Bailing Out

Sir:

Your spelling [TIME, April 18] of baling wire as "bailing wire" is haywire. Baling wire is commonly known as hay wire and the term "haywire" originates from the fact that when a thing is repaired with baling wire it usually remains haywire--although this was not true of the Pittsburgh Pirates last year ... In any case, "bailing wire" is haywire and baling wire is the true hay wire.

REX F. CLARKE

San Francisco, Calif.

> Hay! Hay!--ED.

Plane-Bullet Speed

Sir:

There is something that is quite puzzling to me . . . after reading about Test Pilot Yeager [TIME, April 18], Suppose a plane was traveling at the speed of a bullet, and a gun located in the plane and facing the direction of travel was fired, what would happen to the bullet? Would it stay in the gun, come back, or go forward at twice its normal speed? . . .

I happen to be an engineer, but not a good one, I'm afraid, for this has me baffled.

RICHARD W. MARSH

Orange, NJ.

> The velocity of the bullet as it left the muzzle would be twice the speed it would have if it were fired by a man on the ground.--ED.

Challenge to Civilization

Sir:

Thanks for the inspirational messages of Msgr. Fulton J. Sheen and Dr. Chao Tse-chen [TIME, April 18].

Msgr. Sheen has brought forth a deeper meaning beyond the material security of peace of mind . . . Dr. Chao has revealed with peculiar penetration the dilemma of :.ll religion faced with the greatest challenge to civilization in a thousand years.

TIME is to be congratulated for . . . making available to the lay public the philosophies of the great religious thinkers whose ivory towers are not easily available to modern man . ..

MAURY M. TRAVIS

Denver, Colo.

Sir:

Would that men like Msgr.-Sheen ... could retire to the Middle Ages, where they belong in spirit! Such clever men serve merely to hinder what harassed modern man really needs: a reinterpretation of the nature of man on the basis of new psychological and philosophical insights. I refer them not only to Freud, but to the efforts of such truly significant men as Albert Schweitzer and Jose Ortega y Gasset.

C. HARLAN

Humphrey, Ark.

Pity the Children

Sir:

The report on allergic children [TIME, April 18] provokes serious reflection. After over 30 years of active medical practice I can say with utmost conviction that the specimen cases cited in the report which you quote are evidently children who have been poorly brought up, either by ignorant and indifferent parents or, more likely, by mothers who regard themselves as "progressive"--young ladies who swear by Freud and know all there is to know about inhibitions, complexes and the subconscious ego. Pity their poor children.

By far the largest number of youngsters I have observed and treated over the years for allergic manifestations have been normal in every other way. Generally the child inherits the allergic sensitiveness or predisposition from one or the other of the parents. To be sure, the psychic element is important, but the basic cause of the ailment lies in heredity, nutrition, infection, glandular disturbances and environmental factors. Too many people, lay and medical, are talking loosely about "psychic" upsets and tantrums when they should be paying more attention to the child's food, rest, play, work and discipline.

JOSEPH KRIMSKY, M.D.

Huntington, W. Va.

Conspirators or Cockroaches?

Sir:

Fundamentally, the hullabaloo over a Communist conspiracy to overthrow our Government [TIME, April 18] is phony ... A few crackpot Reds have as much chance of starting a revolution here as a gang of cockroaches plotting to take over the Empire State Building. To check the cockroaches we are spraying the whole edifice with a noxious poison, and the air of freedom has been polluted.

The press as a whole seems to be abetting an intellectual lynching bee, with the independent thinker as its quarry . . .

The real source of this country's strength has been freedom of thought and freedom of speech. These freedoms have never been at so low an ebb.

PAUL DAVIS

New York City

Socialistic Diet

Sir: I cannot agree with my fellow student of Edinburgh University, the Rev. James R. Woodruff, in regard to Britain's welfare on her present regime [TIME, April 11]. His stay must have been short indeed.

I regard Britain's present diet as one of the most important factors in the prognosis of this country's illness. I blame the planned chaos of Socialism for the prolonged deficiency of protein food which has now reached the alltime low of one chop and one rasher of bacon a week per head. Orange juice and cod-liver oil can be replaced by tablets, but without adequate proteins, preferably in the form of good red meat, there can be no virility or creativeness in any field of endeavor. It is no use citing the creativeness on a herbal diet of such men as George Bernard Shaw. Any doctor will testify to the fantastic variations from normal which can occur in some few individuals, but I am speaking of a nation . . .

DAVID E. TULLOCH

Barnton, Midlothian, Scotland

Man of the Half-Century?

Sir:

It has just occurred to me that we are about to turn the half-century. Would it not be Timely for you to have on the cover of the first issue of 1950, not the Man of the Year, but the Man of the Half-Century ? . . . I nominate the Rt. Hon. Winston Churchill.

B. G. Hoos"

Berlin, N.H.

Statement of Faith

Sir:

TIME [says] that I had little to say to the press at the time of my re-entry into the Anglican ministry three months ago [TIME, Jan. 17] ... Here is a statement of my position:

The Roman Catholic Church is perfectly correct in making immortality its central doctrine, as the primary reason for Our Lord's Incarnation, and in centering its worship upon the Eucharist, the "medicine of immortality." That is the correct Catholic instinct, fulfilling what, from my psychological studies, I have concluded is the primary instinct of man--the desire for immortality, that hope which is behind all the myths.

Where I part company from the Roman Catholic Church is in the rationalist nature of its official theology; its preaching of the God of Greek metaphysics, the First Cause, impassible, an abstract, not a living God . . . Such a God is not one who can easily be prayed to, and that is why the Roman Catholic laity have turned for their devotions inordinately to creatures--to the Blessed Virgin and the Saints. Similarly, I disagree with the rationalist Scholastic interpretation of the soul and of the nature of man, of the act of faith and the rigid distinction between the natural and the supernatural . . .

On the other hand, the great Protestant theologians are perfectly correct and more satisfying than the Roman Catholics in their statements of the nature of God and of man, and of the meaning of the act of faith. However, they lay the main emphasis of their teaching on sin, which in its turn throws the whole structure of Protestant popular devotion out of gear . . . This results in the placing of eucharistic devotion to one side, in the periphery of devotion and as a practical result, Protestant services become drab and lacking in all life and color . . .

Because I disagree with both Roman Catholic and Protestant theologians, I have become a member of the Anglo-Catholic movement in the Church of England.

W. P. WITCUTT

London, England

The First $50,000

Sir:

Thanks for a swell article on Washington and Lee University [TIME, April 18].

An interesting item might be that the $50,000 that George Washington left is still intact. No part of the principal has ever been expended.

JIMMY DURHAM

Memphis, Tenn.

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