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necessity of developing a "service of raw materials" (Rohstoffabteilung) which shall become the nucleus of an "Economic General Staff." Herr Rathenau candidly admits that he would like to call it, not "the service of raw materials," but "the service of war economics" (Kriegswirthschaftsabteilung). He is concerned that Germany should never again find herself "insufficiently prepared" for war. "All the future years of peace should be employed in this preparation, and that to the full height of our capacity." For the accomplishment of this purpose he has three principal measures to propose: first, the construction and maintenance of enormous stores, under Government supervision; secondly, an official statistical research into the whole resources of the Empire; thirdly, the preparation of a general plan of "economic mobilization," to be recast from time to time, according to circumstances.

Herr Rathenau works out this idea of economic mobilization in some detail. He calls for the preparation of "marching orders" in some such form as the following:

On the second day of mobilization, you will go to such and such a house in the Behrenstrasse; there you will assume the directorship of such and such an economic

war association which will at once be formed and the rules of which will be given to you. It will be for you to supervise the formation of this association, and to set up the various committees connected with it.

The same thing is to take place in the case of machine factories and other industrial enterprises. They too are to receive their instructions:

On the third day of mobilization you are to give up such and such a part of your factory; such and such a machine is to be placed at our disposal. At the same time you will

receive an order for so many articles of such and such a kind.

Everything concerning the allocation of labor, including the question of exemption from military service, must be decided in time of peace. At the same time a political-commercial department is to be engaged in the conclusion of agreements with neutral countries and the formation of organizations in those countries in order to thwart "violations by enemy countries of the laws relating to exports." Special bureaus are also to be set up permanently for the purpose of centralizing imports and exports during the and maintaining the rate of exchange. Finally, Herr Rathenau sagely remarks: "The question of after-war legislation will require very special attention, and I suppose that an Economic General Staff will be set up for the purpose of concerning itself actively in this field also."

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In the face of such preparations, and with such motives, on the part of the enemy, it surely behooves the Allies also to set aside everything which hinders the organization of their economic resources. In order that we may do this to the best advantage the consumer as well as the producer must be willing to co-operate. I know the attraction of cheapness; I know the satisfaction of "beating down" the price of a purchase. But there is no more absurd mistake which the consumer can make. To pay for any article what it is fairly worth is to take out an insurance against ever having to pay too much for it. We in France should have suffered less from the economic consequences of the war-and I suspect it is the same with you-if both our Government and our people had not helped to kill a number of our industries by permitting cheaper foreign products to oust them from our markets.

There is another matter which concerns us most closely, but which may have some lessons for our Allies, and that is the necessity to clear our minds of the spirit of petty economy. At the present time a debate is going on which seems to me to illustrate only too well the French attitude to business affairs. In December, 1914, the Government decided, and rightly, that the losses suffered by the invaded districts should be borne by the nation as a whole. We cannot yet estimate the amount of these losses, but I know that for Lille, Roubaix and Tourcoing alone they are reckoned at 900,000,000 francs. This is not only a matter of sentiment, though sentiment counts for much in this connection. It is obvious that the restoration of industry in these regions will be a most important means of alleviating the burden imposed by the re-establishment of the economic equilibrium. It is to our interest therefore to give generously and to give quickly. Yet what do we find? A fairly satisfactory settlement has been arrived at with regard to the reconstruction and re-equipment of the factories, but for over eighteen months a discussion has been raging on the question of raw materials. In Roubaix alone the Germans have seized raw wool to the value of 300,000,000 francs. The Government has offered to the manufacturers value of the wool at the date when it was seized. The manufacturers reply: "Yes, but that three hundred millions' worth of wool would now cost six hundred millions. If you give us only three hundred millions, we' shall have to restart our industry with only half the raw material we possessed in 1914. Our production will be fifty per cent less and we shall only be able to employ half the number of workpeople." And no agreement bas yet been reached.

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This is, as one of our great northern manufacturers has called it, "a policy of drop by drop." At the Paris Conference on June 17, 1916, our Allies proclaimed their willingness to share the cost of restoring the invaded districts, so as to revive their impaired economic powers. And now, when Great Britain, Russia and Italy declare themselves ready to share the burden with France and Belgium, the French Government is saying, "There is no need for us to take all that you offer us. We are so much afraid of giving one penny too much to one of the war victims." It is not in such a spirit of petty bargaining that the difficulties before us can be successfully encountered.

