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ganized under a government. There is no way of winning a war against several hundred thousand more or less independent villages. Yet that is the fundamental condition in Bolshevik Russia to-day. All the ordinary rules of warfare are inapplicable. And because of this, the ordinary short cut of force instead of negotiation is inapplicable. The process of redintegration cannot be pushed fast because all the ties of habit upon which government rests are torn. It is not possible to bully Russia into order, nor to curse her into it. She will have to be drawn into it by reëstablishing the bonds of economic interdependence between her fragments and the organized society of the west.

To this end a suggestion might perhaps be offered. As a preliminary to the withdrawal of the Allied forces now operating in various parts of Russia, agreement should be reached both with the local soviets and with the Central Soviet at Moscow that certain ports of the Arctic, the Baltic, the Black Sea and the Pacific should be constituted international cities under the administration of bodies appointed by the League of Nations, and including for this purpose repre

sentative of the local and Central Soviets. The policing of these ports would be by naval forces including marines authorized by the League. In these ports economic commissions representing the League would be set up with authority to make trading agreements with any soviet, coöperative society, trade union or corporation that could give the necessary guarantees. The failure to uphold the guarantees would be followed by boycott of the particular offender. These commissions would sell the goods imported by and exported for an international trading corporation organized for the purpose by the nations having commercial resources for the enterprise. They could also distribute relief where the need existed without means of payment.

Now the raising of the standards of life resulting from this trading and from relief might gradually restore the contact of the Russian people with the outer world. And with contact would come that sense of the realities of government and business which is necessary to the revival of Russia. The relation would be delicate, and if mismanaged would certainly fail. If it were used to promote the counter-revolution, if

these commissions were made the centers of antisoviet intrigue, if in short the thing were done in bad faith, the experiment would certainly collapse. But if it were done humanely, tolerantly, generously, with a high sense that the Russian people too have a right to choose their own ways of life and obedience, it might well undermine the Bolshevist régime, and attach Soviet Russia to the world community. By permitting the members of the League actual observation of Russian affairs it might make unnecessary the spectacle of the United States Senate trying to inform itself about Russia by listening to tittletattle. By opening a commercial régime, it might avert the awkwardness of attempting diplomatic relations with a state that denies all the premises of international relationship. Finally it might prevent whatever danger there may be in the single exploitation of Russia by a resurrected Pan-Germany.

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THE TEST

HE three problems presented by Germany,

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Russia, and the intervening border states, do not exhaust the perplexities which victory has brought to the victors. One has only to mention Turkey and China. But these problems do indicate how pressing and practical is the need for an international organization by which the world can be administered into an era of stability. No one who has grasped those problems as they press upon mankind can persist in the idea that peace consists in signing a treaty, shaking hands with the Allies, and returning home to gaze in rapt admiration at the Monroe Doctrine. I know this feeling quite well. I have shared it, and have wondered whether anything could be done with that jangle of memories which so often seems to be the mind of Europe.

Perhaps nothing can be done. Perhaps the

memories and the appetites are too strong to save the world from a period of despair. Perhaps the men who are meeting so secretly in Paris are too much divided to use the instrument of coöperation which they have framed. We shall know soon whether they have made a peace upon which a League can operate. But they shall not be able to say that they failed because America failed them, and that the dishonor is hers. They shall not be able to claim that the peace of the world was shattered because the strongest and safest of all was too timid to help them. America's true policy in this day is to say to Europe: We shall stay with you and share the decisions of the future if you will make the peace we are asked to share, a peace that Europe will endure. But if you make it a peace that can be maintained only by the bayonet we shall leave you to the consequences and find our own security in this hemisphere. It will have to be a very bad peace indeed to justify any such action on our part, and nothing less than that would ever justify it.

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