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February and on the 26th of February. Our object now, as then, is to vindicate the principles of peace and justice in the life of the world as against selfish and autocratic power and to set up amongst the really free and self-governed peoples of the world such a concert of purpose and of action as will henceforth insure the observance of those principles.

Neutrality is no longer feasible or desirable where the peace of the world is involved and the freedom of its peoples, and the menace to that peace and freedom lies in the existence of autocratic governments backed by organized force, which is controlled wholly by their will, not by the will of their people. We have seen the last of neutrality in such circumstances.

We are at the beginning of an age in which it will be insisted that the same standards of conduct and of responsibility for wrong done shall be observed among nations and their governments that are observed among the individual citizens of civilized states.

know that in such a Government, following such methods, we can never have a friend; and that in the presence of its organized power, always lying in wait to accomplish we know not what purpose, there can be no assured security for the democratic governments of the world.

We are now about to accept gauge of battle with this natural foe to liberty, and shall, if necessary, spend the whole force of the nation to check and nullify its pretensions and its power. We are glad, now that we see the facts with no veil of false pretense about them, to fight thus for the ultimate peace of the world and for the liberation of its peoples-the German people included-for the rights of nations great and small and the privilege of men everywhere to choose their way of life and of obedience.

HE world must be made safe for democracy. Its peace must

WE have no quarrel with the German people. We have no feels

E have no quarrel with the German people. We have no feel- dominion. We seek no indemnities for ourselves, no material com

not upon their impulse that their Government acted in entering this war. It was not with their previous knowledge or approval. It was a war determined upon as wars used to be determined upon in the old, unhappy days when peoples were nowhere consulted by their rulers and wars were provoked and waged in the interest of dynasties or of little groups of ambitious men who were accustomed to use their fellow men as pawns and tools. Self-governed nations do not fill their neighbor states with spies or set the course of intrigue to bring about some critical posture of affairs which will give them an opportunity to strike and make conquest. Such designs can be successfully worked only under cover and where no one has the right to ask questions.

Cunningly contrived plans of deception or aggression, carried, it may be, from generation to generation, can be worked out and kept from the light only within the privacy of courts or behind the carefully guarded confidences of a narrow and privileged class. They are happily impossible where public opinion commands and insists upon full information concerning all the nation's affairs. A steadfast concert for peace can never be maintained except by a partnership of democratic nations. No autocratic government could be trusted to keep faith within it or observe its covenants. It must be a league of honor, a partnership of opinion. Intrigue would eat its vitals away, the plottings of inner circles would be a corruption seated at its very heart. Only free peoples who could plan what they would and render account to no one can hold their purpose and their honor steady to a common end and prefer the interests of mankind to any narrow interest of their own.

Does not every American feel that assurance has been added to our hope for the future peace of the world by the wonderful and heartening things that have been happening within the last few weeks in Russia?

Russia was known by those who knew it best to have been always in fact democratic at heart, in all the vital habits of her thought, in all the intimate relationships of her people that spoke their natural instinct, their habitual attitude toward life.

Autocracy that crowned the summit of her political structure, long as it has stood and terrible as was the reality of its power, was not in fact Russian in origin, in character or purpose, and now it has been shaken and the great, generous Russian people have been added in all their native majesty and might to the forces that are fighting for freedom in the world, for justice and for peace.

Here is a fit partner for a league of honor.

One of the things that has served to convince us that the Prussian autocracy was not and could never be our friend is that from the very outset of the present war it has filled our unsuspecting communities and even our offices of government with spies and set criminal intrigues everywhere afoot against our national unity of council, our peace within and without, our industries and our

commerce.

Indeed it is now evident that its spies were here even before the war began, and it is unhappily not a matter of conjecture but a fact proved in our courts of justice that the intrigues which have more than once come perilously near to disturbing the peace and dislocating the industries of the country have been carried on at the instigation, with the support, and even under the personal direction of official agents of the Imperial Government accredited to the Government of the United States.

Even in checking these things and trying to extirpate them we have sought to put the most generous interpretation possible upon them because we knew that their source lay, not in any hostile feeling or purpose of the German people toward us (who were, no doubt, as ignorant of them as we ourselves were) but only in the selfish designs of a Government that did what it pleased and told its people nothing. But they have played their part in serving to convince us at last that that Government entertains no real friendship for us and means to act against our peace and security at its convenience. That it means to stir up enemies against us at our very doors the intercepted note to the German Minister at Mexico City is eloquent evidence.

