what you put into it."

The Federal Trade Commission was the feeble instrument through which our government first probed the disease at home, hesitatingly, cautiously feeling its way until it was sure the ulcer had been reached.

The Commission embodied the doctrine that the disciples of special privilege in America are not patriots; that the masters of industry in America who seek to control legislation and to dominate the enforcement of laws to suit their own ends are not patriots; that eminent scientists and skilful lawyers who defend commercial expediency at the expense of justice and public welfare are not patriots; that it is necessary, in order to preserve democratic institutions, to place under proper and lawful control all those groups of narrow and selfish men whose activities tend to set up an invisible government, thus rendering good government ineffective, or substituting bad government in its place.

Distracted by the horrors of overseas events, we have become almost indifferent to our home affairs, except in so far as they affect our winning of the war.

The Commission turned our attention to the Hun within our own gates, and as the evidence of its investigation discloses, the warning was sounded none too soon.

To its obvious and inevitable conclusions one might add that food manufacturers who seek to perpetuate pernicious methods if sophisticating the nation's dietary rather than revolutionise a system that can be defended only behind falsehood are not patriots; that the plain people who cling to follies that curse generations yet unborn are not patriots; that the ignorant and bigoted who foster religious prejudices and racial animosities are not patriots.

The sons of America who followed Pershing to Europe in 1918 went forth to uphold by their deaths the loftiest principle to which mankind has ever subscribed. They did not go forth to perpetuate narrowness, selfishness, greed or false patriotism at home.

They have shown America the perils of these selfish pursuits. They have opened America's eyes to the meaning of service to others. They have done much to prepare America to face the hard conditions that must be faced if these beloved hills and plains of ours are not to take their place beside Egypt, the old Greece, Ancient Rome and Modern Prussia.