Contribution

While the securities of his company were soaring to unprecedented heights on the New York Stock Exchange last week (see p. 38), Major Gen. James G. Harbord, president of the Radio Corporation of America, made a speech to some women Republicans in Manhattan. Said he: "The change that will be wrought by radio lies in the fact that though one address goes to an audience of 30,000,000 the contagion of the crowd is gone. The magnetism of the orator cools when transmitted through the microphone. The impassioned gesture swings through unseeing space. The purple period fades in color; the flashing eye meets no answering glance. . . . We sit in our library, in a room where we are accustomed to study and reflect, where all the surroundings are natural. When we there hear the same man speak we know him better than we could in the crowd. The very tones of his voice, quiet and deliberate, if he is to be heard by radio, proclaim his sincerity or his lack of it.

"Great as have been the varied contributions of science to mankind, it may well be that none has been quite so great as that of radio to the science of government, the exposure of the demagogue. . . ."