In respect to the contrast between our telegraph system and that of Germany under this head of the interests of employees, I cannot do better than to quote the pregnant words of Professor Ely who has studied the German system in its home:

"Experienced and tried men, with comparatively short hours, are employed in Germany, while in the telegraph offices of this country one finds very young lads, and they are frequently overworked. The fact that so few mature men are found among them shows that they have no secure tenure of office and no permanent employment. One young generation of telegraph operators gives way to another. They are employed frequently in dark, dingy and ill-kept rooms. The contrast with the class of operators employed in a country like Germany and the neat and attractive offices found in that country is painful, and it is really a disgrace to our own country.""

The italics are mine. I underlined that sentence because it touches a truth of tremendous import. "One young generation of telegraph operators gives way to another." Do you know why? Do you understand the meaning of that fact? Think back over the evidence collected in this article, and you will see what it means. It means that the telegraph system in America is a great press in which the youth and energy and life of thousands of men and women are coined into gold for industrial aristocrats. It means that as each new generation comes along, the telegraph management takes as large a portion of it as may be wished, puts it into the great press, rapidly squeezes the youth and freshness and beauty out of it, the best years, too often all the years, out of it, throws it away as a cider maker rejects the juiceless pulp, and turns to replace it with new victims, rosy, plump, and hearty, from another unsuspecting generation. It means that a collosal business is conducted in the interests of a few capitalists regardless of the welfare of the multitudes who do the actual work. It means the oppression of labor, the overworking of employees, the appropriation by the master of all they produce beyond a bare subsistence the methods that slaveholders always follow, with the added viciousness of caring nothing for the life or health of the slaves because it costs the master nothing to replace them. Such is the meaning of our telegraph system on its working side-a perennial theft of youth and years, a systematic robbery of toil,-a meaning that ought to enlist every lover of manhood and justice in the cause of a National Telegraph.

(To be continued.)

50 The ARENA, December, '95, p. 51.

PLANETARY FREEBOOTING AND WORLD

POLICIES.

BY RICHARD J. HINTON

Great races have been great robbers, our own being no exception. Indeed, the Anglo-Saxon has been the champion bandit of the later centuries. Men shrug their shoulders and remark, "What has been will be." Rapine and robbery have marked the conflicts and indicated the catastrophes of all civilization. The martyrdom of Man has been an unceasing procession of horrors. Is there never to be a period of transfiguration-a lifting and remoulding of environment? Certainly there is not much now to indicate such changes, except that altrurian "cranks" are bolder and perhaps more numerous. Otherwise the horrors of Islamism, the reddened glare of past Roman marches, or the blackened embers of Spanish cruelty, with the grasping greed of Anglo-British statesmen and plunderers, fade into petty larceny and sneak thievery by the side and in the presence of the current planetary freebootage. That which is being planned seems likely to outrival for audacity in purpose and immorality in methods, the boldest dreams of conquering devastation that made drunken with blood and brutality, the mad ambition of an Alexander and the overpowering brigandage of a Napoleon!

The planetary robbery of our period fully befits the processes of the plutocratic policy that dictates its chief features. In the name of their god, Trade, John Bull and Herr Von Junker seize upon the larger part of the Dark Continent. Under the fasces of a republic, Chauvinism has been skilfully directed by the statesmanship of stockbrokerage, into avenues of plunder and channels of cheatery. France has stolen right and left in Asia, Africa, and the Indian Ocean. Everywhere, too, the temple has been made the plunderer's bazaar. The altar has sometimes served for a bargain counter, and its priests and missionaries have been efficient advance agents for Maxim guns and magazine rifles.

But John Bull, once the boldest of brigands, is now a

pattering fence playing the part of Fagin and seeking mainly to protect the plunder of the past. The Venezuelan braggadocio of Chamberlain and the Salisbury hectoring of the Turk on behalf of the Armenians, is part of the game to protect the East and hold Egypt. The Nemesis waits upon the "road to India!" Africa is used for a safety valve. The danger at home is in the discontent of those whom privilege steadily disinherits. Better for her that younger sons should be land marauders and mine robbers, against Kaffir and Boer, than remain at home to be Fabianized into socialism.

The German is a good trader, but a clumsy as well as brutal colonist.

France revels in buccaneering riot, bridling the dangerous temper by the discretion gained at Sedan and enforced in Paris. But this combination is fast making of her a fit ally of the crowned white terror, a servile serf to the bastard Byzantine pontiff and potentate whose ambition stretches dripping hands across two continents to find without open war the seat of a world's empire upon the shores of the Golden Horn, and the armed control of the planet's midoceanic waters!

