dalous condition, if borne out by the facts, which brings shame to the cheeks of all Americans at home and unconcealable contempt to the lips of all the nations whom we are supposed to be saving from defeat and ruin.

There is more that the American people want to know: What was the ultimate reason for the rejection of the Lewis machine gun by our military bureaucrats, when more than seventy thousand of them are now being used effectively by the French, British, and Italian armies, in favor of the Browning gun, which has been demonstrated only by "wet-nurse" methods and has never yet been used on active service? Why has General Leonard Wood's official report upon our Atlantic coast defenses never been made public? Why not make it public immediately? Why did we have to send 200,000-(official correction 20,000, accepted)-20,000 gas masks to our Army in France and then bring them back in favor of better gas masks, when the satisfactory French and British models have been available from the beginning of the war? Why have we no American artillery in France, and when shall we have a quantity sufficient to protect our troops without stripping the French and British lines?

These are some of the questions plain matter-of-fact Americans are asking. As they pass from mouth to mouth across the

T

HIS letter came to my desk a few days ago from a member of the church:

I do not come to church to hear war sermons and Red Cross appeals. To my mind, the church has no business to preach about war, and if the women of the church attended to their homes they would be more Christian than going to Red Cross meetings. Neither do I think that the church is any place for flags. I will not come to your church any more.

Yours,

I felt very sorry about this letter, for I had great hopes of making out of the writer a good American and an energetic church worker. You see, I need men, for all my young men and some of the older ones have gone into the service of the country. The service has taken our best, and I am short-handed. But then, on the other hand, if my friend the writer, who is of German descent, could not stand the very mild exhortations which I have delivered to my people as to their duty to their country in this crisis, then perhaps we are better off without him.

I am serving a congregation which has a number of Germans in it, both American-born and a few foreign-born. In ordinary times I count that as a decided benefit to the church. The church in America should be as cosmopolitan as the Nation, and the representative American church is that which is composed of many nationalities. But since the beginning of the war the presence of Germans in the congregation has been somewhat of an embarrassment and sometimes a decided detriment to the spiritual life of the church.

The German as I have known him in the church is not a spiritual-minded person. Many of the women have a devout, simple faith, but the men are apt to look upon church member ship more as a duty which they owe to their families, and sometimes in the nature of an insurance for the future life. Seldom do the men become active in religious work. With them it is each man for himself, and the devil take the hindmost.

After the beginning of the European war I felt it incumbent upon me to state to the congregation my attitude, and what I believed to be the attitude of Christian civilization, and what, considering the issues involved, must be the attitude of Christian and democratic America. This was taken exception to by a number of my German parishioners. When authentic stories of the atrocities and frightfulness practiced by the German

"Wet-nurse" is a technical or colloquial term employed by army men to describe the tests of a gun in the arsenal or on the proving-grounds under the special direction of the inventor or promoter.-THE EDITORS.

army began to come to us, I was surprised to find men of Amer ican birth and education, but of German descent, whom I had looked upon as men of kindly feelings and of Christian disposi tion, justify every German atrocity, and yet condemn the United States in unmeasured terms for carrying on any trade with the Allies. The climax came when, after the sinking of the Lusi tania, I heard one of my church board, in conversation with a number of other men in the church vestibule after service, declare that it served America right for aiding the Allies with munitions and for presuning to criticise the war aims of Germany. His resignation from the church board was immediately requested by the rest of the members, and I did not hesitate to sign that request.

When the United States entered the war, which I felt was inevitable from the very beginning, we at once established an active Red Cross auxiliary at the church. This auxiliary has done excellent work and has received commendation from headquarters both for the amount and the excellence of its output. Several of the most active women in this auxiliary are of German descent. They are giving at least two days a week to the work, and also have spared neither time nor trouble to secure a large membership for the Red Cross. But there are several others who have resented deeply every reference to the Red Cross made from the pulpit, who would not give a cent to the work, and who were active in circulating stories which have been started by German sympathizers concerning mismanage ment and misappropriation of materials manufactured by the Red Cross auxiliaries. The story of the sweater with the tendollar bill hidden in the seam, a very silly story at the best, with other similar tales, went through the congregation, until I found it necessary to speak of the matter from the pulpit and to say that henceforth people would be requested to cite their authority for the stories which they told. Red Cross posters on our announcement board were several times disfigured or torn down, and we found in two cases that German sympathizers had paid boys to do this.

