measures virtually excluding Argentine meat, fruits, and seed from the North American market. In substance, the Chamber declared that if the United States was not willing to buy from the Argentine Republic it was useless to hold congresses to promote trade between the two countries. Ambassador Pueyrredon recurred to the same theme at a banquet in New York last month. His assertion that a certain balance of advantages, a reciprocity of markets and commercial privileges, is indispensable for the maintenance of amicable and enduring commercial relations between countries was quickly caught up not only by Latin American editors but also by the British press. panies, banks, dockyards, and about one million tons of shipping. She has estates in Korea, Japan, and the West #Indies, and her various enterprises are said to have made fifty million dollars profits during the war. Latin America's growing self-assertiveness with respect to the United Latin States is not confined to political relations alone, but America is also manifesting itself definitely in the field of business. The Chamber of Commerce at Buenos Aires originally declined our invitation to be present at the Pan American Commercial Congress, to be held in Washington this month, in view of the fact that the United States had adopted PRICE LEVEL Annual Rate of Gold Accumulation (Ratio Scale). 1830 1855 1800 1865 1870 1875 1880 1885 World's gold production, percentage addition each season to preceding year's gold stock, and commodity price level, from 1846 to 1926 inclusive. Average prices from 1867 to 1877 are taken as 100 in the price index. The left-hand column in the graph recording annual additions to the world's accumulated gold measures one per cent. Statist, London LIFE, LETTERS, AND THE ARTS More about Spirits THANKS to the translation of Dr. Gustave Geley's book on his experiments in the Paris psychic laboratory, the English-speaking world is at last put in touch with that even larger world of spirit life beyond the grave. A great deal of the material in this volume is most impressive, in spite of the fact that it is based on the experiments of a Polish medium called Stephen Ossowiecki. This gentleman is a successful engineer in private life, and ever since he discovered that he was the lucky possessor of psychic gifts he has refused to take any money for his performances. Facts of this type never fail to impress certain arrant materialists whose judgment of worldly matters is as cynical as their hope of the future is serene. Be this as it may, Mr. Ossowiecki's exploits are amazing. At one time he was a master of the art of telekinesis the exertion of force at a distance. He is said to have moved a heavy marble statue two and a half metres in broad daylight at the house of Princess Olga Wolkonska. But as he developed his gift of clairvoyance his other faculty deserted him, and now he confines himself to recovering lost or stolen articles and describing the contents of sealed packages. Some of his feats were flawlessly executed at Paris before a committee of scientists and lawyers whose reputation for honesty is beyond question, but whose skill at detecting fraud was apparently not quite so carefully authenticated. His stunts impressed them as absolutely genuine, and in his native Warsaw he has been even more remarkable. In one experiment there, Marshal Pilsudski wrote down a chess formula known only to himself, placed it in an envelope, and sealed it with a seal handed to him by the Minister of War. Rung up on the telephone later in the day, the Marshal confirmed the accuracy of the medium's reading, the package remaining sealed the whole time, and the incident taking place in the presence of many distinguished Poles. This willingness of important political figures to lend their prestige to scientific investigation might even suggest a similar course to our own enterprising President. The much-discussed Eva is also dealt with by Dr. Geley. She satisfied the committee that she could produce genuine emanations of ectoplasm in the form of a small human head. The author, however, admits frankly the failure of the Sorbonne experiments, and he is properly suspicious of the dark in which so much of the work has to be done. The best results, it seems, are secured when everyone present is in good health and in the prime of life. Dr. Geley advances the theory that the scarcity of mediums in Western nations is due to the suppression of sorcery in the Middle Ages. Psychical gifts are apparently inherited, and mediæval intolerance robbed us of a rich legacy of magic. Voronoff's Latest FROM Paris comes the news that Dr. Voronoff has successfully applied his gland experiments to sheep, and that the skins of the father are visited upon the children unto at least the second generation, and perhaps unto the third and fourth as well. In 1924 the Doctor grafted a gland from a healthy fullgrown sheep on to another slightly younger specimen, which at once responded by putting on two extra pounds of fleece. The economic drawback to this