terests of the smaller fry, always the ones to suffer most. It was characteristic of the Congress of 1878, that, in contrast to its two predecessors, it carefully avoided every larger issue, every humanitarian question, any attempt at building up the law of nations. It is true that the Peace Society presented a petition, but this was taken charge of by Bismarck, and naturally nothing more was heard of the matter.

The plenipotentiaries

slept while the Greeks were pleading the cause of their country. The Great Powers did not intend to allow their deliberations to be embarrassed by the presence, the prayers, or the protests of the small States. Chimerical schemes for perpetual peace-as illusory as these for perpetual motion -do not, it is true, deserve much encouragement. If the Congress gets to work with men of intellect, force and breed, insensible to popular clamor and ignorance (such as the shallow humor that decries diplomatists, just

The New Witness.

as these who have never encountered death or a settlement decry doctors and solicitors) we shall get peace assured for sixty years. That is enough for reasonable men; we cannot make peace a perpetual entail. To ensure against snap wars the safe thing is national service all round, without wrangling, and no possible exceptions. Those who serve in the place of honor with severe competitive head work, or on the ground of physical fitness, risk and courage, should get more voting power and less taxes. Conspiracies to enforce peace have one ending only, that of provoking war. The whole world bent exclusively on peace cannot operate or even prepare effectively against a single heavy weight intent upon war. If the experience of the present time has brought that home to England, as it has brought it home to the majority in Europe and America, the cause of humanity will at least have gained something.

Thomas Seccombe.

In the period before the war there was for America no social fact to compare in importance with the volume of the immigrant stream. Year by year the United States gave harborage to more than a million newcomersdrawn from every country and race in Europe. Many thousands of these, belonging mostly to the Mediterranean peoples, did not become American citizens. They went westward without intending to break away from their old homes. The vast majority of the immigrants, however, went with the purpose of remaining in the New World. The war checked, and in a short time practically stopped, the stream; and, as a consequence, American agriculture and industry, strained

to the utmost by the demand of a world in conflict, are suffering from a shortage of labor unexampled since the expansion which followed the Civil War. The first winter of the war was marked in the United States by widespread unemployment and by acute distress in all the large cities. During the past two years labor has grown increasingly scarce. The land and every trade are clamoring for men; and, as the war organization advances and the Military Service Law levies its toll upon the man-power of the country, the situation must increase in difficulty. In the North and Middle West the results are sufficiently noticeable. Organized labor becomes more powerful, and a great impetus is

given to the systematic Americanization of the foreign-born. In the South the results are even more momentous. They amount already to something that may not improbably be the beginning of a social revolution-for the Negroes are on the move.

The present northward exodus of colored people has its immediate occasion in the opportunities created by the stoppage of European immigration. But it has long been evident that the old order in the Southern States was approaching its end. Industrialism is gaining rapidly. Not only is the Cotton Belt producing varied crops, but it is in process of becoming one of the great food and cattle exporting regions of the world. The Negroes, moreover, are acquiring education, and no small proportion of them a share of the general prosperity. Before the present generation had passed away the old would in any case have been driven to change its inherited attitude towards the colored population; but we may assume that it would have done so with exceeding slowness if the war in Europe had not started a movement against which neither landowner nor capitalist can argue.

Until recently the Negro in the Northern States was, roughly speaking, restricted to certain occupations that are unskilled and outside the range of organized labor. Today he is being welcomed on the farms of New England and the Middle West and in the industrial centers, where hitherto the employer has not wanted him and the white workman has regarded him as a dangerous intruder. In Chicago, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, and many other cities large numbers of Negroes are found in factories and workshops where, until lately, the colored man was never admitted even as a visitor. This is especially true of the iron and steel works and the munition factories, while many thousands have

been absorbed by the railroads and street railway companies. The wildest statements as to the extent of the movement find currency in the American Press. The Department of Labor in Washington has been compiling information, but its conclusions are not yet available, and from other quarters trustworthy figures cannot be obtained. One association of colored people calculated that between September and April last over 308,000 had emigrated. Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois, a careful authority, gave in his monthly The Crisis (June), the conjecture that altogether about 250,000 colored workmen have left the South. As by this time a large proportion are settled with their families, Dr. Du Bois's estimate would seem to imply that the total may be over three-quarters of a million-including immense contingents from Georgia, Alabama and South Carolina. It is not difficult to understand the readiness of the large industrial corporations to recruit their labor in the South. The colored man has a standard of living lower than that of even the most depressed European worker; he is more easily managed; he is outside the scope of revolutionary propaganda; and the white trade unionist is, for the most part, hostile to him. On the other hand, however, his advent in numbers may be a great danger. The recent pitched battles in St. Louis have revealed the horrors that may, only too easily, be precipitated when the suspicion prevails that the employers are using colored labor to destroy the power of trade unionism.

The Southern newspapers provide evidence of the alarm which is felt throughout the Southern States, and particularly in the cotton region. Some of them, anxious to avoid a disagreeably obvious conclusion, contend that the cause of the migration is specific and temporary. If, they say,

there had been no floods last year, and if the boll weevil were not ravaging the cotton plantations, the Negroes would never have been induced to go North. They don't want more money if it means harder work; they need a soft climate; the relations in the South between the races were never so good as they are today. This is the orthodox line of argument pursued by the organs of the Old South, but it makes a feeble show against the testimony on the other side. The spokesmen of the Negro are unanimous. The colored people, they affirm, are migrating because the South has stolen their political rights and curtailed their civil rights, because it refuses common justice to the Negro and education to his children, because it segregates him in the cities, condemns him to the Jim Crow car, refuses to respect his property, and holds over him the ultimate terror of mob violence and Judge Lynch. The attraction, in a word, is irresistible: first, because of the almost unlimited opportunity offered by the North and West, and secondly, because migration is the best means of self-defense and, as the ablest of their leaders puts it, the most effective protest against Southern lynching, lawlessness and general devilry. Elsewhere Dr. Du Bois points out that after the war the demand for black workers in the North will continue, because not for a generation will immigration from Europe rise to appreciable figures. He adds:

There are not jobs for everybody; there is no demand for the lazy and casual; but trained, honest, colored laborers are welcome in the North at good wages, just as they are lynched in the South for impudence. Take your choice!

