THE MICHIGAN DAILY ""NIJ [E MICHIGAN DAILY Jal Publication of the Summer Session a1 "' ps, 'v' , frt 11 I the awakening of the American public to its new and revolutionary attitude toward mental hygiene. Today, "insane asylums" are coming to be known as "state hospitals"; "violent wards" have disap- peared; mental hygiene clinics -several hundred of them-have sprung up all over the country; the courts and schools are turning more and more to the psychiatrist for counsel; and insanity is re- garded as a disease rather than as a crime., The National. Committee on Mental Hygiene, founded, by Mr. Beers, is now at work on an inten- sive program of prevention -seeking to strike at the source of evil by going into the schools and homes to deal with maladjustment in children. It is a program that, alone, should be enough to an- swer any charges of failure on the part of the mental hygiene movement, and one that deserves the energetic support of everypublic-spirited indi- vidual. Four stars - mustn't miss; three stars very good; two stars - an average picture; one star - poor; no star- don't go. nents and, seeking their co-operation, it is also possible that he realizes what a source of constant domestic unrest and what a blot on Mexico's name abroad the religious persecution has been. In any genuine charter of liberties for the people, relig- ious freedom must have a prominent place. It is to be hoped that this will soon be restored in Mexico. --St. Louis Post-Dispatch. A Washington BYSTANDER" 0 Mf 7% - 7 I 1I p'1. ,r Ii 11 Publi~ed every morning except Monday during the Univer ity year and Summer Session by the Board in Control of Student Publications. emef ithe Weste rConference Editorial Association sand thie' g ten New ervice. MEMBER Asot ted ffigia fix - 1934 (ii]|gg zs*- MEMBER OF THE ASSOCIATED PRESS The Asocated Press is exclusively entitled to the use for republication of all news dispatches credited to it or not vt~ws rdtdi hs apradtelclnw pblished hereite Alrghtisof republiatiohe lo aspecal dispatche are reserved. En~te at the 'Post Office at Ann Arbor, Michigan, as second class matter. Special rate of postage granted by Third Assistant Postmaster-General' Subscription' during summer by carrier, $1.00; by mail, $1.50. During regular school year by carrier, $4.00; by mall, $4.50. - Offices: Student Publications Building, Maynard Street, Ann Arbor, VtphIgan. Phone: 2-1214. Representatives: National Advertising Service, Inc. 11 West Steet, New York, NY. - 400 N. Michigan Ave., EDITORIAL STAFF Telephone AF49 MANAGING EDITOR...............JOHN C. IEA IEY AS8I TAT MANAGING EDITOR ..ROBERT S. RUWITCH ASSOCIATE EDITORS:, Thoms . Groehn, Thomas H. Kleene, WilliamRedGuM.WppeJr ASSISTANT EDITORS: Robert Cummins, Joseph Mattes, Elsie Pierce, Charlotte Rueger. RUSINESS .STAFF BUSINES MANAGER ....RUSSELL READ ASS At BS.MGR.....BERNARD ROSETHL2 6irclation Manage............E..Clinton B. Conger BUSINESS ASSISTANTS: Charles L. Brush, Frederick E. Maget. Note On Dc1mocraey. .. .E~MOCRACPY is a. spiritual ideal, a I2burning. passion, a moral hunger:. It is .a. cherished hope which glows. and fades in. mainls heart according to its realization. Yet, it is asstimnulating. hope which encourages men to seek ,a better, fuller, freer life. The s iriV of demnocracy demands a social order based.upon the vigorous, fearless co-ordination and integration of all the dynamic forces of . nature and human nature - whose power shall be har- nassed not for the benefit of a single group, for a minority, nor even for a majority, but for the entire body politic. The spirit of Democracy is the spirit of evolu-. tion, Man's inventiveness, his ingenuity, and his faith, in the future must. not be fettered by the chains. of outworn habit, decadent custom, and moss-backed institutions. His dynamic, evolving powers must be free to analyze the institutions which serve him. They must be free to take the best from the past, the best that experience has sanctioned, leaving what has withered and died, to reorganize old institutions and create new ones in the light of new facts and enlightened theory. The belief that human nature is static, unmut- able is death to the spirit of Democracy. Its very strength depends upon man's willingness to sweep into. oblivion those customs and. habits which ex- perience has found warnting and which critical minds have proved worthless. Stagnation and reaction sap the vitality of De- docracy. They stand for the old, decrepit social, oi ders and "things as they were" instead of things as they should be, Their presence epitomizes coer- cion instead of cooperation and regimentation in- stead of freedom - and freedom is the very es- sence of Democracy. They are inseparable, they go hand in hand, and they rise or fall together. Mental Hy~giene. .. - WITH OUR INSTITUTIONS for the mentally afflicted crowded to over- flowing and our waiting lists swelling; with our prisons filled with prisoners; and with mental mis- Aits walking the sreets of virtually every large city and tiny hamlet in the land, it might not seem un- just to charge the mental hygiene movement with failure to appreciably alleviate.the very critical