Almost without exception the young men who are in the service from this church are enlisted men. I am free to acknowl edge that the attitude of their pastor toward the war may have had considerable influence upon them, but I think that the chief reason was that here was a group of loyal and patriotic Amer ican young men, and before the draft ever came into operation almost every young man in the congregation had enlisted. We have at present one man in Camp Meade, we have several at

Camp Hancock, some in the Regular Army, three or four in the Navy, and a good representation in France.

One fine young fellow whom I received into the church about three years ago enlisted early last spring. He is only eighteen years old. I did not know anything about his enlistment until he appeared in uniform. His two sisters were also members of the church, and I began to note their absence from our services. I went to the house to ascertain what the difficulty might be, and also to get their brother's camp address. He had been sent to one of the Southern camps. The parents are very German, and the sisters, while not able to speak a word of German, are strong German sympathizers. I was met with a tirade of indignation. It was my fault and the fault of my church board that their brother had enlisted, and we would be held responsible for his safety until he returned home discharged from the service. I have since ascertained that his parents have been trying to use the influence of German-American politicians to get the boy sent home on the basis of any excuse which might prove effective

To offset the case cited I would refer to two excellent young men both of whom are sergeants at Camp Hancock. Their parents were born in Germany. There are four sons in the family, and the two oldest enlisted soon after the United States declared war. They were recently home on a furlough, and the German parents were prouder of their two soldier boys in O. D. than if they had the highest decorations of the German Emperor.

One can readily understand the difficulties which are encountered in equipping our Army and Navy when he observes what goes on in a comparatively small circle of people, such as a congregation. Two men who are cloth manufacturers sought and received a large contract from the Government for cloth for uniforms. Then they began to find all sorts of difficulties in their way. They claimed that it had been impossible for them to get wool, but that they expected a shipment soon. Then the necessary dyes could not be got; and when, with the help of the Government, these difficulties were overcome, a strike occurred in the mill which held up the work two months longer. The strike was caused by a cut in wages which the GermanAmerican owners of the mill claimed was necessary because of the high cost of materials. The same scheme is being worked

all over the country, and the fact that many of our boys have been without overcoats has not been so much due to official inefficiency as to the constant effort of the enemy in our midst to cause delays and hamper production wherever possible.

Many attempts have been made by men and women to change my attitude toward Germany and my views upon the war. One woman in my congregation, who is American-born, but who was married to a rather well known German who died a few years ago, used every opportunity when I went to her house or when we met elsewhere to sing the praises of everything German, and to enlarge on the kindliness and Christian qualities of the Germans, and the superiority of German Kultur to every thing American. America was crude and "unkultured" (thank the Lord!), and lacked appreciation of the aims and aspirations of the German nation. She was suspiciously insistent in her propaganda. When, a little later, there was considerable trouble about certain interned German-ships in the vicinity, this woman disappeared from the city, and I have not seen her since.

That German propaganda in the United States is not a recent thing was very evident to me. Long before there was any thought of war among us I heard it continually dinned into the ears of the church-going public by clergymen of German descent that we must go to Germany for a purer doctrine, a deeper scholarship, and more efficient methods of Christian work. All that Protestants possess of religious life and devotion was supposed to come from there, and the principles of Protestantism had only been distorted in the too free atmosphere of America. I was blind to the meaning of this religious propaganda until after the war broke out and the plea was made that Christian America should sympathize with ultra-Christian Germany.

My patriotism may be of quite a pronounced type. So, I hope, is my religion. And patriotism for such a country as ours I somehow cannot dissociate from my religion. My business is to fight the devil, and I have never met him so clearly in the open as in this war, and therefore we should fight him in the open. He is our enemy, and I must fight those who are giving aid and comfort to the enemy whether they are in the church or elsewhere.

can be silhouetted.

