Grapeshot and Shrapnel

Aimed at Some of Life's Minor Engagements and Surprises

OLIVER WAKEFIELD

"Anybody who calls anybody else pro-German on the ground of German descent, without further inquiry and information, is a lost outcast."—New Republic.

IF anybody is to be deterred from calling anybody else pro-German on any ground whatever, or on no ground at all, it will dam the course of animated conversation. ProGerman has become the expression of the speaker's mood, and has lost all application to the loyalty of the person addressed, concerning which there is, as a rule, no time to make inquiry. It may follow any warm conversation on any subject, being the convenient current equivalent for "Rot" or "Drivel," or the simple slamming of the door. Though still retained as a descriptive term, its use as an expletive has spread to every family; and if one half of the people to whom it is applied were, as a matter of fact, correctly designated, about every second conversation at a club would be followed by a lynching. The man who steps on another's foot is seldom the pro-German he seems at the time. - It is unfortunate that it should subsist both as a definite term and as a verbal explosive, but it seems too late to straighten the matter out. The very man who—in a burst of righteous indignation—will apply it to Mr. William Randolph Hearst, for example, may go all to pieces at the breakfast table and apply it,to his wife—possibly to the coffee.

WHE New England paper that congratulates Englishmen on the pleasure they are now finding in being eighty-three per cent non-alcoholic, and assures them that when the remaining seventeen per cent of inebriety is gone, they will be ecstatic, is published—curiously enough —near the home of the distinguished poet who wrote—"Inebriate of air am I, and debauchee of dew."

"We should keep constantly in mind two facts about Russia—first that we know only the merest fraction of the truth concerning that country."— Philadelphia Public Ledger.

AND the newspaper writers all over America should take care, in writing their two regular columns a week on "The Real Russian Situation" accompanied by advice to the Government as to precisely what it ought to do, not to let the above fact pass into anybody else's mind. The firm, sure tone of the well-informed Russian paragraphs, would cease to command the public confidence, should the guilty secret escape.

A NEW critic has discovered that the late Mark Twain was a bitter, misanthropic person who, out of mere lust for popularity, disguised his hate. His books do not express his own sense of humor; they merely express his idea of other people's, which he considered, on the whole, contemptible. He was mocking the people whom he entertained. Mark Twain from his own point of view, never made a^'oke. His apparent pleasantries were in reality rather malignant parodies of what passed for jokes among a Philistine public. "Tom Sawyer" and "Huckleberry Finn" were elaborate and covert sneers at the American sense of fun. The merit of this view is that it sees as com-

pletely through Mark Twain as if Mark Twain has never existed. There is nothing in Mark Twain's writings that obstructs the critic's gaze, and nothing in Mark Twain's life that distracts the critic's attention. This may indicate the first step toward a new, free school of criticism, to be known, perhaps, as the Extemalistic Movement, which will not be tied down, as heretofore, but shall deal broadly with what an author did not write and never even thought of. Hitherto considerable inconvenience has been occasioned, to the critic of an author, by the necessity of dragging the author in.

THE latest poet who asks Colonel Roosevelt

"Art thou no better than an old-fashioned soul "When it comes to unions free, and birth control?"

apparently wishes to make trouble for him, whichever way he answers—but he will not succeed. On any platform calling for a variety of wives and forcible and legalized limitation of our offsprihg, Colonel Roosevelt would be hopelessly out of the running and he has always known it. He has nothing to lose by exposure.

"For sciatica take equal parts of flour and red pepper and mix with vinegar. Make a paste, and move from place to place with the pain"—Woman's Page.

APATIENT who, for one reason or another, is unable to move from place to place, may reduce the proportion of red pepper.

HILE abstaining from more than two lumps in our afternoon tea, it was pleasant to think that those devoted Americans winning the war for us at the front of the candy counter across the street were not uncomfortably restricted. After all it was little enough for us to do for them. Nothing seemed too good for the brave fellows holding their places in the line over there in the very thickest of the confectionery; and we did not in the least begrudge our sacrifice.

R. ALFRED B. CRUIKSHANK'S own view of Hamlet as "a reckless, shrewd, daredevil who undertakes a task of doom without hesitation and executes it without flinching," while no doubt original, does not seem to differentiate the prince sufficiently from a good many of the American men and boys who have gone to France.

"Just the weather the corn wanted."—New Hampshire County Item.

ROM the point of view of the corn it was no doubt delightful and perhaps some potatoes and other deserving vegetables were pleased. No one can say how happy he might have been at that moment had he been bom a bean. But among us human survivors of unjust heatstroke there were few who could really enter into the jolly leguminous spirit of the occasion.

MANY of the severe articles about the Bolsheviks would be more helpful if the writers could spare the time to look the subject up a bit. Bolshevik and boll weevil are not synonymous: not even related in derivation or by marriage. Writers who will persist in that absurd misconception tend to retard the solution of the Russian problem—especially at our evening meal.

THE writer for the Edinburgh Review who, after patient investigation, finds that American democracy is a government of groups "engaged in perpetual struggle for ascendancy" has at least the satisfaction of knowing that the people of this country are after all a part of human society. By plodding along a few years more he may be able to corroborate the general impression that even in the United States man is a political animal.

IT is understood that in the new school for the training of railway baggagemen an elementary course in practical ethics is included. Each student will be required to submit to the destruction of some valued object of his possession, and each will take an extremely long journey in which he is destined never to be overtaken by his trunk.

IT is not from tenderness toward Ferdinand of Bulgaria that one objects to the raking up of the scandal that Krum, the Bulgarian hero, drank wine out of the skull of an Emperor. On the contrary, it is because there seem to be stronger points from recent European history that might easily be urged against King Ferdinand.

MR. DE SELINCOURT maintains, in writing about poetry, that "Absent thee from felicity awhile" is really a good deal more poetical than if it were expressed in a different manner, as, for example, "Put off your happiness a little." He argues ably and we believe he proves it. While many are called to serve their country in some more spectacular or exciting capacity such as that of farm-hands, stokers, tabulators of agricultural statistics, and chauffeurs, we must not forget those faithful literary toilers who, whether in war or peace must bend to the hard, monotonous, unloved, daily task of explaining, to a waiting world, "What is Poetry?"