WASHINGTON, Sunday—The January magazines, as a whole, it seems to me, provide us with a great deal of interesting reading. There are several articles which are particularly interesting to people with children. Among them, John K. Springer's article, "The Battle For Child Health," shows that our birth rate is going up in this country and makes some valuable suggestions on how to meet the problem of keeping our children well, inspite of the lack of doctors on the home front.

Miss Katharine Lenroot, head of the U.S. Children's Bureau, writes a few words of introduction to this article. Dr. John W. Studebaker, U.S. Commissioner of Education, writes a few words to introduce an article by Raymond Nathan on the way our schools are mobilizing to prepare our youth "for the realities of the world in which they find themselves."

David Cushman Coyle, who is to me one of the stimulating writers on economic questions, has an article on "Planning A World Of Plenty." In it he points out that we are learning things in these hard war years that may be valuable in teaching us how to live better in the future.

One of my hopes is that, because we are forced to do certain things now, we may find them really interesting, pleasant and worth doing at all times. We may become better neighbors and live together more happily in our communities, because of what we learn in this period.

Miss Dorothy Thompson has sent me the "Christmas Declaration," which was released on Monday, December 28th, to the newspapers. It is signed by loyal Americans of German descent and addressed to the German people. It is a fine appeal and we hope that it may reach many of the people now under the Nazi heel in Germany and make them realize that there is faith in this country that some of the fine German qualities we knew in the past still exist among the people there.

In the Washington Post yesterday, there was an editorial addressed to the American people, which I hope will be widely read. It spoke of the fact that we had allowed mob violence to increase in two or three of our states, and one of our minority groups had been 5 times the victim of this type of mass murder.

It quoted Virginius Dabney, writing currently, and pointing out that three of these lynchings had occurred in a state where a man in this minority group had announced that he would run for office. The editorial is one that I think all of us should read and take to heart, for we can not be trusted to deal justly with the rest of the world if we do not deal justly at home.