sit- uation with which it has attencpted to cope. But a glance at the historyr of the moyement is enough to suggest'that there is more reason to applaud than to belittle. - In the 18th century, said an official of the British National Council for Mental Hygiene, "nearly the whole of the indigent mentally afflicted were at larg, living by such few wits as they possessed from birth or were left to them after some acute attack, and subjeced to the jeers, jibes, rough humor and sport - even the violence and brutality of the public; or if considered dangerous, they were con- fined by a magistrate's order.. . in jails, houses of correction, poorhouses, and houses of industry where they were in an infinitely worse plight than when at large." In the fact that we have today a large number of institutions specifically intended for. the mentally ill there is, then, a point in favor of the mental hygiene movement. A.Frenchrrap, Philippe Pinel, started the activity. toward institutionalization of the unfit in 1792 when, for the first time in medical history, he at- tempted to treat the insane as human beings and put them into hospitals under lenient physicians. Fifty years later, Dorothea Dix began her splendid work of awakening the American public's interest in the "new evangel" - work that was instrumental in the foundation of no less than 32 mental insti- tutions. Modern psychiatry was born at the end i NO- ** AT THE MAJESTIC "BREAK OF HEARTS" An RKO-Radio picture starring Katherine Hep- burn and Charles oyer with Jean Hersholt and John Beal. Also a Charley Chase Comedy, a Pete Smith oddity, and a Hearst newsreel. Un-beautiful (always), handsome (at odd mo- ments), fierce-looking (often) Katie Hepburn struggles through a story in which there is nothing new, even nothing clever. A young musician (Hepburn) meets quite by chance New York's most famous conductor, Franz Roberti (Charles Boyer), and marries him after a brief acquaintance. But he goes out with other women and she leaves him; he turns to drink ... and so on. Hepburn apparently has the ability to do very good or very bad acting, depending on God knows what. Her performance reflects this. She inter- sperses convincing moments with the most hor- rible of grimaces and melodramatic poses. But good or bad, she couldn't have made "Break of Hearts" very interesting anyway. Charles Boyer, in a typical role and performance, is good. He does a better job than Hepburn, but still has to prove his versatility. Jean Hersholt, a veteran, is fine, as usual. John Beal, one of the screen's newer juveniles, is engaging. Your interest in "Break of Hearts" will vary di- rectly with your interest in the actors. The short subjects are disappointing. In the face of steadily declining quality of Hollywood shorts (excepting cartoons, which are beginning to monopolize the field) Charley Chase comedies and Pete Smith oddities are holding the fort. Unfortunately, "Poker at Eight" (Charley Chase) and "Sporting Nuts" (Pete Smith) are about the worst efforts of both. The Hearst newsreel is no better than average. -R.A.C. ArsOther S ee 850 Words WILL BASIC ENGLISH, by means of which C. K. °Ogden of Cambridge has reduced the essential words of the language to the meager number of 850, ultimately become the conventional method of international communication? This possibility looms distinctly brighter as the result of recent developments, for basic English seems to be making great headway. A Japanese- Basic English dictionary has just been completed; basic English is furnishing a model for basic Chi- nese; the Soviet Government is issuing basic Eng- lish textbooks; and in the Leeward Islands basic English is being taught in the schools, Sooner or later, it is expected that basic English will be adopted by the screen, which, of course, is particularly anxious to use a language that can be universally comprehended. It may be thought that 850 words is a vocabulary incapable of narrat- ing a whole drama, but this is not so. Not long ago. a book of 80,000 words was written in basic English without anyone's noticing any difference from an ordinary book. Nevertheless, some people have misgivings. If basic English achieves the international currency hoped for it, and especially if it is adopted by the films, will it tend to restrict.the vocabulary of the English-speaking peoples themselves, causing the 850 words, which it contains to be the only ones out of the 400,000 in the dictionaries to be em- ployed in practical daily use? How severe a re- striction of present vocabularies this would repre- sent may be gauged from the estimate that today a British teashop waitress uses about 7,000 different words. But on the whole it is likely that these fears are groundless. Basic English is not in any sense "pidgin" English. It makes its users carefully examine the exact shade of meaning of each of the terms they employ; and this is the first step toward good English. Moreover, the 850 words of- basic English are only a foundation; the super- structure of a larger vocabulary can easily be built upon them. If basic English fulfills its interna- tional functions properly, its national effects are not