Grapeshot and Shrapnel

Aimed at Some of Life's Minor Engagements and Surprises

OLIVER WAKEFIELD

WE understand that the War Department's plan for using conscientious ob -jectors as attendants in insane asylums has fallen through on account of the conscientious objection of the inmates to having them about.

Behind this rampart of a nation's devotion hides a coterie of politicians, gilded and painted by a group of theorizing, intolerant intellectuals as ever met high heaven with their phrase-making jargon.—Senator Sherman.

IF the Senator is reported correctly, the situation, though somewhat obscure, seems delightfully romantic.

WE understand that among scholars the leading articles in the New Republic are believed to contain material of such value that there is serious thought of having them translated into English.

IT is announced that the "Get Together" Language Movement has already established several schools for teaching French people how to understand American-spoken French. It is based on the principle that it is easier for the French to unlearn some of their language than for the Americans to learn more. Thus they meet each other half way.

PRIORITY in the use of the term "doughboys" is still debated by letter-writers to the newspapers, but personally we incline to the view that it is a translation from the Hebrew and dates from the time of the Passover, having been applied to the Gentiles as partakers of raised bread. Sanskrit scholars, however, are said to have evidence of a somewhat earlier origin.

"I do not think there is any paper in the United States or any editor in the United States who has been as bitterly, as violently, and as persistently proAlly and anti-German as I have been."—Mr. Arthur Brisbane.

IT was no doubt owing to some unconscious personal charm, subtly seductive to our Teutonic population, that he simply could not drive the Germans away from him.

MR. MAX EASTMAN would like to know if Mr. E. S. Martin, in calling him a "galoot," has reference to his private life or to his views on imagist poetry7.

If the head of the family has few calls upon his income, he should invest more heavily [in Liberty Bonds] than the man who has debts to liquidate, or many dependents.—Literary Digest.

SAY what you will, eight children, a wife, a mother-in-law, forty creditors, and a mortgage on the old farm do make a difference, even though the income remains the same.

APROPOS of the turning of our four hundred colleges into military schools, a correspondent asks, "Now that the higher education has gone, what shall we do with the higher educators?" We advise nothing sudden or violent. They should first have a chance to live it down.

Brotherhood implies, yes, involves personal relations between men.-John D. Rockdeller, Jr.

THIS should set at rest any lingering doubt that a brother, no matter what you think of him, is, after all, a sort of male relative.

ENTHUSIASTIC daylight-saving Senators are asking why we should save only today's daylight when by putting the clock back far enough we could save some of yesterday's, if not all. It is reported that a bill to that end will be submitted at the winter solstice It will have the advantage, its supporters say, of bringing every man to his office not merely an hour earlier but a whole day beforehand.

MR. GALSWORTHY thinks the insistence of his fellow-countrymen on "good form" is a point in which they contrast unfavorably with Americans and cites as a peculiarly British instance the case of a mother who on seeing her son for the first time after a two years' absence could do nothing but complain because he had not brought a dinner coat. We regretfully confess that the guilty woman has her counterparts amongst us—that there are socially passionate American women who have divorced their husbands for less, and that this particular instance might have occurred in Brooklyn, in the Catskills, or even among our colored fellow citizens.

MR. BERNARD SHAW says he prefers a bigamist to a bad player on the trombone, but does not disclose the circumstances that make the choice necessary. It seems singular that a man whose acquaintance was hitherto supposed to be so wide should be confined to this unfortunate alternative.

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A NEW ENGLAND authority on autumn leaves, declares that their color from year to year varies according to the temperament of the beholder, their brightness depending on the way he feels. We gather from his discussion that a dark and bilious person may miss them altogether, whereas a sandyhaired man with a gay inner life will often encounter them in the spring.

There is a Russian born every minute.— Los Angeles Times.

IT is as if Nature were trying to keep up with the changes in the form of Russia's home government.

It is believed by suffrage advocates that now the President will systematically take up the work of laboring with the obdurate Senators.—Press.

AS the President is somewhat pressed - just now on account of sundry foreign matters, we suggest that the steady, systematic laboring with obdurate Senators should be entrusted for the present to some division of the Department of Agriculture. Perhaps the Bureau of Animal Industry could take it on.

EVERY large newspaper in Great Britain, France, Italy and the United States is, according to Mr. Hilaire Belloc, run by the hirelings of a class, and utterly given over to lying, and the truth is told only by small papers which hardly anybody reads. These small papers, he says, are almost always eccentric, but if you take them all together and let the eccentricity of one check off the eccentricity of another the truth, in all its shining purity, will finally emerge. Try as we will to read all the journals great and small of these four countries for the purpose of verifying this conclusion, some of them still escape us, and we have about decided to fall back upon the usual plan of subscribing to a prosperous newspaper— and then totally disbelieving it.

"Do you know that every time you use a sheet of paper unnecessarily you are depriving the government of caustic soda, sulphur, and potash—chemicals sorely needed in the manufacture of 'T. N. T.,' the most powerful explosive used in the war?"— Paper-saving Propaganda.

IT seems as if this appeal to the writers of contemporary fiction and the contributors to the Congressional Record ought to have some effect, especially as the information is added that the Salvation Army and the junkmen stand ready to put to a proper use the paper thus carelessly destroyed.

FROM the nature of the clothes sent from this neighborhood to the stricken countries it would seem that the war victims were intending, on the return of peace, to go quite madly into private theatricals.

IT is rather irritating, as you get out your last winter's overcoat, to read those demands from the American pulpit that Germany shall repent in sackcloth and ashes—if the sackcloth is even halfway decent and has any wear at all left in it.

THE man who says the trouble with Germany is the "breakdown of equilibrium characteristic of the great collective psychosis" is not really endeavoring to conceal his opinion of the Boches. Owing to some accident in childhood he grew up a social psychologist and hence a stranger to our common speech. He only means that the Germans are crazy.