The East Side is more of a state of mind than even Boston, to which this term was first applied. Externally it is a chain of tenements. Its streets are black with men, women, and children. Many of its thoroughfares are packed with push-carts. Behind them stand the picturesque peddlers whose shouts, siren-like, serve to attract the beshawled housewife to the wares piled high for her scrutiny and discriminating purchase.

Superficial journalists have exploited the picturesqueness of the East Side. Reformers have been moved by the challenge of its sordid environment. Externally the East Side is as ugly as its soul is fascinating.

In the whole neighborhood there is no colony of immigrants which can show such a rich and variegated life of the spirit as that of the Russian Jewish immigrants. They support five daily newspapers printed in Yiddish, with a circulation of over three hundred and fifty thousand, and read by many more. The Jewish life of the world is mirrored in this press. The international mind is popularized by the agile-minded Jewish journalists, and the news is frequently colored by the headline methods of the American popular dailies. They support many serious weeklies, monthlies, and even a weekly of biting Jewish satire and humor, all printed in the common tongue of the quarter. There is scarcely a school of religious, social, or economic thought unrepresented on the East Side. Orthodox synagogues and small congregations that conserve the religious traditions of the Jews are, outwardly at least, associating with radica! soci

for the aged, are among the many other visible incorporations of popular aspirations.

The tone of this restless spiritual life of the East Side is supplied by the vigorous Jewish labor movement. The unions of Jewish workers are no mere trade organizations for higher wages and better living conditions. They supply the outlet for that striving which bread alone cannot feed.

The tragedy of the great war has acted as an international catharsis purifying the souls of many and liberating human sympathy on a most unprecedented scale. The heart of the Jewish worker has been touched by the affliction of his flesh and blood throughout the war zones. He has given generously and with sacrifice of his small means to relieve the sufferers. But the vision of the men who make up the Jewish proletariat includes the brotherhood of the workers, and mere relief, though necessary, does not appeal either to their imaginations or their minds. They see in the outcome of the world war a realization of their dreams of internationalism-a federation of free peoples.

Therefore, while American Jewry was raging with controversy over the calling of an American Jewish congress which would represent American Jewish opinion respecting the removal of Jewish civil and political disabilities at the final peace conferences of the belligerent nations, and whether it should or should not advocate the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, the Jewish workmen of America organized a National Committee of Jewish Workmen on Jewish Rights. The freedom of the

Jews throughout the world concerned them even more than Palestine. In their reaction as to Jewish questions the Jewish workers are internationally minded.

One of the first things undertaken by the National Committee was the publication of their Black Book of Jewish Suffering, which set forth a series of acts of cruelty deliberately committed by the military staff, the bureaucracy, and the tools of the Romanoff régime against Jews who were giving their lives for the Russia which persecuted them. As chairman of their Committee on Publication I submitted the Black Book to the Convention of the National Committee of Jewish Workmen on Jewish Rights at Beethoven Hall, New York City, March 25, 1917. Five hundred thousand Jewish workmen of the United States were represented by delegates that Sunday morning.

In presenting the book I tried to enlist the support of the radical workers for the war, and appealed to the internationalism of the protelariat by declaring that the dream of Marx and Lassalle was coming true. It had become a practical world issue, and the President of the United States was sponsoring the necessity for internationalism as the only basis for a permanent

peace.

So long as I dwelt upon internationalism there was warm response. But when support of the war was urged the response was not so enthusiastic. The ordeal was passed with more subjective satisfaction than applause.

Upon the platform sat a tall, broad-shouldered, shabbily dressed, and gaunt figure. His friends say that he is under forty, but his appearance, with the lines of suffering in his face, was that of a man past fifty. He had keen and blazing eyes. He looked unshaven and his hair was disheveled. He was a picture of the disinherited intellectual-a fighting agitator who had neither the means nor the inclination to concern himself with his appearance.

The chairman introduced him-Comrade Trotsky. When he rose, the Convention applauded him vigorously. They recognized him as one of their own.

Trotsky's manner of speaking was unlike the manner of the conventional agitator. He was calm, sincere, and undramatic. His sharp, metallic voice penetrated the hall without exertion and carried conviction.