We are accepting this challenge of hostile purpose because we

We have no selfish ends to serve. We desire no conquest. no pensation for the sacrifices we shall freely make. We are but one of the champions of the rights of mankind. We shall be satisfied when those rights have been made as secure as the faith and the freedom of the nation can make them.

Just because we fight without rancour and without selfish objects, seeking nothing for ourselves but what we shall wish to share with all free peoples, we shall, I feel confident, conduct our operations as belligerents without passion and ourselves observe with proud punctilio the principles of right and of fair play we profess to be fighting for.

I have said nothing of the governments allied with the Imperial Government of Germany because they have not made war upon us or challenged us to defend our right and our honor.

The Austro-Hungarian Government has, indeed, avowed its unequalified indorsement and acceptance of the reckless and lawless submarine warfare adopted now without disguise by the Imperial Government, and it has therefore not been possible for this Government to receive Count Tarnowski, the Ambassador recently accredited to this Government by the Imperial and Royal Government of Austria-Hungary; but that Government has not actually engaged in warfare against citizens of the United States on the seas, and I take the liberty, for the present at least, of postponing a discussion of our relations with the authorities at Vienna.

We enter this war only where we are clearly forced into it because there are no other means of defending our rights.

It will be all the easier for us to conduct ourselves as belligerents in a high spirit of right and fairness because we act without animus, not in enmity toward a people or with the desire to bring any injury or disadvantage upon them, but only in armed opposition to an irresponsible government which has thrown aside all considerations of humanity and of right and is running amuck. We are, let me say again, the sincere friends of the German people, and shall desire nothing so much as the early reëstablishment of intimate relations of mutual advantage between ushowever hard it may be for them, for the time being, to believe that this is spoken from our hearts.

We have borne with their present Government thru all these bitter months because of that friendship-exercizing a patience and forbearance which would otherwise have been impossible. We shall, happily, still have an opportunity to prove that friendship in our daily attitude and actions toward the millions of men and women of German birth and native sympathy who live amongst us and share our life, and we shall be proud to prove it toward all who are in fact loyal to their neighbors and to the Government in the hour of test. They are, most of them, as true and loyal Americans as if they had never known any other fealty or allegiance. They will be prompt to stand with us in rebuking and restraining the few who may be of a different mind and purpose.

If there should be disloyalty, it will be dealt with with a firm hand of stern repression; but, if it lifts its head at all, it will lift it only here and there and without countenance except from a lawless and malignant few.

It is a distressing and oppressive duty, gentlemen of the Congress, which I have performed in thus addressing you. There are, it may be. many months of fiery trial and sacrifice ahead of us. It is a fearful thing to lead this great peaceful people into war, into the most terrible and disastrous of all wars, civilization itself seeming to be in the balance. But the right is more precious than peace, and we shall fight for the things which we have always carried nearest our hearts-for democracy, for the right of those who submit to authority to have a voice in their own governments, for the rights and liberties of small nations, for a universal dominion of right by such a concert of free peoples as shall bring peace and safety to all nations and make the world itslef at last free.

To such a task we can dedicate our lives and our fortunes, everything that we are and everything that we have, with the pride of those who know that the day has come when America is privileged to spend her blood and her might for the principles that gave her birth and happiness and the peace which she has treasured. God help her, she can do no other.

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WAR AS AN INDUSTRY

HREE years of war have educated the American people to its meaning. We know that war is no longer, if indeed it ever was, an affair of young men with uniforms and rifles going out to shoot the enemy while the rest of the nation carried on "business as usual" and applauded the soldiers on their return. It was Krupp's factories and not the Kaiser's mailed fist or "shining armor" that won the first Belgian campaign. It was the train dispatcher and the maker of railroad supplies that defeated the Russians. It was the two million men and women in the British munitions factories that compelled the German retreat in the west. Even the men actually in the war zone follow the most varied and specialized occupations. He who says "soldier" may mean by the term baker, lumberman, dentist, blacksmith, engineer, electrician, musician, chemist or mechanician. The man in the front trenches is the apex of a great industrial pyramid which includes nearly every trade and occupation known to mankind, with the exception of a few that minister to the luxuries of peace times.