practice was that the cost of operating was not compensated for by the extra wool grown. But Dr. Voronoff is not a man to be discouraged, and he tried breeding young sheep from his own improved models. The results were heartening, for at the age of five months lamb à la Voronoff weighed eight pounds more than lamb à la Nature. His next experiment will be to graft bigger glands on these already precocious youngsters, in the hope that all the added weight will go into valuable wool, and not into worthless bone and cartilage. urs, It is only natural that these activities should be regarded with a certain amount of suspicion. Even the Manchester Guardian, which always welcomes political novelties, feels that it would be most unwise to disturb the balance of nature. The possible effects of Dr. Voronoff's experiments on human beings are particularly terrifying. If his methods are successfully put into practice, we shall see a race of men living to one hundred and forty years, cluttering up the earth, and retaining for an additional half-century the positions that, in the minds of the younger generation, they are holding too long as it is. Sheep are one thing, people are something else again, and until our youth can be protracted as much as our age, life under the Voronoff régime presents more horrors than ever before. Certainly this is the view of the annuity companies, who are already being embarrassed by successful longevity operations. In Budapest, for instance, an aging gentleman submitted to the Voronoff treatment with such success that the insurance company which had been paying him an annuity declared its contract void and refused to give him any more money. The poor fellow is rejuvenated all right, but without finances must feel as if he were all dressed up with no place to go. New Russian Films BERLIN, the first European city to see 'The Armored Cruiser Potemkin,' now has several more recent Russian films on its hands. The best of these is Pudovkin's production of 'The Mother,' which is based on a Gor'kii story, and is less frightful than certain scenes in 'Potemkin.' Its realism is ruthless enough, but never cynical, and all the sordid details are steeped in heroism and self-sacrifice, after the fashion of Dostoevskii. More impressive and much more terrible than 'The Mother' is 'Strike,' a picture of the Revolution of 1905, directed by Eisenstein, the same man who did 'Potemkin.' Here, as there, the propaganda is mendacious. All employers are depicted as filthy monsters, and whereas in 'The Mother' many of the bourgeoisie are represented as kindly people forced to suppress the poor, 'Strike' makes out all the employing class to be monsters, and thus loses the dramatic value of a character who is at war, not only with the world about him, but with himself. One scene in 'Strike' is particularly effective. Three bloated capitalists are shown shaking up cocktails, and the camera focuses on the most loathsome of the trio squeezing a lemon between his fingers and watching the juice drip out as if it were blood. In a flash the scene changes, and we see a forlorn group of strikers surrounded by Cossacks, who press in upon them just as the fingers of the wicked capitalist crushed the lemon. 'Ivan the Terrible' is another picture of this type. Virtuous peasants are oppressed and tortured by fiendish aristocrats. Violence, Sadism, and cold-blooded cruelty saturate every scene. The emotions of the audience are not purged, as Aristotle said they should be, by pity and terror; they are simply revolted by the rank excess of frightfulness. Yet with all these defects the Russian film is certainly as powerful as that of any other country. Its defects are the defects of present conditions there, and American producers may well learn from its enthusiasm lessons which a Will H. Hays school of censorship could never teach. New Hungary on the Stage MODERN Hungary is beginning to be heard from. We spoke in a recent issue of Baron Lajos Hatvany's epical novel, Gentlefolk and People, which depicts the rise of the new type of hard-working Jew. Now the dramatist Lajos Zilahy steps forward with a somewhat similar theme on the stage, in which he shows the collapse of the old Magyar nobility and the rise of the new kind of man. In his latest piece, The White Stag, which has just been presented at the National Theatre in Budapest, we see the ancient Hungarian, Peter Karakan, who owns extensive estates and despises peasants and Jews. During the war his son is captured by the Russians, and learns a trade in Siberia. Returning home, the young man finds the father temporarily dispossessed of his lands and waiting to see if they will be confiscated in the course of the readjustment of frontiers. Naturally the old man does not like waiting, so he organizes an Irredentist movement known as The White Stag. This, however, fails, and in the meantime various factories that the father has been managing get into such a state that he has to resign, forfeiting money and honor. In the third act old Peter is celebrating his birthday in spite of all his misfortunes, when a telegram arrives telling him that his estates have been definitely confiscated. He collapses with a heart attack, and dies to the accompaniment of gypsy music and the popping of champagne corks. After he is carried out, the blind old gypsy who has played for him all his life enters. 