likely to be undesirable. -Christian Science Monitor. Straws In The Mexican Wind THERE ARE :INDICATIONS in Mexico that the religious war that has disgraced the country in recent months is to be ended, or drastically cur- tailed. First was the reorganization of the cabinet,\ when President Cardenas and Gen. Calles parted political company, of which one result was elim- ination of men who had pushed the war on the Catholic church and substitution of officials of By KIRKE SIMPSON WASHINGTON - Fears of congressional leaders - and presumably of business - that the wealth tax program means a session of Congress prolonged into September or later, are challenged by the records. Congress has sat all summer a number of times, even in days before air-condition-, ing devices tempered the summer heat in Wash- ington somewhat for the law-makers. It has taken very special emergencies, however, to, induce long summer sessions. War, rumors of war, the after- math of war and the tariff, have provided the in- ducements most frequently when Congress dipped beyond mid-July for adjournment. This session is not comparable to predecessors because it started later. The Norris anti-lame duck constitutional amendment saw to that. The usual "long" session began in December. It starts a month later now-a-days. * * * * MIGHT SIT ALL. SUMVER THERE isn't much doubt that if a general revision of the tariff had been thrust upon Congress at the eleventh hour so far as norm'al mid-July adjournment is concerned, it might sit not only all summer, but all fall. Pr'esident Hoover, during his first year in office, discovered for himself what a tariff session means. He called a special session for "limited" tariff revision soon after he took office. Congress met on April 15 and adjourned on November 22 to meet again in regular session on December 2. Just what part that particular session played in shaping American political history and paving the way for the Roosevelt New Deal still is a matter of heated debate. Will shaping a new tax policy as proposed by President Roosevelt result in any such prolonga- tion of the present session? If it is confined strictly to the .limited wealth-tax increase categories out- lined by the President, probably not. But if de- velopments follow the Vandenberg formula and the effort is to redraft all tax schedules on a budget balancing basis, nobody could say how long it might take. That is a point to be considered in esti- mating the possibilities of the Vandenberg plan. * * * * BID FOR NOMINATION? 1NCIDENTALLY, the Vandenberg tax program looked to many political writers like the most definite bid for the Republican 1936 nomination he has made. When, twitted in, the Senate, as he so frequently is both by Democrats and, now and then, by his Michigan colleague, Couzens, with such ambitions, Vandenberg has managed to smile his way out in non-committal fashion. His counter to the presidential tax proposals was calculated to invite the construction that he saw in it a possible prime issue to bridge the gap between Republican eastern conservatives and western progressives. Apparently the senator regarded his announce- ment as of more importance than any run-of-the- mill declaration of policy on other New Deal ideas he has thus far made. Copies were sent around to newspaper offices. By JOHN SELBY "REDDER THAN THE ROSE," By Robert Forsythe; (Covici-Friede). TWO IMPORTANT matters "condition," as the psychologists would certainly say, the reader's response to Robert Forsythe's "Redder Than the Rose."' One is the "take-off" on the title of Stark Young's famous book. One might expect a satire on Mr. Young's book, a satire on magnolia-scented novels, a satire on lush writing generally. But the red refers to Mr. Forsythe's political complexion. The second is that complexion. One must realize that Mr. Forsythe is quite as intolerant of conserv- atives and liberals as those gentry are intolerant of Reds. There is but one solution for present problems in Mr., Forsythe's mind., This is com- munism and this is infallibly right. His abundant and slashing humor fails him only here. He can see how funny everything is, himself included, but he cannot see that there might possibly be some- thing amusing in his politics. This (to crib a phrase from the Britishers Mr. Forsythe hates with a whirling hatred) is just too, too bad. For Mr. Forsythe has satire, irony, sarcasm, humor and innuendo perfectly at his command. He can make a subject so ridiculous that even when his facts are shaky his reader is sympathetic and probably converted. He applies his talents to a most varied list of subjects. One of the 38 little essays in "Redder Than the Rose" snatches a bloody scalp from Ernest Hemingway's head: "What we do get from Mr. Hemingway," he writes, "is the impression of a man who has been writing in a vacuum and is now ending in a vacuum." Another is a hilarious and yet stinging fireside scene in the White House. Another takes Alex- ander ("these old bones") Woollcott for a ride. Mr. Hearst, the state of Indiana, the British royal fam- ily, the Duke-Cromwell alliance, the Mellons - these and many others are birched. HE tr 11 U; A I I