The moral of this for the people of the United States is that we should never confront another war either in the state of unpreparedness which is represented by a small volunteer army or only half-prepared, with compulsory service for the army and no organization of war industry. We must make universal service a reality as well as a name. When the time comes that the other nations of the world will consent with us to a general disarmament this period of training may be devoted to some peaceful service to the community, such as was suggested by that far-sighted American philosopher, the late William James, in his "Moral Equivalent of War." We trust that the necessity for the individual nation to organize its citizenry for the common defense will become as obsolete under international federation as the sheriff's posse has become in cities whose peace is safeguarded by a good police force. But so long as there exists in the world a military menace to our national liberties every one who shares the privileges of American citizenship ought to be taught some useful part in the great industry of war.

Of course the acquirement of a war technic will take a certain amount of time and absorb a certain fraction of the productive energy of the nation. But as some counterbalance to this we must reckon the cost of economic disorganization on the eve of battle. The transition from a peace basis to a war basis at present is a frightful waste not of money only but of time and human ability as well. Thousands of men and women are thrown into the ranks of the unemployed by the failure of their businesses and yet no place has been made ready for them in the industries of war. Skilled artizans and farmers, just the men to feel first the impulse of patriotism, enlist in the army while the fields go untilled and the men at the front curse the lack of ammunition which prolongs the agony of the campaign. New fleets of merchant shipping are built and experienced sailors cannot be found to man them. Coal miners go on strike for double wages, confident that their places cannot be filled. The liquor trade and other parasitic businesses flourish, and the worst class of slackers, the wasters, keep servants and tradesmen busy ministering to their pleasures while the army is short of the most elementary necessities and the poor in the great cities are face to face with famine. All this is true even in Germany, the land which claims a monopoly of efficiency.

The needs of war time may be reduced to five: men to fight at the front; men and women to supply their immediate needs or to make the tools of war; men and women

to care for the needs of the civilian community; men and women to care for transportation, and men and women to "tide over" the enterprizes of peace until the end of the war. All persons in any way capable of productive effort should be enlisted in one of these five national services from the instant war is declared and it should be the primary duty of the national Government to preserve a due balance among them. The first class consists of all the physically sound young men whose civilian work can be taken over by others during the war without economic loss. Ordinary military training should be given to all persons in this group.

The teaching of war technic to the other groups is still to be developed. So far as possible it should be in line with the chosen occupation of the individual, but it might well be given in summer camps or university extension classes and, of course, in schools and colleges, so that the feeling of comradeship and patriotic coöperation might be emphasized as strongly as in the regular military service. Large factories, manufacturing and electrical establishments in particular, would perform a great patriotic service by giving facilities for a few weeks' training each year at the plant in the application of mechanical, chemical and electrical processes to the special needs of war. All agricultural schools should give a course on the proper balance of crops with each other and with live stock when there is a large standing army to be fed according to the standard diet provided by the Government. Railroad men should be instructed in the handling and shipment of munitions of war and every merchant ship should be available as an efficient transport. Some of the trades farthest removed from military life in the limited sense of the word can be made surprizingly useful in war time with a little special training. The baker ought to be taught the use of the army oven as a part of his business. The veterinary surgeon can specialize a little on the army mule and the cavalry charger. The photographer should be given a little practise in military observation work. The chauffeur ought not to be licensed until he has proved his knowledge of how to repair a military transport automobile or an army ambulance. The jeweler might well study the officer's field glass and chronometer. Every tailor should learn to make the standard national uniforms and every cobbler to make army boots before necessity compels him to learn in a hurry what he should have known all along. Even the painter has a field opened to his talents in the new science of camouflage.

An objection may be raised to this universal conscription that it would tend to introduce militarism into the whole of industrial life. It would be far more likely to introduce the civilian spirit into the business of war. The nation would simply turn from mere money making to the task of the common defense without any accompaniment of red tape or gold braid, of arrogant officers or "shot at sunrise" courts martial. Every man and every woman, young or old, strong or sickly, would slip into an appointed and duly prepared post of duty; at the hospital bedside, in the camp kitchen, at the telegraph key, at the engine throttle, at the plow, in the coal mine, in the lumber camp, at a clerk's desk in Washington or even the schoolhouse and the hearthside. Wherever work had to be done there would be a man or woman trained before the war to do it. This common basis of service would in time become as much a matter of course as going to school and since all would have the share that they were able to perform in the work of the war it would be the logical basis of a common citizenship and a universal franchise.

