In Vancouver

Sirs:

TIME is read in the office of the Vancouver Sun, from cover to cover, by five of our executives. We get from it editorial ideas and news leads and a news presentation that is right in line with modern journalism.

TIME has developed a fast moving telegraphic style all of its own that is extremely informative and entertaining. Speaking as a newspaper owner and publisher, I would say that if circulation and advertising departments will thoroughly promote and "merchandise" what you are selling, TIME has ahead of it a very successful career.

The old didactic style of writing has gone; people are no longer content to read a full column editorial and then wonder what it is all about. The reading public today wants brevity, variety and versatility, and they want facts.

Try and get in a little more Canadian news. And also try and get in some common-sense understandable health news, which the public is today hungry for. Most of the so-called health services in the newspapers have been run by M. E who are using their space not to give the public common-sense health knowledge, but they have been using that space as free advertising for pills, pellets, serums and surgery.

Health is a matter of publication and education and today I look on it as newspaperdom's best bet. . . .

R. J. CROMIE

Publisher Vancouver, B. C.

Mudhooks

Sirs:

While nearly all other newspapers in the States are publishing silly, sentimental rubbish on the situation in China, fatuously extolling the "enlightened American Policy in the East," you continue to give accurate and unvarnished descriptions of conditions here. You deserve heartiest congratulations from Americans here, who are constantly faced with the fact that the present diplomatic policy, which was first staged, and is still sponsored, by first the American Government, is a ridiculous farce and largely responsible for the deplorable state of affairs existing here.

Of course I am aware that in your Peking correspondent you have a much more reliable and disinterested source of information than other papers possess.

On .p. 15 of TIME, Sept. 13, you mention that an American destroyer, the Elvano, was fired on while steaming up the Yangtze. You probably refer to the small gunboat U. S. S. Elcano which is stationed at Ichang. It is easy to believe that she was fired on, but much harder to conceive her steaming up the Yangtze.

The Elcano is an old Spanish gunboat captured by Admiral Dewey in the Battle of Manila Bay. Some years ago she was refitted and sent to occupy a station of the Yangtze Patrol Gorges at Ichang, just below the Yangtze Gorges. The trials and tribulations the Elcano met with in navigating the comparatively quiet stretch ot river between Hankow and Ichang make a legend dear to the hearts of the merchant skippers at Ichang. Some say she was towed up by hundreds of Chinese trackers, and others that she came up under her own power, making sometimes as much as 15 miles a day. Yangtze rivermen frequently express the opinion that if she ever lost her mudhooks in her present state she would drift right down to Shanghai, unless her crew were able to get a line ashore.

After seven years of wrangling over the Yangtze Patrol, Washington has made a contract in Shanghai for six modern gunboats to replace the old and feeble units now in use. The first is to be ready in March, the others to follow a month apart. The Elcano will soon be released from duty as a floating fortification at Ichang and scrapped.

After the Elcano, the two gunboats U. S. S. Monocacy and U. S. S. Palos which form the Upper Yangtze Patrol, will be released. These are coal and wood burners of the vintage of approximately 1910, and are so old that they navigate the rapids above Ichang with the greatest difficulty and danger.

The Palos went down river to Shanghai early last spring for overhaul and since then has never gotten further up river than Ichang, although she has been badly needed on the upper stretch, and has made several attempts. Chungking residents have a popular ditty to the tune of "Parlez-vous," the two essential lines of which are:

The Palos passed a ship one day The ship was going the other way.

You may use this information as you please but for business reasons I do not want my name mentioned.

The above came from a U. S. businessman in Szechuan, huge and remote province.--ED.

Potent Flayed

Sirs:

. . . TIME gives me pretty good news service. China news is as accurate as it could well be at your end of a long wire.

Only, get your red pencil after some words that are ready to be molted from your rather exceptional vocabulary. Grandpa "Potent" and a few of his confreres ought to get well-deserved old age pensions.

FRANK M. TOOTHAKER The Yenping Mission Methodist Episcopal Church Yenping City, Fukien China.

Quipper Quillen

In' TIME, Dec. 20, you say of R. Charlton Wright: "A few years ago, his quips outnumbered all others on the funny-page of the Literary Digest; often as many as a dozen were reprinted in one issue.

The reference to "all others" invites comparison with the paragraphs of Robert Quillen. When Mr. Quillen wrote for the Greenville (S. C.) Piedmont, he led all other papers in the number of paragraphs quoted, his high mark being 19.

After his paragraphs were syndicated, he held the lead--the high-water mark being 20 of 42 paragraphs quoted in the Digest for March 14, 1925, as the inclosed reprint of the Digest page will show. . , .--There is no competition between paragraphers; but since Mr. Quillen leads the field, we think he should be given proper credit in TIME.

