Letters, May 10, 1943

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Printer v. President Sirs: TIME, April 19: "They listened when he said 'Los que no se obtiente por la buena es negativo' (That which is not obtained by good will is negative)." They probably raised their eyebrows too, if Avila Camacho ever said it that way. . . .

It would be: "Those which is not obtainted . . . etc." and I'll bet you a year's subscription to the Latin American edition that the President of Mexico didn't say that. . . .

W. F. BLACK Montreal, Que.

> No bet. TIME's tired printer slipped, misread Lo as Los and obtiene as obtiente.—ED.

World War I Cigarets

Sirs:

Your story about the mystery of cigarets [TIME, April 12] proves again that history repeats itself and the Quartermaster Corps is still the Quartermaster Corps. In World War I if you had no other way of gauging your proximity to the front line, you had only to observe what the locale was smoking.

If Egyptian Deities or Pall Mall, you were at a base port.

You were near Paris if they smoked Melachrinos—at the rail head, Camels.

And when you came upon Bull Durham labels you were damn near the front line.

FRAZIER FORMAN PETERS Warwick, N. Y.

Russia's Mumbo-Jumboism Sirs: Apropos your recent article on "Churches in Russia" (TIME, April 12) and particularly with regard to this quotation: "Most foreign observers . . . believe that the Kremlin is basically just as anti-religious as it ever was," I should like to offer a word of parenthetical comment. It is apparently little remembered that pre-revolution Russia's official religion — and consequently "religion" as the Russians understand the term — was about as unchristian a religion as any African mumbo-jumboism. In support of this I offer the following statements made by John MacMurray, eminent professor of moral philosophy at London University (in a review of Julius Hecker's Religion and Communism, in 1934): "I can come ... to only one conclusion and it is a conclusion that all true friends of religion will share — nearly all that religion has been, and has meant, in Russia ought to perish for ever from the face of the earth and from the memory of men." Does this explain the traditional bias of Russian Communist leaders against things religious? . . .

GEOFFREY H. JOHNSON

Toronto, Ont.