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Argine, Ettore Stagni (decorated for war services) and others have been arrested. Ten families will be evicted with their household goods in lorries belonging to the artillery and brought to Bologna, where they will be quartered in the old customs barracks in Piazza Malpighi, which have been cleared for the purpose. Other military lorries are lined up in the square in front of the Law Court in Bologna, ready to start on other evictions. The assistant chief of police of Bologna will superintend operations.

Yesterday (September 29) the women were received by the vice mayor of Molinella, who said to them: 'You shall not be left out in the rain, but they will take you away because you cannot remain any longer at Molinella unless you enter the Fascist unions.' The same thing was repeated to them by the police commissioner of Molinella: 'You can go where you like, or else you will be taken to Bologna. There, if you wish, you can join the unions. You can also remain outside them if you can find work there. But you must not even think of staying on here at Molinella.' I need not tell you the answers of the women. They insisted on remaining in their own parish and declared that, if taken away in the evening, they would return in the morning.

To-day the women sent a deputation to Bologna, accompanied by a barrister, which was received by the secretary of the chief of police, who could do nothing but shrug his shoulders. He acknowledged that these doings were worthy of a madhouse, but 'they' wished these things to be done and one is obliged to act in this way.

The barracks are meant to house forty families, a number which will be reached by degrees. Then operations are to be suspended to see what effect is produced on the recalcitrants by this first internment of families from Molinella in Bologna.

October 1

This morning the evictions began. Yesterday at about 8 P.M. the houses of ten families to be evicted were surrounded so that no one could leave. The men had already taken to the fields, so that only women, children, and old men remained in their homes.

At 7.30 this morning (October 1) some porters and the carabineers insisted on the women being present while the furniture was being loaded up and taking note of what was being loaded. All pressure and threats proved useless.

When the women tried to leave the houses, they were seized by the carabineers and brought before the local police. The old people and children were taken in by the neighbors. At 11, the women were still at the police station. There was a going and coming of women taking them food. The courtyard of the police station was surrounded by some twenty carabineers.

In the meantime porters continued to load up the lorries and had not finished by midday.

The district is like enemy territory in war time. A cordon of carabineers surrounds its boundaries; there is no road, path, or outlet which is not barred.

It is not the authorities who command here, but Regazzi, who, in a fast car, flies backward and forward between Bologna and Molinella and the surrounding villages.

At this moment, 5 P.M., news comes in that, as the women refused to be removed on the lorries with their furniture, they have been taken to Bologna on lorries under the escort of carabineers.

We do not yet know whether they have been taken to S. Giovanni in Monte (prisons of Bologna) or to the barracks where the evicted families are to be interned.

The number of men arrested has reached 34, among whom is Gaetano Bagni. It is absolutely forbidden for their families to send them food.

October 2

Yesterday the lorries loaded with furniture and those carrying the women and some of the children and old people reached Bologna, the remainder of the latter being still at Molinella. They were all taken to the barracks in Piazza Malpighi. At 8 P.M. there were still two lorries of furniture waiting to be unpacked in the square.

Only part of the furniture has been unloaded - beds, tables, chairs, and so forth. Chickens, pigs, firewood, and wine were left on the spot at the mercy of anyone.

When the lorries had left, the secretary of the Fascio gave orders to families belonging to the Fascist unions to take possession of the houses. Many of these refused to do so, and had for answer that if they continued to refuse they would suffer the same fate as the others.

The barracks in Bologna to which the women were taken are surrounded by carabineers and police - no one is allowed to enter, except relations already living in Bologna. To-day no one has given them any food, and they are not allowed to go out. Toward eleven o'clock one of them, under escort, was allowed to go out and buy something for all the others with the few pence they had in their pockets.

And to-morrow? Bear in mind that among them is the old Mainardi, aged seventy, who is ill, and who at home could only feed on bread and broth; he has charge of three small children, two of whom are of school age. A police officer is searching Bologna for relatives to take them in and look after them and persuade them to make their home permanently in Bologna. A sister of one of the interned women was not allowed to take her child in with her.

