Taft Letter

Odious. Detestable

Sirs:

I cannot condone in silence the reprinting on your letter page of a scurrilous anti-Catholic campaign verse, directly under a letter from a Catholic Sister who cancels her subscription in protest against your original printing of this doggerel. If the Presidency of the United States were being contested by a Buddhist and a Mohammedan, I should wish TIME to print no shocking, versified allusion to the sacred "Beard of the Prophet."

By so doing you would merely cause unnecessary pain to pious devotees of Islam. In the present instance, I fear that you have shocked the Catholic Sister cruelly, unless you cancelled her subscription so promptly that she did not receive the issue in which her letter and the verse appeared. If I am any judge of human nature, she at least flipped through a copy to see if her letter had been printed. You might have spared her a shock, and perhaps tears.

Compassion and consideration should always be shown to those who are still religious. Personally I like to pretend that I have lost all contact with religion, and then sometimes I wonder.

MARY BURCHARD PRYOR

Worcester, Mass.

TIME assumes that subscribers who request cancellation do not thereafter peek.

If the Presidency of the United States were being contested by a Buddhist and a Mohammedan, TIME would observe due reverence in mentioning the "Beard of the Prophet." But if hundreds of Buddhist verses ridiculing the "Beard" should appear, in such scurrilous myriads as to violently affect the campaign, then TIME would print a very few significant specimens of such doggerel.

If these typical verses were of a self-evidently odious and detestable nature, TIME would expect both Mohammedans and Buddhists to join with TIME in holding them up to general odium and detestation.

Exceedingly apropos is a despatch from Tennessee, printed last week by the Republican New York Sun, staunch supporter of Candidate Hoover. The Sun's star political correspondent, George Van Slyke wired: "The religionists have thrown off all restraints in the last month and are working openly against Smith. The State is flooded with the anti-Catholic literature. More than fifty separate pamphlets and circulars have been spread broadcast. The extent of this movement has caused much comment as to its cost and who is footing the bill. Much secrecy prevails as to the method of circulation. The literature bears the mark of Flint, Mich., and mostly is put into the rural mail boxes at the crossways, under doors and into small town letter boxes during the night. . . . "All the stuff is much the same . . . holds out the most amazing threats of devastation and disaster which will come to the nation if the Pope wins control of the Government . . .and contains the most vicious and lurid attacks on the Governor, assailing him in the vilest language."-ED.

Taft Letter

Sirs:

Permit one of your original subscribers to commend your published excerpts [TIME, Oct. 15] of letter of William Howard Taft of June, 1918, wherein he declares against the pending Eighteenth Amendment and against National Prohibition as further evidence of the historical value of your publication, but also evidence of the attitude of one whom the American people had honored with the highest office in their gift.

To many of your normal, well-balanced readers, who believe in protecting the people against themselves by judicious enactment of laws restraining the vicious and those devoid of self-control from inflicting upon themselves and others the consequences of self indulgence and vice, your timely expose of the Taft letter, which to many of your readers was unknown, was I am sure, very much like the discovery of a letter written by Abraham Lincoln in 1857 applauding the Dred Scott decision; or Theodore Roosevelt's posthumous missive condemning the Sherman Anti-Trust law; or a communication of William McKinley condoning the destruction of the Maine.

To at least one of your readers it seemed unbelievable except for the inherent probability contained in the unrestrained language of the author. I think it safe to say that if the Taft letter had been generally known to the conservative, law-abiding, progressive people of the country before his appointment as Chief Justice of the United States he would not now hold that important office.

L. ERNEST PHILLIPS

Oakland, Calif.

Tom Jones Hiker

Sirs:

After reaching the end of the trail to Tom Jones Mountain in the Ramapo Range, I met up with a fellow hiker who had spent the night there. The first thing I noticed lying among his equipment was a copy of TIME. I also had my copy with me, and it was not long before we were discussing matters in general.

However, in some unaccountable way I neglected to secure his name and address, neither did he get mine, but I know if he reads this letter (if you print it), he will, no doubt, communicate with me as I desire him to do.

Thanking you for your kindness in doing both of us a good turn, I am

J. F. GEIST

Grand View-on-the-Hudson,

Nyack, N. Y.

Errata

Sirs:

Twice, TIME errs in the issue of Oct. 15, 1928.

On page 13, col. 3, under "Renaissance in Richmond," John Davison Rockefeller Jr. was introduced to Lady Astor; not Lady Astor to Mr. Rockefeller.

And on page 56, in the review of Heart to Heart, suspector Fazenda never finds the truth concerning trifler Littlefield and the engaging seamstress; for in the end Uncle Joe titters and remarks that he knows something that will keep him laughing for the next twenty years.

FRED ASHLEY WILSON III

Coushatta, La.