Of the greatness and wealth of a country they make a devouring disease, a kind of cancer absorbing living forces, taking the whole place and crushing life and which, being contagious, ends either in the crisis of war or in the exhaustion and asphyxia of armed peace. Of how many crimes have they not made virtues by calling them national—with one word! They even deform truth. For eternal truth is substituted the national truth of each. So many peoples, so many truths, which twist and turn the truth. All those who keep up these children’s disputes, so odiously ridiculous, scold each other, with: “It wasn’t I who began, it was you.” “No it wasn’t I, it was you.” “Begin if you dare.” “Begin, you.” Puerilities which keep the world’s immense wound sore because those really interested do not take part in the discussion and the desire to make an end of it does not exist; all those who cannot or will not make peace on earth; all those who clutch, for some reason or other, to the old state of things, finding or inventing reasons for it, those are your enemies! In a word, the enemy is the past. The perpetrators of war are the traditionalists, steeped in the past ... for whom an abuse has the power of law because it has been allowed to take root, who aspire to be guided by the dead and who insist on submitting the passionate, throbbing future and progress to the rule of ghosts and nursery fables. “Verily the criminals are those who echo, ‘because it was, it must be.’” Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman have just been given a sentence of two years in prison, fines of ten-thousand dollars each, and deportation, for believing these same things!—_M. C. A._ Argument Louis Putkelis, Cambridge, Mass.: I am thinking seriously on the subject of Art and I would like to have a clear exposition of your views and the reasons why they do not agree with mine. Having the relation of art to life and to society, as a question, seriously to heart, I would prefer a serious reply to a serious article rather than a flippant reply to chance remarks. I had hoped that discussions would arise among the Reader Critic that would interest a larger circle of readers and that would sift the question thoroughly. It seems to me that the last few numbers of _The Little Review_ have been below your earlier standard—almost below zero. What sympathy can the majority of readers feel for the foreign editor, Ezra Pound, with his contemptuous invective against the “vulgus”? The last letter of Wyndham Lewis, to be sure, has more food for thought, though it seems that the author’s acquaintance with Russian literature is rather limited. I could say more about that but I await the psychological moment.