Their lawyer is taking steps to know whether they are under arrest, in which case they are entitled to prisoners' rations, but if they have only been taken there as free citizens they have a right to circulate freely. So far he has had no satisfaction.

October 8 The evictions and arrests still continue. On the evening of October 3, the following were arrested: Domenico Burnelli, seventy-six years old; Carlo Bianchi, seventy-four years old; Algeri Poggi, a disabled ex-soldier; Alberto Buriani; Ungarelli, aged fifteen; Zanghi, aged fifteen; and two women, Ines Gamberini and Angiolina Burnelli.

On October 4 the military lorries removed the furniture of seven more families, including that of a widow and of two men over seventy.

On October 5 eight more suffered the same treatment.

On October 7 notification was given of four further evictions.

As most of the evicted families had already left their homes, the police officials had to break in the doors to remove the furniture.

In the barracks at Bologna there is no change, except that a daily food allowance is made of four lire for grown-ups and two for children. Old Mainardi, they say, went out of his mind last night.

October 11

Among the evicted is Natalina Piazzi, aged seventy-three, who lost her son in the war and had lived in her house for over forty years. The Bianchi husband and wife are both over seventy, and had lived fortyeight years in the house from which they were evicted: their three sons served in the war. Domenico Burnelli, aged seventy-six, whose three sons fought in the war, has lived for nearly sixty years in the house from which he has been evicted. He was not allowed to take shelter with his own son, and when the son claimed the right of taking charge of his parents both father and son were arrested. The old Frazzoni and his wife have been evicted three times in four years and their son was killed by the Fascists in 1924.

The material damage is not inconsiderable, considering the poverty of the people. Their furniture was loaded carelessly on the military lorries; part got broken in the loading, part during transit, some remains on the spot with no one to look after it.

Relations and friends of evicted families, even though inscribed in Fascist unions, are not allowed to take charge of furniture and other goods left in the houses.

Some families are without means and live from hand to mouth; others are helped by their neighbors. Help is urgently needed for the worst cases.

The government authorities have given orders that no permits to go out be given, as they fear that the people would all go back to Molinella. They offer them work in Apulia, Sardinia, Tuscany, or the Marches. The object is to split up the solid block of opposition. However, the people are not to be cajoled or cowed into submission. They keep repeating: 'We have done nothing wrong; we have a right to remain in our native town, and directly we are set at Rabindranath Tagore, the Hindu poet and philosopher, is still the very active head of his school in Santiniketan which he founded over a quarter of a century ago. Famous for his prose and poetry in both English

THE CONTRIBUTORS' COLUMN

The correspondence of Governor Smith and Mr. Marshall conducted in this magazine is an incident not unlikely to become historic. Owing to the unauthorized publication of Governor Smith's reply by a newspaper in defiance of our copyright, it was felt to be in the national interest that the publication of the May Atlantic be hastened and the release of the article to the press be made a week earlier than was intended. In this unique instance it proved impracticable to mail subscribers' copies before the news-stand edition was on sale. We are glad to make this public explanation and again to affirm our consistent policy of serving subscribers first.

and his native tongue, Bengali, Dr. Tagore

taken Place Seven Years before it did. I could have produced Such a Duel at any Moment for Seven Years. I kept the Secrets Sacred and inviolable: and have kept them to this day.

This letter, which forms part of the earlier correspondence published in the May Atlantic, and the present selections were discovered a few months ago in a strong box where they have lain through the generations.