"N

AS THE WORLD LIVES ON

BY H. G. WELLS

AUTHOR OF "MR. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH"

OTHING will be the same after the war." This is one of the consoling platitudes with which people cover over voids of thought. They utter it with an air of round-eyed profundity. But to ask in reply, "Then how will things be different?" is in many cases to rouse great resentment. It is almost as rude as saying: "Was that thought of yours really a thought?"

Let us in this paper confine ourselves to the social-economic processes that are going on. So far as I am able to distinguish among the things that are being said in these matters, they may be classified cut into groups that center upon several typical questions. There is the question of "How to pay for the war?" There is the question of the behavior of labor after the war, "Will there be a labor truce or a violent labor struggle?" There is the question of the reconstruction of European industry after the war in the face of an America in a state of monetary and economic repletion thru non-intervention. My present purpose in this paper is a critical one; it is not to solve problems, but to set out various currents of thought that are flowing thru the general mind. Which current is likely to seize upon and carry human affairs with it, is not for our present speculation.

There seem to be two distinct ways of answering the first of the questions I have noted. They do not necessarily contradict each other. Of course the war is being

seeming to pay less to him. They can go bankrupt either by a depreciation of their currency or without touching the gold standard-thru a rise in prices. In the end both these things work out to the same end; the creditor gets so many loaves or pairs of boots or workman's hours of labor for his pound less than he would have got under the previous conditions. One may imagine this process of price (and of course wages) increase going on to a limitless extent. Many people are inclined to look to such an increase in prices as a certain outcome of the war. and just so far as it goes, just so far will the burden of the rentier class, their call that is for goods and services, be lightened. This expectation is very generally entertained, and I can see little reason against it. The intensely stupid or dishonest press, however, in the interests of the common enemy, which misrepresents socialism and seeks to misguide labor in Great Britain, ignores these considerations, and positively holds out this prospect of rising prices as an alarming one to the more credulous and ignorant of its readers. But now comes the second way of meeting the after-thewar obligations.

This second way is by increasing the wealth of the state and by increasing the national production to such an extent that the payment of the rentier class will not be an overwhelming burden. Rising prices bilk the creditor. Increased production will check the rise in prices and get him a real

It is the resistance of spurs and red tabs to military innovations over again. This is the resistance of quills and red tape. On the other hand the organization of Britain for war has "officialized" a number of industrial leaders and created a large body of temporary and adventurous officials. They may want to carry on into peace production the great new factories the war has created. At the end of the war, for example, every belligerent country will be in urgent need of cheap automobiles for farmers, tradesmen, and industrial purposes generally. America is now producing such automobiles at a price of four hun dred dollars. But Europe will be heavily in debt to America, her industries will be disorganized, and there will, therefore, be no sort of return payment possible for these hundreds of thousands of automobiles. A country that is neither creditor nor producer cannot be an importer. Consequently, tho those cheap tin cars may be stacked as high as the Washington Monument in America, they will never come to Europe. On the other hand the great shell factories of Europe will be standing idle and ready, their staffs disciplined and available, for conversion to the new task. The imperative commonsense of the position seems to be that the European governments will set themselves straight away to out-Ford Ford, and provide their own people with cheap road transport.

UT here comes in the question

largely paid for immediately out of the payment. The outlook for the nahoma red Bh whether this commonsense course is

accumulated private wealth of the past. We are buying off the "hold-up" of the private owner upon the material and resources we need, and paying in paper money and war loans. This is not in itself an impoverishment of the community. The wealth of individuals is not the wealth of nations; the two things may easily be contradictory when the rich man's wealth consists of land or natural resources or franchises or privileges the use of which he reluctantly yields for high prices. The conversion of held-up land and material into workable and actively used material in exchange for national debt may be indeed a positive increase in the wealth of the community. And what is happening in all the belligerent countries is the taking over of more and more of the realities of wealth from private hands and, in exchange, the contracting of great masses of debt to private people. The net tendency is toward the disappearance of a reality holding class, the destruction of realities in warfare, and the appearance of a vast rentier class in its place. At the end of the war, much material will be destroyed for evermore, transit, food production and industry will be everywhere enormously socialized, and the country will be liable to pay every year in interest a sum of money exceeding the entire national expenditure before the war. From the point of view of the state, and disregarding material and moral damages, that annual interest is the annual instalment of the price to be paid for the war.

