Eleven A Year
Sirs: Your Religion Editor does less than full justice to the position of the Catholic Church in his story on the Marlborough-Vanderbilt case (TIME, Dec. 6). The answer to the "question of principle" which he asks is so patent that no Catholic ever thought of giving it. "Why does the Roman Catholic Church he asks refuse to grant a divorce to a man and woman who have lived in civil wedlock; but instead (italics mine) grants an annulment, of which one effect is to inform the unhappy pair that they have been living together in an unmarried state?" The Catholic Church grants no divorce, that is well-known. Neither does it grant an annulment. It announces that a marriage is null, when it is null, an entirely different thing.... The Rota gives an average of eleven declarations of nullity a year, not a very heavy percentage, for a Catholic population of several hundred millions. (There were more than 175,000 divorces in the U.S. last year.) The Acta Apostolicae Sedis, the official gazette of the Vatican, duly reports the facts of cases before the Rota. They run about 50-50, rich and poor. So much for that. If the cases of nullity from coercion, outside of China and Africa, are more frequent among the wealthy than the poor, that is because selling into marriage is more common among the wealthy than the poor. Speaking without knowledge is bad for the reputation. Please pardon another word. A very simple and not uncommon case for some reason or other was exaggerated beyond its importance. A woman appeared before an ecclesiastical court and asked it whether or not in its opinion her marriage, in the light of sworn testimony, was valid. The court replied after hearing the evidence, that in its opinion the marriage was not valid. There was neither more nor less to the case than that.
WILFRID PARSONS, S. J.
Editor of America National Catholic Weekly New York, N.Y.
TIME made clear that, aside from the resulting and often irrelevant controversy, there was little in the case.oring the elsewhere-popular cartoon. Why don't you run one clever cartoon every week, drawing the material from every section of the country? Surely, a glimpse of what the cartoonists of America are doing deserves place in "The Weekly Newsmagazine."...
FREEMAN H. HUBBARD
Secretary, American Association of Cartoonists and Caricaturists
Eugene ("Zim") Zimmerman, Pres. ; "Bud" Fisher, 1st V. P.; "Rube" Goldberg, 2nd V. P.; Edward McCullaugh, 3rd V. P. New York, N. Y.
Retraction
Sirs: In TIME, Nov. 29 in the review of my novel Revelry you make the statement: "Gimbel Brothers, potent Manhattan department store, brought suit against him when he attacked some of their advertisements. Gimbel Brothers won the suit." This is a misstatement. Gimbel Brothers did not win the suit; on the contrary, they withdrew the suit. Nor was any retraction or withdrawal of any sort published by the New York Tribune, which printed the article. In view of these facts, I request that you print a retraction of your statement.
SAMUEL HOPKINS ADAMS
New York, N.Y.
TIME retracts the statement, regrets the error.of Doremus & Co. across the country to appear in Boston papers.
While this is a tribute to the aggressiveness of our company and so is, of course, gratifying, it may interest your readers to know that we have been using the telephoto for over a year in sending advertisements requiring speed and accuracy. You are correct, however, in that the advertisement referred to was the first to be sent from San Francisco to Boston by anyone....
You will be interested to learn that we have heard on every side comments on this article, which supports our previous belief of the quality and responsiveness of TIME'S circulation and the careful scrutiny given it by its readers.
E. W. POWER
Doremus & Co. New York, N. Y.
Air
Sirs:
Apparently a large percentage of your readers spends its time looking, like the schoolboy, for errors in the teacher's statements and is overjoyed when one is discovered....
Probably the reason the schoolboy takes so much joy in catching the teacher in an error is on account of the superior air the teacher wears....
WHITNEY GOIT
Kansas City, Mo.
10 Downing Street
Sirs:
Will you please enter a subscription for TIME to go to the Hon. Stanley Baldwin, 10 Downing Street, London, England?
I am enclosing my check for $6.00 to cover this subscription, but I am not sure that it is exactly the correct amount for a foreign subscription. If it is not, will you let me know what it is and I will send you the difference.
ROBERT A. GARDNER
Chicago, Ill.