Short as is this sketch of future requirements, I hope I have made it clear that at the present moment there is no task more urgent, more acute, and I should like to add, none nobler, than that of devoting ourselves to the economic restoration of our country. But to fulfil this task we need to be deeply impressed with one fundamental necessity-the necessity of excluding, from our consideration of the economic problems of the future, the spirit of routine to which we were accustomed before the war. At this very moment, when the Socialists themselves begin to see that they have been the dupes of German Socialism and resign themselves little by little to the limitation of their international relations to those with comrades in the Allied countries, at the moment when the Allied Governments proclaim it to be a fundamental necessity for liberal Europe to develop a sort of economic federation with protectionist tendencies in order to protect itself against militarist Europe, there are, I am sorry to say, Frenchmen who dream of resuming, on the morrow of the war, their accustomed little trade, buying from the same

people, selling to the same clients. Let them beware! Should they persist in attempting to tread again the old The Quarterly Review.

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tracks they will surely suffer tional excommunication, and will find themselves ordered off the soil of France. André Lebon.

THE REVIVAL OF THE ARAB NATION.

Great events crowd upon us SO thickly in these days that we are apt to miss their full significance at the moment. It is for this reason, I suppose, that our operations in Mesopotamia and Palestine, with all they involve and portend, have attracted comparatively little attention in this country. Military experts and ministers have gone out of their way to insist that Turkey-in-Asia is, after all, only a side issue, and that we must be careful not to make too much of Sir Stanley Maude's brilliant achievement. One member of the Government in a public speech referred to the subject mainly, as it would seem, to impress upon his hearers that "it is a damned long way from Bagdad to Berlin."

It is; and no doubt we shall not crush the Prussian autocracy or choke the U-boats by victories upon the Tigris. Nevertheless, the advance of Maude's army up that river is much more than a mere local success. For my part, I believe that when the history of the world-war is written, with due regard to perspective, the Asiatic campaign will be deemed little inferior in importance to any other episode of the memorable spring of 1917. The Revolution in Russia, the German retirement from the Somme and the Aisne, the declaration of war by the United States, the coming of China into line with the Western Alliance-all these are world-shaking events. But so also is the expulsion of the Turk from the old capital of the Caliphs. For what it signifies is no less than the new birth of a nation; it implies the emancipation of a people

who once created great empires, who gave the light of religion to Asia, and that of learning and science to Europe.

The Arab race, long weakened, disinherited, and degraded by its political divisions and the brutal tyranny of the Turanian barbarians, is coming into touch with Western civilization again after centuries of isolation and neglect. And when this union is consummated great results may be expected to ensue. For the Arab intellect in the past has shown itself singularly responsive to external influences, and able to draw the best elements from any alien culture with which it is in close contact. From the Turk, indeed, it has gained nothing, for the Turk had no culture worthy of the name, and never attained excellence save in war and government, chiefly by forcible methods, and by arts he did not care to impart to his subject populations. But Persia, Greece, Rome, Byzantium, and Latin Christianity taught the Arabs much, and they proved themselves apt pupils.

"When they met Rome they produced Palmyra; when they met Byzantium they produced the brilliant Ommeyad civilization; when they absorbed Sassanian culture they produced Bagdad; when they invaded Spain they produced Cordova."* They built great cities as well as great States, so that the wastes of Irak, Mesopotamia, and the Syrian desert are strewn with the imposing remains of their temples, their palaces, their

*These words are taken from a brilliant and interesting article in The Times of February 20th, 1917, by a writer who is described, with evident justice, as "a distinguished authority on Oriental affairs."

theatres, their monumental tombs, their castles, their courts of justice, the ruins and remnants of a civilization that was for long the most elaborate and finished in all that part of the globe which lies between the Atlantic Ocean and the river-plains of China.

The history of the Arab Caliphate has never been adequately written for English readers, and its importance has been forgotten or ignored. Few of us remember that the Arabian Empire was in extent hardly less than that of Rome at its greatest expansion, and that it lasted longer than the realm of the Western Cæsars. For more than six centuries Arab sovereigns ruled over Nearer Asia, Northern Africa, and no inconsiderable portion of Europe, from the Upper Nile to the Black Sea and from the Persian Gulf to the Pyrenees. The Ommeyad, Abbasid, and Fatimite Caliphs were lords of Egypt, Tripoli, of Morocco and Spain, of Syria and Cilicia, of Iran and Khorassan; and if they had composed their dynastic quarrels, and kept their rebellious satraps and emirs in order, they might have mastered Italy and France as well, turned St. Peter's into a mosque, and set Moslem doctors to expound the Koran at Oxford.

They had their share of the vices and weaknesses of Oriental despotisms, and they fell victims at last to the barbarian mercenaries whose swords they hired. But they also revealed qualities which never have been so favorably exhibited by other Eastern governments. Where they conquered they knew how to establish a settled administration which did not rest entirely upon military power; they fostered agriculture, trade, manufactures, irrigation; they had good laws and good judges; they showed a high respect for art, learning, literature, science, and philosophy. They

were the inheritors of that ancient Semitic civilization, older than Christianity or Mohammedanism, older even than Rome and Greece, which, with its Hellenic and Iranian tincture, seemed at one time destined to prevail all round the Mediterranean lands and far beyond them.