Unfortunately, I could not understand what he was saying, for he spoke in Russian. But the drift of his speech became plain with the help of a friend who sat next to me. His person ality was magnetic. Every little while the audience chuckled or roared with laughter at a sally or a satirical reference to the capitalistic war for humanity.

I remember vividly my friend's translation. Trotsky depicted

the world war as the clash of capitalistic states in their race for world empire. He referred to Morgan of the United States, Bleichroeder of Germany, and the Rothschilds of France and England as capitalists who were accidentally Americans, Germans, French, or English. If shaken in a hat and thrown into other countries, they would take the other side with the same degree of patriotism.

He contrasted the conflict of interests of the capitalistic states with the common interests of the workers of the world, and pointed out that there was only one war in which the workers of all lands were concerned--the class struggle; and only enemy-capitalism.

He appealed to the workers to remain steadfast to their internationalism, and to continue their enthusiasm for the only tactics which will realize it-the revolution of the workers of the world.

While in New York Trotsky lived in a Bronx flat with his wife and two children. He earned a meager living by lecturing to Socialist locals and writing for a Russian radical paper, the "Novy Mir," in its dingy editorial rooms on St. Mark's Place.

Trotsky was born in a little Jewish colony in the Province of Kerson (Little Russia). He received his education at the gymnasium of Tchnernigov, and probably went to the University. though he was never graduated. He was, like other Russian students, early engrossed in revolutionary activities. He became prominent in the Revolution of 1905 as president of the first Council of Workmen's Delegates at Petrograd.

With the failure of the 1905 revolution, Leon Braunsteinfor that is his real name-was arrested, tried, convicted, and exiled for life to Siberia. Like other revolutionists, he made a daring escape from Siberia, and it is said that he accomplished it by the use of the passport of his jailer, whose name, Trotsky, he also assumed, and whom he sufficiently resembled to make such a method successful.

He lived the life of a revolutionary outcast in some of the leading capitals of Europe. Berlin, Vienna, London, Paris, and Madrid he knew. Like other revolutionists, he found refuge in Switzerland.

Both in his point of view and in his life experience the world is his country. He displays in all his writing a familiarity with the latest Socialist thought of Europe and a knowledge of Socialist and radical European leaders which come from close personal association.

He arrived in this country in 1916, and received a warm reception from his East Side comrades, who were accustomed to welcome and help revolutionary outcasts. The East Side has been a sanctuary for many of the men and women who

He has carried out this function in Brest-Litovsk with a master hand and bared the "trickery, cheating, and knavery of the Teuton diplomats to the world.

Trotsky is endowed with a scalpel-like critical faculty schooled by years of revolutionary activity and study of Socialist literature. He is typical of a class of European Socialist journalists who have been trained to a life of critique.

Temperamentally he is like those brilliant Jewish labor leaders I have known on the East Side whose minds require the stimulus of a strike to bring out their resourcefulness and their ingenious fighting tactics which have won many a hardfought battle for the organized workers.

Trotsky's remarks to the Allies and the Central Powers have reminded me at times of addresses I have heard East Side labor leaders make to garment manufacturers. They show the same nerve, the same subtle jockeying for position.

His publication of the secret treaties was such a strike stroke, and it answered the demands of the Russian soldiers who were told by the German soldiers with whom they fraternized on the east front that the Allies' aims were imperialistic. "If you want proof, ask your representatives at Petrograd to publish the secret treaties. They will convince you." When the German soldiers abandoned fighting, they were sowing the seeds of German propaganda. The literal-minded Russian soldier said, It is not true. We shall ask our Government." And so they sent a committee to Petrograd. The publication of the treaties was Trotsky's reply to the demand of Russian public opinion. It also answered the demand of liberal world opinion and brought forth a definite statement of our democratic war aims, which Kerensky's milder methods of importunate appeal and good manners could not achieve.

Russia is a land of intellectual contrastspeasants with "literal minds at the bottom, with a stratum of sensitive intellectuals who are familiar with the last word in scientific, economic, and sociological thought at the top, many of whom also have “literal minds.'