Modern Russia is the most desperate and dangerous, then, of our planetary brigands. Her trumpets proclaim to European civilization the coming of Armageddon. She is strong enough to wait, and therein lies the secret of her terrible portents. Napoleon's prophecy, though belated, of Cossack or Republican, yet bids fair to become the living actuality. There is only one safe road out for Europe, and that is by way of a democracy founded on social equity, honest economies, and political justice. It must be moulded into a strong federation of republican states. It may be sooner than we now expect. The unexpected happens; the unforeseen often lifts the curtain of time. The womb of Russian statecraft is quickened by the desire to control the Asiatic Mongol and Turanian hordes and use them for its own purposes. It is a favorite sophism of the resplendent sciolists who seek to shape opinion through the press, to write of the northern empire as part of and not a menace to civilization and of its rulers as the protectors of peace. What Russia plays for is delay. What she proposes to achieve thereby is the control of continental Asia, free access to the sea by the Persian Gulf and the Pacific Ocean, thus flanking Great Britain, France (if need be), Spain, and Holland, in all their conquered realms in peninsular and island Asia. Constantinople can even wait for the comple

tion of the Siberian railroad. The Mediterranean will readily become a Russian sea, and Asia Minor will pass under the control of a Greek Catholic pope.

With China in its toils, the Asiatic steppes and ranges for the almost unknown (to Europe) fields of organizing activity, it is within the range of possibility by the closing dates of the nineteenth century that we shall hear the movements of armies vaster than those of Cyrus or Tamerlane, rushed by steam, directed by electricity, equipped with guns carrying high explosives, and armed with magazine rifles that slay at long range. The patience of the Slavonian peasant and the fatalistic endurance of the Asiatic nomad, will be trained into machines with German drill and precision, while led as furies of slaughter and overthrow by the successors of Ghourko and Skoboleff. The Greek presbyter who taught Alexander III and controls Nicholas the Second, spins a powerful web for the enmeshment of the world's forces. The bomb that destroyed Alexander II created a new situation. The Treaty of Stefano and the Berlin Congress made imperative for the new Byzantium propaganda, a strange and powerful policy of dissimulation and waiting. The Pope Sixtus of Russia sat behind the tutors and now fills the administrative desk of its orthodox church. Statecraft for ten years past has been directed to the gaining of time. All energies have been assiduously preparing for oppor 'tunity. Modern Europe knows less of Russian resources in men and money, in productiveness and staying force, to-day than it did when British and French guns thundered around Sebastopol. Opinion is in slavery. Intelligence seems broken and defeated. In religion and knowledge the fourteenth century and not the nineteenth rules in European Russia. The spirit of the Inquisition is enthroned. The only political church now existing as such, will have its apotheosis when the young czar is crowned in the Basilica of Moscow.

The revolution seems dead. Tolstoi alone, talks and-makes "shoes"! The leaders of nihilism are scattered. They have apparently no foothold at home. They have become, says Stepniak, "teachers of Europe." If so their lessons are meagre and show that the fountain of information is drying up. Are they ignorant or have pan Slavonian myths taken control, even of them? The world gets little evidence from that source, of the iron hand on the Russian Jew or protesting sectary. They tell little of the material progress making in Asia, or of the lax dealing with pagan and Mussulman by the same wily brain that drives the Jew

to emigration and persecutes the Slavonian heterodox into silence, exile, or imprisonment and poverty. They do not tell us of the enormous wealth created for the secret treasury of the imperial household and diverted from the open doors of the public exchequer to the direct and unrestrained control of the czar himself.

The problems of planetary freebooting and the politics thereof, have been craftily shifted from the Golden Horn to the Yellow Sea. Only for the fanatical folly and frenzy of the Turk it would have continued unbroken on that line. But if Russia can make a catspaw of Armenia, she will not fail to sacrifice the Armenians to even Kurdish barbarism. "No war" is the checkmate she plays, at present. The Mediterranean of the near future is the Pacific Ocean, and she aims, as the Romans did, to be its ruler. British India may be the Carthage, Japan the Greece and Macedonia, and China the Egypt of the mighty struggle that impends. The greatest of modern Russians, Alexander Herven, who in 1861, proclaimed in the Kolo-Kol (The Bell)—his London revolutionary organ-the emancipation of the Russian serfs or the destruction of the empire, gave to the Pacific the historical title I have mentioned. Herven, who was a political seer, declared in a novel published in the early fifties, that a great world-contest was to be fought over an attempt to control the Pacific Ocean in the interest of a Slavonian imperialism. Bismarck and Disraeli both comprehended, each for his own purposes, that the unlocking and controlling of China by Russian efforts, might justify not only the rolling up of the map of Asia from the British standpoint, but that it would tend strongly also to the obliteration of present European lines and influences. All of northern and central Asia in Russian hands, means very much more than an open winter port on the Pacific. The direction of China, be it open or "under the rose," by the czar's agents will prove a Greek chorus the old world over— a dread signal of fate to all who fancied themselves secure.

What is the interest of the United States in such possibilities? Have we no part or parcel with that wonderful island-race whose superb isolation-which, unlike that of their Chinese neighbors, was never stagnation-we broke down? Even on the baldest of needs and for self-protection there must in public opinion as crystallized into. formal national expression through the voice of Congress, be given a bold and dignified expression to wise policy and honorable comity. The cheap utterances and hints of a departing Russian diplomat, that fleets can lie in harbors to