Compared with the children of Ishmael the Mongol and Tartar raiders from the steppes are late-comers and interlopers in Southwestern Asia. In Anatolia and Cappadocia, until comparatively recent times, the rule of the Turks was at least tolerable; but in the Arab countries they have never been anything but plunderers and armed despots, who have turned some of the most potentially fertile regions of the earth into a wilderness, and left to desolation and decay the sites of some of its most famous cities. The cradle of the human race, the lands of the Assyrians, the Chaldeans, the Phoenicians, the Israelites, the great river deltas, the sun-kissed shores of the Red Sea, and the Eastern Mediterranean belong by every moral and historic right to the Semitic peoples. With them Islam was a religion that made for culture, commerce, and prosperity before all these were strangled by the hands of Mongol and Turanian conquerors. And as the result of this great war, which was intended to rivet upon Western Asia a militarism as deadening as that of the Sultan, and more formidable, Arabia will be released and revivified. Semitic Islam has revolted from the alien tyranny of Constantinople; an Arab king is installed at the seats of the Prophet; British arms are driving the Osmanli from Mesopotamia and Syria; and Arabian freedom is to be restored under British protection. It is something more than the dream of the Berlin financiers and railway promoters that the Anglo-Indian troops have shattered. They have opened

a new chapter in world-history, or turned back to an old one.

The importance of our successes in this region is quite understood by Turkey's Teutonic patrons, who recognize that their clients have sustained most disastrous reverses. Major Moraht* finds himself compelled to admire the energy and skill with which the Anglo-Indian army has been directed.

Bonar Law in the House of Commons not unfairly pointed out that the capture of Bagdad was the result of a series of brilliant operations by British and Indian troops. The English have with their usual stubbornness set themselves to restore the prestige which they had lost in Irak, and taken the means to do so from their remote base in India and their nearer one on the Persian Gulf. . . . It will not be explained till later why the Turkish Staff was not able to concentrate their strength on threatened Bagdad. Any criticism is superfluous at a time when we do not know all the details. But this much is already clear-that the operations of the English were carried out with particular energy. We have no reason to doubt Bonar Law's words, as they are proved by the success attained there. He said in the House of Commons that the Turks were vigorously pursued by the English, and that a large number of prisoners and war material had fallen into English hands. It is true that the Turks did not abandon their positions without fighting, but the English, nevertheless, succeeded in winning the very difficult passage over the Diala east of Bagdad. Apparently the Indian cavalry, which is being used as mounted infantry, has proved particularly useful in this region. .. The English had two objects to fulfil-to restore their prestige in the East and to secure the petroleum wells in Persia and Mesopotamia. They have attained both objects, and although the war in Mesopotamia is not yet decided, we *In the Berliner Tageblatt, March 16th.

LIVING AGE, VOL. VIII, No. 378.

must, if only in the interests of our Ally, earnestly hope that it will soon be possible to transform the situation in the East. We are also thinking of the danger which threatens our Turkish Ally in Syria if the English further extend their Al-Arish-Suez front into Palestine. Nor are we forgetting the political pressure which Great Britain is exerting on the more or less independent Arab chiefs. Now that the whole of Irak is in English hands, the sphere of influence of the Turks is considerably diminished. In spite of all assertions to the contrary, and in spite of all internal troubles, England still holds firm sway in Egypt, and her eyes are now looking towards the west coast of Arabia-the Hedjaz railway and the holy places.

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Sir Stanley Maude's well-conceived and admirably written proclamation. to the people of the Bagdad Vilayet will take rank as an historic document scarcely less memorable than the abdication manifesto of Tsar Nicholas II. It is the Charter of Freedom for the Arabic race. "Our armies," says the British commander, "do not come into your lands conquerors enemies, but as liberators." recalls the glories of Bagdad during the centuries when it was the capital of the Abbasid Caliphs. For a part of that time it was the most famous city of the world, with its two millions of inhabitants, its palaces, its gardens, its teeming warehouses and busy factories, its colleges and libraries, its poets and philosophers and mathematicians. In the days of HarunalRashid, and for two hundred years afterwards, Bagdad was to London and Paris what London and Paris are today to Sofia and Serajevo.

"The Bagdad of Harun-al-Rashid," says the writer already quoted, "was not a disorderly agglomeration of tortuous streets, picturesque ruins, pointed arches, slender minarets, ragged awnings, and crumbling walls.

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