Whether Russia can survive the Bolsheviki only time will tell. But in the meantime they have contributed to the cause of open diplomacy by baring the trickery and the annexationist designs of Prussian Junkerdom, masquerading under the formula of "no annexations and no indemnities." They have heartened the liberals of the world, and made a more definite formulation of the Allies' war aims along democratic lines inevitable. Trotsky's internationalism is rooted in economic determinism. The world war, according to Socialist theory, represents the collapse of the capitalistic states in their economic rivalry for world markets. To some of us this theory does not sufficiently take into account complicated race, historical, moral, and psychological factors, which Socialists dismiss with their well-worn word, "ideology." The internationalism Trotsky represents can be achieved only by a world revolt of the proletariat. Trotsky

hopes to stimulate this revolt by Russian propaganda among the German soldiers. He has the abiding faith of revolutionists in the force of the revolutionary idea.

That Trotsky is pro-German nobody familiar with the history of the persecution by the Prussian state of the Russian revolutionists can believe. The Hohenzollerns faithfully served the Romanoffs in hounding those pioneers of Russian freedom. The colony of Russian students who lived in Berlin and eagerly drank from the well-springs of German scholarship there was constantly reminded of the kinship between Russian and Prussian autocracy when scores of their number were driven from Germany at a moment's notice at the behest of the Russian secret police. If American journalists were only slightly familiar with the history of Prussian persecution of Russian revolutionaries like Trotsky, they would not describe him as pro-Germanaside from the theoretical impossibility of the position--because of his revolutionary and internationalist doctrines.

But Trotsky perhaps overestimates the effect of revolutionary propaganda upon the German people under the spell of Prussianism. German social democracy, the cradle of theoretical revolutionary Socialism, has itself become Prussianized. It is in action and tactics the least revolutionary of Socialist parties. I am reminded of a statement which I heard the late Professor Gustav Schmoller, of Berlin University, make in the semester of 1904. In the concluding lecture of his course on "The Class Struggle in History" he said: "Chancellor von Bülow told me that the existence of the Social Democratic party in Germany is fortunate for the monarchical state because it provides us with a disciplined proletariat." How prophetic! In 1914 the Social Democratic party of Germany, departing from international traditions, voted for the war credits and deserted its proletarian brothers of France, England, and Russia. It was truly the act of a "disciplined proletariat."

Can Trotsky undermine the discipline by the naïve, sincere propaganda of Russian peasants and revolutionary soldiers? Can fraternization and non-resistance break the German war machine? Or is he playing with fire? Some of us are skeptical. In the meantime the Bolsheviki have imprisoned Bourtzeff, the consecrated historian and sleuth of the Russian Revolution. Their mob has murdered some of free Russia's choicest spirits and in the name of Russian public opinion, of which they are the arbitrary interpreters, they are employing autocratic methods against which revolutionists fought and bled. In their fear of a counter-revolution and bourgeois government they give the illusion of a strong government by surface acts of ruthless brutality violative of elementary democratic principles.

A quality of incrusted prejudice against the possessing classes permeates the spirit of the Bolsheviki agitator, even though he explains class exploitation in the impersonal terms of his materialistic conception of history..

Those radicals whom America harbored from persecution, and who returned to Russia after the Revolution, denouncing our country as the land of plutocracy and industrial exploita tion, played into the hands of the German propaganda.

They do not represent the mass of the East Side people, nor even the majority of Russian revolutionists, like Kaplan, who also believed in an international federation of free peopleseven as the Socialists conceive it.

Their estimate of America's role in the world war betrays the limitation of minds that think solely in terms of a system, and of those who do not recognize that idealism takes many forms and has a varied expression.

The Bolsheviki of all lands may serve a useful dynamic function in times of storm and stress. Even in Russia they are a temporary phenomenon, a product of anarchy incident to every profound revolutionary movement. But they are not the ones to build, brick upon brick, the new social structure. This is America's lesson to the Bolsheviki wherever they may be, in Russia or on the East Side of New York.

Through the seething life of the East Side Léon Trotsky passed like hundreds of other exiles who made temporary use of the refuge this country afforded them. Citizens of the world, they let fall their messages like plumage from a bird's wing, and passed on. No one thought, and least of all those who knew him closest, that he was destined to become a world figure in a world tragedy.