$6 is correct.e been very much impressed with the energy with which your staff has attempted to cover the news of the week. From time to time references have been made in the news columns to Columbia University and some of its activities in the educational world. These references have not always been complimentary and in some particulars have not been entirely correct. This has been somewhat disappointing because on the whole the impression which the magazine makes is one of authority and naturally any one connected with an organization does not like to see mistakes in representation. TIME, Sept. 27, in the last column of p. 18 had a news reference which commented upon the work of the Department over which I happen to have supervision.... "Columbia University was advertising, seemingly with record enterprise, the degrees it has to confer upon correspondence students." This sentence is a bald misstatement; no degrees are conferred by Columbia University for any work done in absentia. "Newspaper displays made it appear as though famed Professors John Dewey (philosophy), Michael Idvorsky Pupin (science), Ashley H. Thorndike and John Erskine (literature), and peers would personally supervise the work of unseen disciples, send them their marks, write them advice, send pearls of erudition by rural free delivery." This sentence makes implications which are not founded on fact. Every course in our Home Study Curriculum must have the approval of a University department of instruction before it is offered, and all but ten instructors, and these chiefly in subjects which are not given even in our Columbia residence courses, out of more than a hundred, are members of the regular University faculty. "Shrewd customers, however, did not raise their hopes so high." This sentence is a statement about which it would be useless to raise any discussion. We make no promises; we can not supply any one with brains and mental or moral stamina. "They well knew that, like the Universities of Chicago, Wisconsin, California and other institutions conducting extension courses, Columbia must find mail-order pedagogy in such demand that an able corps of special assistant instructors is necessary to assist the faculty headliners." The implications in this sentence are purely malicious, as my comment above amply indicates.
LEVERING TYSON
Associate Director In Charge of Home Study Columbia University New York, N.Y.
Biggest Snook
Sirs:
I note with amusement that Montague Morton Snook who champions his family name on your LETTERS page (TIME, Dec. 8) forgot to mention Albert ("Lucky") Snook publisher of the Beacon-News of Aurora, Ill., who is probably the biggest Snook of all.
My sister is married to an Aurora man, and she tells me that "Lucky" Snook got his nickname by winning a big antique oil painting at a raffle in New York City. At least that was what he said when he came home with it.
JOHN BOX
Ashtabula, Ohio
News-stand-buyer John Box casts unwarranted suspicion upon the exploit of honest Albert Snook. Let Mr. Box turn to p. 14 of TIME, Oct. 27, 1924, and read how Albert Snook won not "an antique" but "The Chess Game," a painting by John Singer Sargent, at a lottery for the benefit of lay patrons of the Painters and Sculptors Gallery Association, in Manhattan. Art-patron-publisher "Lucky" Snook was first noted by TIME when he attended an Associated Press convention at Manhattan and emitted there on the appearance of President Coolidge "a wild and enthusiastic yell" which was heard by Mrs. Snook in Aurora, Ill., over the radio hook-up installed to broadcast the President's speech. Said Mrs. Snook (TIME, May 26 1924): "When I recognized Mr. Snook's holler, I knew he was all right." ith the students of Smith College.... This conclusion is deduced from an examination of the magazines to which each college house subscribes as a body. Smith has the "cottage system" of residence, 30 to 60 girls to a dormitory.
MARY M. ARNOTT
Smith College Press Board Northampton, Mass.
Rural "Persuader"
Sirs:
Your footnote definition of a "persuader" (TIME, Dec. 6, 1926) does not confirm my idea of the connotation of the colloquialism. My father is a Wisconsin-born farmer who has never been south of the latitude of Chicago. For 20 years he has used that term to mean a rope-made halter that tightened up on a horse when he offered any resistance to being led. The pressure of the rope around the nose "persuaded" the horse to follow the leader.
And there must be other colloquial uses.
GUY HAROLD SMITH
Madison, Wis.
TIME defined the urban "connotation of the colloquialism" as follows: Persuader: Negro, and therefore Southern, colloquialism for a lethal weapon.LOSE_P]
CHARLES LATHROP PACK
President, Nature Magazine Lakewood, N. J.
Butcher Paper
Sirs:
Your magazine which came a few days is not the kind I wish. I will gladly purchase Elbert Hubbard's Scrap Book in the clothlined butcher paper binding.
Please send immediately C.O.D.
EMMA J. HADLEY
Long Beach, Calif.
Let Subscriber Hadley apply to The Roycrofters, Dept. 411-A, East Aurora, N.Y.SE_P]
New York, N.Y.