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THEY order these matters a little more viciously in England. The literary life of London has an acerbity for which we find no parallel in America, perhaps because the art of controversy does not flourish here, perhaps because neither our sober nor our inebriate artists are so convinced of the exclusive completeness of the truth they have been lucky ehough to hit upon. When we find The London Mercury, a young but eminently sober review, damning the dead with the definition "Blast: a flatulent disease of sheep," talking of "dealers in chaos" and quoting from Patience, we suspect that the literary Guelphs and Ghibellines are rioting in Kensington and are not surprised to hear, privately and from one of the moderns, that no artist who had any self-respect would allow his name to appear in the review which Mr. J. C. Squire is editing with such a fine sense for evenness of tone. We wonder whether this bitterness is as much a symptom of health and power, whether all the heat is the fire of inspiration, or a little of it simply fever temperature. And in a very practical way we wonder whether it is necessary to reject anything, in the old forms or the new, except the dishonest and the shallow and the feeble in execution. The question is practical because The Dial has set itself the task of including a great many things which fall under the ban of one or the other of the challenging pontiffs of art. As we have said before, the place of a contributor in any "movement" backward or forward does not concern us; and until we are convinced that we are in error, we shall hold to that principle.

From an aesthetic point of view the world is and probably al- ways will be divided into people who think that every able-bodied man should be compelled to work at least six hours every day and people who do not. The alignment makes some rather peculiar bedfellows. On one side are: Mr. Gompers, the Y: M. C. A, General Wood, the Republican party, the Democratic party, the Bolsheviki, Mr. Edison, Mr. Brandeis, the Socialists, and all right-minded persons. On the other side are: the vicious and idle rich, a few priests, some tramps, some artists, some orientals, some anar-