'Now, Master,' says this broken figure, to an empty stage, 'I will play you your favorite song.' And the curtain drops to the plaintive strains of 'The golden leaves of the aspen have fallen.' So dies the old Hungary, and in the fourth act we see Peter's son at work in his joiner's shop putting the finishing touches on the father's coffin. As dusk descends, the lights blaze fiercely from the windows of a neighboring factory and sirens announce the watchword of the new Hungary Work. Music for the Millions IF it is very lucky indeed, London is going to have an enormous concert hall almost as large and fully half as splendid as one of these new movie theatres that the Paramount people are building on every Main Street in America. Mr. Lionel Powell, a concert agent, has revealed the details of a scheme to build an auditorium seating four thousand, at a cost of four hundred thousand pounds. The virtues of the project are obvious. In Mr. Powell's estimation, the only reason that music is dying on the English air is its expense. In the new building, opera as good as the Metropolitan in New York will be provided at ten and six for an orchestra seat. Symphony concerts will be still cheaper - five shillings will purchase a place within earshot of the band. At present only the Albert Hall fulfills the functions that this new build ing will perform, but the acoustics are so poor that it is as unsatisfactory for concerts as for dancing. Mr. Powell's auditorium will be available for all purposes which the Albert Hall serves to-day, only it will be much better. The one almost insurmountable difficulty that the promoters fail to mention is that no foreign musicians are allowed to play regularly in England. Whole organizations from abroad are permitted to visit, and even to play, but individual artists are not allowed to intrude their alien strains in any of the hundred-per-cent-British organizations. Until this condition is altered, the musical future of England will remain as dark as a London night. Don't Buy Books WHEN she had read Mr. Keynes's recent article on the sorrows of the book trade on which we commented here, Miss Elizabeth Drew, herself a professional writer, addressed a bitter letter to the editor of the Nation and Athenœum in which she deplored the purchase of any books at all. 'All the arguments in favor of buying books seem to me the thinnest,' sheannounced, and went on to say that in England at any rate 'the vast majority of the cultivated public' turn to lending libraries. 'I do not buy books,' she explained, 'for the very simple reason that I do not want books. I read books ancient and modern for both business and pleasure, but by what logic does that mean that I have got to keep bringing them into my house and lodging them there permanently? It would no doubt benefit both publishers and authors if I did so, but since even in the present conditions regulating bookwriting and bookselling far too many manage to be produced, why should I do anything to make it easier to produce more and to cumber up rooms already too small and too dust-laden with greater numbers of these articles which take up so much space and collect so much dirt?' Needless to say, the miserable publisher is not even considered by this violent lady, while the author is soundly drubbed. 'I am an author myself,' she confesses unashamedly, 'and I know a great many authors, and quite nine tenths of us write partly because we enjoy doing so more than we enjoy doing anything else, and partly because it satisfies an itching vanity in the heart of us. None of us, so far as I know, do it to serve the public in any way, so I really do not know why we should expect the public to support us.' When these statements fall into the hands of Elizabeth's publishers, the fun will really begin. Come To, Britain PURITANISM is likely to turn the 'Come to Britain' movement into a 'Don't Come to Britain' policy, according to Sir Francis Towle, one of the leading English hotel men. Not only will foreigners be driven away by the restrictions that decorous town councils are enacting, but the natives themselves will flee to France for their fun. When the Metropole Hotel at Folkestone recently sought permission to hold Sunday dances the request was refused, and the local congregation added insult to injury by singing 'We thank Thee all, our God' the very next Sunday. Poor Sir Francis was almost in tears. He placed the blame on 'the butchers and grocers who form the town councils of our seaside resorts, and imagine their mission in life is to reform the morals of holiday visitors.' This insolent desire to run their own locality the way they please takes many curious shapes. In some places mixed bathing is for |