Here, as in regard to most of the problems touching his people, Dr. Du Bois takes the more downright and defiant position, while from Tuskegee, the in

stitution which carries on the tradition and spirit of Booker Washington, a different note is heard. "Come out from among them" is the cry of Dr. Du Bois; Tuskegee, on the contrary, is in effect the ally of those Southern authorities which are trying-by means of municipal ordinances or severe license fees-to restrain the Negro. Its argument is that the temptation from the North is overborne by the new opportunity offered by the South, for only there can the Negro be a landholder, and today he may become an owner of real estate "on practically self-imposed terms."

It may perhaps be assumed that educated American opinion, outside the Old South, rejoices over every influence which tends to raise the condition of the colored people; and, doubtless, the more optimistic would like to believe that, should the present movement continue unchecked for a few years, the obstinate and menacing racial problems of the United States will be greatly eased by the working of economic forces. One thing is beyond dispute: if the South is to hold the population without which, apparently, its immense potential resources cannot be developed, the Southern whites must abandon their traditional attitude and address themselves to the task of reconstructing their society upon a scheme which will admit the Negro to the full rights of citizenship. Meanwhile, it cannot be forgotten that for the Negro himself migration is not equivalent to liberation. Under existing conditions it involves increased congestion in the colored quarter of every large city, additional problems of sanitation and public health, and of administration in the schools, colleges, and military camps; while throwing upon organized labor, on a greatly extended scale, the task of finding a principle of harmony and co-operation between the manifold elements-An

The New Statesman.

democracy.

S. K. R.

When the late Professor Freeman said that a nation might still be in bondage though in possession of all the outward forms of freedom, he must have had in mind some such country as Prussia. There all the male inhabitants on reaching the age of twenty-five are entitled to vote in the election of delegates of the Lower House of the Landtag or Legislature; but the majority of the recipients of

German Emperor, May 4, 1891.

the suffrage receive through their enfranchisement neither power nor privilege. This arises from a unique method of voting, which renders Prussia proof against all the assaults of democracy. That is achieved by separating voters into three classes-a division which is made by taking the aggregate amount of the State taxes in each electoral district and dividing it into three equal parts. The first third

is paid by the highest taxpayers, the second third by the next highest, and the last third by the rest of the contributories. A tri-partite division having thus been made, the three classes elect the members of an Electoral College, which chooses the delegates of the Lower House. The thoroughly unrepresentative character of this proceeding becomes apparent when it is remembered that as regards the Electoral College some 260,000 wealthy taxpayers choose one-third, 870,000 taxpayers another third, and 6,500,000 the last third.

The result is that the 6,500,000 who stand for the great mass of the people are not represented at all, being outnumbered by a two-thirds majority. It is indeed conceivable that the whole of the tax included in the first class might in a particular district be paid by a single rich voter. In order to make this remarkable State arrangement perfectly clear, a concrete instance may be taken in respect of the Town Council of a great city where the principle just described is in operation though on a smaller scale. In Berlin, for example, not long before the war there were 931 voters of the first class, who paid 27,914,593 marks of the aggregate tax; 32,131 voters of the second group, who contributed 27,908,776 marks of the total liability; and 357,345 voters of the third category, who were responsible for 16,165,501 marks of the entire sum.

Of the representatives returned, onethird was chosen by the 931 voters, another third by the 32,131, and the last third by the 357,345. The outcome is that the business of the capital, with upwards of two million inhabitants, is in the hands of 33,062 citizens (the first and second classes together), who elected two-thirds of the Town Councillors. In Düsseldorf, to take another example, there were 62,443 voters at the election of Town Coun

cillors in 1910. The first class inIcluded 797 voters, the second 6,645, and the third 55,001. The result is that the 7,442 voters (the first and second classes combined) are in control of the civic government by a majority of two-thirds.

It may now be interesting to examine briefly the constitution of the Prussian Legislature and the character of its membership. The Landtag is composed of two Chambers-the Abgeordnetenhaus or Chamber of Delegates, described as the Lower House, and the Herrenhaus or House of Lords, which may be called the Upper

Chamber.

In the Lower House there are 443 members, among whom are 19 manufacturers, 10 merchants, seven labor men, and one bank director-that is to say, 37 delegates in all to speak for the commercial, mechanical, industrial and working-class interests of Prussia. The Upper Chamber, which is not elective, includes princes of the blood royal, descendants of the families of Hohenzollern-Hechingen and Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, chiefs of the territorial nobility, and burgomasters of the more important towns. There are also an indefinite number of persons nominated by the Emperor for life or for a limited period, with a contingent of those university professors whose teaching has made Germany the most materialistic and agnostic country in the world, and Berlin the most immoral and licentious capital in Europe. In this House of Lords, which is little else than a select Chamber packed with courtiers of the War Lord, there were recently among its 327 members three bankers, eight spokesmen of the mercantile and industrial classes, and one mechanic that is, 12 altogether, or less than 4 per cent to represent the financial, business and working-class concerns of the country. The executive government of Prussia is in the