"I DIPPED INTO THE FUTURE--"

"Dead in Smyrna Put at 250,000" was the newspaper announcement based on the cabled report of Mark O. Prentiss of the American Near East Relief. Yet the people of this country have not been particularly interested; most of them have, and are, giving more attention to lurid accounts of local murder cases than to the signs of the times. That there should be such an apathy toward the happenings in the Near East, or anywhere outside the gates of our own cities, is deplorable. The world has reached a stage where all sections are coming into close contact. In such a situation a policy of disinterested aloofness can lead only to disaster. Here and there, it is true, a few individual efforts are being made to combat this smugness in the American mind. The latest example is a new magazine, "Foreign Affairs", under the editorship of Professor Archibald Carey Coolidge of the University. Included in the list of contributors are President Eliot, Andre Tardieu, and Elihu Root.

While magazines of this character are excellent; they cannot help but be merely sporadic engagements with the dead weight of splendid mental isolation. It needs something more than journals which reach but a comparative few to awaken the greater mass of the people to a consciousness of what is going on beneath the surface in world affairs today. A more than merely cursory glance at any newspaper within the last two weeks would have revealed the following facts:

The threat of a Turkish-Russian-German alliance which may grow out of the present situation in the Near East.

The conclusion of the Disarmament Committee at Geneva, announced by Lord Robert Cecil, "that it was impossible to suppress--entirely the use of chemicals and scientific weapons" and that "the only safeguard was to make the peoples of the world understand the horrors that might be expected from such methods," notwithstanding the Root resolution at the Washington Conference forbidding the five powers the use of "asphyxiating, poisonous or analogous liquids or materials or devices."

The simultaneous announcement by Lord Cecil of the discovery of "a scientific means for the almost complete extermination of whole nations at a time."

The development by the British Air Ministry of an oil burning airplane attaining a speed of three miles a minute and capable of a thousand mile non-stop flight.

The improvement of gliders in Germany so that eventually, as a correspondent reports, "wind-borne motorless flights, revolutionizing human transport can be made for hundreds and thousands of miles."

Will people awaken to the situation before the ever-increasing instruments of horror a turned upon them? Or will Professor Sir C. S. Sherrington's supposedly scientific conclusion that all nations will ultimately be one come true, if it does at all, only as the result of a world carnage?