***

in 1913 was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. In these days of sober reports it is a joy to know that there are Innocents Abroad who, like C. Lester Walker, an American business man in Manchuria, are able to tell when the joke is on them. Robert Lynd's definition of the bounds of decency comes pat at a time when a Boston official is banning fifty-seven varieties of books and the New York courts have sentenced the actors and producers of condemned plays. If ever a man had to curb the deviltry of inanimate objects, it was Captain K. C. McIntosh of the United States Navy. More than imagination has gone into the making of A. Cecil Edwards's stories. Thirteen years' residence in Persia provided the author with a rare understanding of the East. One hundred and sixteen years ago John Adams was writing thus to his friend, Professor Waterhouse:

H. [Hamilton] and Burr, in point of Ambition were equal. In Principle equal. In Talents different. H. Superior in Litterary Talents: B. in military. H. a Nevis Adventurer, B. descended from the earliest, most learned Pious and virtuous of our American Nation, and buoyed up by Prejudices of half the Nation. He found himself thwarted, persecuted, calumniated by a wandering Stranger. The deep Malice of H. against Bur, and his indefatigable Exertions to defame him are little known. I knew So much of it for a Course of Years, that I wondered a Duel had not

'I hope you will like my silver-icy reindeer,' writes Fannie Stearns Gifford; 'he was a real dream, and I have a fondness for him. I saw him leap high towards the sunrise over October Mountain and woke almost ready to look with Teresina for his hoof marks in the snow.' A frequent contributor to our pages, Sir W. Beach Thomas is an English naturalist who roves the countryside in the interest of birds and beasts. One of our most eminent philosophers, Alfred North Whitehead has brought his benign influence from Cambridge, England, to Cambridge, New England. Fellow and late Senior Lecturer at Trinity College, Dr. Whitehead is now Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University. Margaret Higginson Barney is the daughter of Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson, whose friendship and encouragement were the precious means of drawing Emily Dickinson from out her mystical seclusion. Their friendship - for they seldom met was bound by the correspondence of over twenty years. A member of the Atlantic's staff and a contributor of essays and poems, Theodore Morrison loves a long walk

CHINA, NOW

BY JOHN MCCOOK ROOTS

FIVE years ago, at the height of one of those perennial civil wars which have racked North China ever since, a quiet, elderly Chinese in neat Western costume landed at Hongkong, the Britishowned island just off the southern coast. He had come to seek England's help in establishing an efficient civil government in Canton. But, although he was banqueted by the Governor, the desired assistance did not materialize. Sun Yat-sen was indignant. 'The British,' he said, 'think that I am not of sufficient importance. They want a strong man with whom to deal. But whatever happens they will eventually have to reckon with me. For I am the strong man of China.'

Sun Yat-sen was right. Since his death two years ago he has become in the realm of ideas a more powerful figure than any militarist who ever cursed the country. More than that, his political organization, the Kuomintang (National People's Party), has beaten the Northern war lords at their own game over two thirds of China proper. Most significant of all, the Chinese Revolution, for which he gave forty years of ceaseless effort, and of which the present Nationalist movement is the concrete expression, is fast becoming a nation-wide reality. The China of the 'opium war' and of the Treaty of Nanking; the China of the Boxer Protocol and the Twentyone Demands; the China, in short, of the 'sleeping giant' variety, is gone

I

forever. The giant is awake - dazed and fuddled and irritable after its long sleep.

It is important, before we consider the immediate problem presented by this revolution, to notice where it originated. Ever since foreign nations have had diplomatic relations with China, these relations have been with Peking, capital city of the Manchu emperors. It was here, in 1792, that the 'Son of Heaven' first received homage from a British ambassador. Here England, the United States, and other nations sent their ministers and built their legations. It was against Peking that Japan waged war on China in 1895, while the mass of the Chinese people along the Yangtze and in the South sat back and shrugged their shoulders. Peking, again, was the capital of the new government that in 1912 assumed power as the Republic of China. And it has remained the capital ever since, although the name 'republic' soon became a mere euphemism applied by tactful diplomats to the succession of military swashbucklers who alternately bought and fought their way into power.