E. P. CONLEY Chicago, Ill.

Voice

Sirs:

... I will close with the following quotation from Shakespeare:

Methinks I hear a voice cry, "Ha-ha!" Time doth murder melancholy!* -J. Y. BLANKETSIEMS

Princeton, N. J.

Regal Fashion

Sirs :

In TIME, Dec. 6, p. 11, you outlined the high and low points in the career of Edward L. Doheny. You stated that after discovering oil near Los Angeles he "rose again and fell again financially. Then he got himself a horse and set out to explore Mexico."

On Dec. 6, 1921, I attended the annual dinner of the American Petroleum Institute and recall a statement by Mr. Doheny to the effect that many people had the impression that he pioneered in Mexico in primitive style, but the truth was that he entered Mexico in regal fashion in a private car. The following excerpt from Mr. Doheny's address placates my mind, for my memory is frequently errant:

"In May, 1900, C. A. Canfield, a well-known and successful oil prospector of California, and A. P. Maginnis, a prominent railway official of that State, with myself, made a trip to Mexico at the suggestion of the late A. A. Robinson, the then president of the Mexican Central Railway Company, who had hopes of seeing oil developed somewhere near the line of his railroad. Although we then and always before considered ourselves prospectors, we had really graduated from that very worthy and energetic class of men to whom our great West owes so much. We were not under the necessity of being 'grub-staked' by anyone, or more ostentatiously on the hurricane deck of a cayuse. Our previous success in finding oil in California led to our going on this prospecting trip in a private car, traveling with passes issued to us because of the benefit which it was supposed the Mexican Central Railway Company might gain."

W. A. MCMILLAN

Milwaukee, Wis.

TIME erred in emphasizing the horse. -- ED.

Stripe

Sirs :

The other day at the breakfast table my wife said to me, "It seems to me that it is about time to put up TIME for the time being."

Reluctantly I did so. I was reading your amusing article entitled "Hint" [TIME, Dec. 20]. I like the second, third, fourth and fifth paragraphs, and chuckled over them, but part of the first stuck.

You head the article with, "What with the Methodist-Episcopal Church, through its board of temperance and public morals, re-declaring war on intemperance" ; . . . then further down . . . "thoughtful citizens wondered . . . how far the Fundamentalist determination to reform the country extends."

I happen to be a Minister in the said Church, and I rather dislike to be included with the Right Rev. Dr. John Roach Straton, or any of his stripe who are doing so much to bring Christianity into disrepute among well informed people.

I think that I do not go outside the facts when I say that the Methodist Episcopal Church is not in the same "swim" as "The Supreme Kingdom" (Vainglorious Term) and is not bothered about the supposed contradiction between religion and science.

Now I feel better.

H. L. WILLIAMS

Preston, Kan.

Elk City, Okla.

Letter carriers have enough to do without looking at the postmarks of mail. But, had they been curious last week, they would have seen the words, "Elk City, Okla,," on one out of every 15 letters addressed to the editorial department of TIME. Able High School Teacher F. J. Cathcart was responsible. He had asked the members of his class in Government* to write words of praise and criticism to TIME. Most of them did. To the dutiful ones and to Teacher Cathcart, many thanks and a hearty acknowledgment. Herewith excerpts from two of the letters:

Sirs:

. . . The TIME staff must be all men that don't think much of women for we don't read much about them. Please take more interest in women.

RUTH ROYSE

Elk City, Okla.

Sirs:

It will not surprise you to learn that TIME is the one magazine which I read from cover to cover. I am glad to add that the sense displayed by TIME is not common, but is very uncommon. As our instructor, F. J. Cathcart, once said, "A man with horse sense would be stable minded."

JOE S NODDY

Elk City, Okla.

Diarist

Sirs:

A day on the last frontier, Alaska--6 a.m.: sourdough hotcakes, made from Alaska grown wheat, with honey from Alaska raised bees; baked Alaska apples, transparent.

Off to the R. R. shop at 7:30 to touch up the iron malamute which carries mail and passengers to Fairbanks . . . the Ry. stamp mills for the Willow Creek gold mines. We use Alaska coal exclusively.

Back to the homestead 4 o'clock. Tuning the radio for eastern news.

Getting supper ready. Bill of fare: Bear roast, potatoes, celery, cranberries, beets, cucumbers, tomatoes, corn on cob.

Reading various magazines accompanied with song and music from coast cities over the radio. Between 10 and 11 Alaska time, is a quiet hour, a good time to study TIME. After 11, Japan, Australia and New Zealand are within reach of. my five tube Grebe radio set.

Your grateful Subscriber,

OSCAR C. NIELSEN

Sunbeam Homestead Anchorage, Alaska

An error. Shakespeare said: Methought I heard a voice cry, "Sleep no more ! Macbeth does murder sleep!"--ED.

*Teacher Cathcart and his pupils consume 46 copies of TIME every week in their classroom work.