To the outside world, then, and to the Orient at large, Peking represented China. The literary world took up the idea. Many volumes were written in which the dominant note was the temple bell, the squeak of the wheelbarrow, or the sombre wail of a funeral horn outside the Forbidden City, while

doctrines of sin and grace were not dissimilar, and neither ever dreamed of a separation of Church from State. The Reformation was primarily a dispute about ecclesiastical authority carried on by avowed believers in the efficacy and necessity of religious teaching. Besides, the conflict was waged with equal interest and fervor by both Catholics and Protestants.

To-day the problems confronting the Protestant sects do not pertain to questions of theology. Far from implying the demand for reform within the Church which constituted the nucleus of the sixteenth-century controversy, the present situation reveals Protestantism making a despairing effort to rekindle the waning interest of the layman in religious matters. The Reformation owed its occasion in large measure to the popular demand for ecclesiastical reform made by a public that considered orthodox religion an inseparable part of their secular life. It was because of their explicit faith in and desire for a reformed Church that the people were so ready to take sides in the dispute. As this faith was responsible for the Reformation, so the present absence of it points to the radical dissimilarity between the Reformation and the modern problems confronting the Church.

The Reverend Mr. Parrish attributes this rapid declension of faith on the one hand to the faulty organization of the Protestant churches which is responsible for sectarianism and the pressing need for money. On the other hand he believes that the radio and the newspaper, combined with the critical attitude of the age, have tended to discourage the fashion of going to church. He will not regret the final disappearance of Protestantism from American life because it 'does not answer to the deep needs of human nature.' Yet he thinks it reasonable to hope that 'the children of the new age will construct out of those values which have been the real sources of inspiration and power, both for Catholic and Protestant, a church that will meet the needs of the day and generation.'

If this were likely to occur, or even suppose it should, would another organized church with its prescribed systems of belief and fixed codes of morals fulfill our subjective human requirements? It is precisely these arbitrarily conceived factors, once an effective force but now an inner weakness, that serve more than anything else to alienate the layman from his church. Because a person no longer seeks an answer to his moral problems in the exhortations of the Sunday sermon it does not signify that he is free from their anxious cares or that he can allow them to remain unsolved. But it does indicate that, instead of relying upon the Church for assistance, he feels he can settle them just as effectively without its intercession on his behalf. And surely this sense

of intellectual independence should be welcomed as an auspicious indication of greater spiritual freedom rather than deplored as the sign of an unregenerate age.

The chief reason for the break-up of Protestantism is not at bottom due to its faulty organization or to the distracting influence of the newspaper, radio, and so forth. Nor is it traceable, as the Reverend Mr. Parrish avers, to the 'logical consequences of the position' taken by the Protestants at the Reformation, though it is true, as he says, that the critical spirit of the age has greatly affected the attitude of the lay public toward the Church. The churches, it seems to me, are confronted by an entirely novel kind of 'belief,' or rather unbelief, that manifests itself in an attitude of respectful unconcern for the erstwhile venerated creeds. That a different variety of church would prove more congenial with the needs of the day and generation is dubious, for it is the ecclesiastical organization and not religion that has become discredited.

MORGAN WORTHY

The Return of the Muse.

DEAR ATLANTIC,

I am sending you a poem which has been the source of some excitement. It was written by & young lady whose chief talent is prose, but who as a child had an enthusiasm for poetry.

Recently she was hypnotized by a friend, and in the course of her reminiscences of childhood she asked for a pad and pencil. Then on three large sheets she wrote the three stanzas.

Lay your head on the wind's breast,
Hush the heart that grieves
Under the sound of the wind surf
Rushing along the leaves.

Trees are bare as coral groves,
Sky is shallow water:
Put to sea in a cloud-ship,
Sail for the storm's quarter.

Days crushed with people, Nights entombed in pain, Find release in tempests, Comfort in the rain.

On waking she had no recollection of having written the poem; she was stupefied when it was shown to her; nor does she remember any previous thinking on the poem with the exception of a single metaphor which occurred to her three years ago.

Sincerely yours,

C. D. M.

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