Now the interesting question arises whether these great belligerent states may go bankrupt, and if so to what extent. States may go bankrupt to the private creditor without repudiating their debts or

itor seems to be that he will be partly bilked and partly paid; how far he will be bilked and how far paid depends almost entirely upon this possible increase in production; and there is consequently a very keen and quite unprecedented desire very widely diffused among intelligent and active people, holding war loan scrip and the like, in all the belligerent countries, to see bold and hopeful schemes for state enrichment pushed forward. The movement toward socialism is receiving an impulse from a new and unexpected quarter, there is now a rentier socialism, and it is interesting to note that while the London Times is full of schemes of great state enterprises, for the exploitation of Colonial state lands, for the state purchase and wholesaling of food and many natural products, and for the syndication of shipping and the great staple industries into vast trusts into which not only the British but the French and Italian governments may enter as partners, the so-called socialist press of Great Britain is chiefly busy about the draughts in the cell of Mr. Fenner Brockway and the refusal of Printer Scott Duckers to put on his khaki trousers. The New Statesman and the Fabian Society, however, display a wider intelligence.

There is a great variety of suggestions for this increase of public wealth and production. Many of them have an extreme reasonableness. The extent to which they will be adopted depends, no doubt, very largely upon the politician and permanent official, and both those classes are apt to panic in the presence of reality. In spite of its own interest in restraining a rise in prices, the old official "salariat" is likely to be obstructive to any such innovations.

inevitable. Suppose the mental energy left in Europe after the war is insufficient for such a constructive feat as this. There will certainly be the obstruction of official pedantry, the hold-up of this vested interest and that, the greedy desire of "private enterprise" to exploit the occasion upon rather more costly and less productive lines, the general distrust felt by ignorant and unimaginative people of a new way of doing things. The process after all may not get done in the obviously wise way. This will not mean that Europe will buy American cars. It will be quite unable to buy American cars. It will be unable to make anything that America will not be able to make more cheaply for itself. But it will mean that Europe will go on without cheap cars, that is to say it will go on more sluggishly and clumsily and wastefully at a lower economic level. Hampered transport means hampered production of other things, and increasing inability to buy abroad. And so we go down and down.

It does not follow that because a course is the manifestly right and advantageous course for the community that it will be taken. I am reminded of this by a special basket in my study here, into which I pitch letters, circulars, pamphlets and so forth as they come to hand from a gentleman named Gatti, and his friends Mr. Adrian Ross, Mr. Roy Horniman, Mr. Henry Murray and others. His particular project is the construction of a Railway Clearing House for London. It is an absolutely admirable scheme. It would cut down the heavy traffic in the streets of London to about one third; it would enable us to run the goods traffic of England with less than half the number of railway trucks we now employ, it would turn over enormous areas

of valuable land from their present use as railway goods yards and sidings; it would save time in the transit of goods and labor in their handling. It is a quite beautifully worked out scheme. For the last eight or ten years this group of devoted fanatics has been pressing this undertaking upon an indifferent country, with increasing vehemence and astonishment at that indifference. The point is that its adoption, tho it would be of enormous general benefit, would be of no particular benefit to any leading man or highly placed official. On the other hand it would upset all sorts of individuals who are in a position to obstruct it quietly-and they do so. Meaning no evil, I dip my hand in the accumulation and extract a leaflet by the all too zealous Mr. Murray. In it he denounces various public officials by name as cheats and scoundrels, and invites a prosecution for libel.

In that fashion nothing will ever get done. There is no prosecution, but for all that I do not agree with Mr. Murray about the men he names. These gentlemen are just comfortable gentlemen, own brothers to these old generals of ours who will not take off their spurs. They are probably quite charming people except that they know nothing of that Fear of God which searches the heart. Why should they bother?

So many of these after-the-war problems bring one back to the question how far the war has put the Fear of God into the hearts of responsible men. There is really no other reason in existence that I can imagine why they should ask themselves the question, "Have I done my best?" and that still more important question, "Am I doing they should ask themselves, "Am I doing my best now?" And so while I hear plenty of talk about the great reorganizations that are to come after the war, while there is the stir of doubt among the rentiers whether, after all, they will get paid, while the unavoidable stresses and sacrifices of the war are making many people question the rightfulness of much that they did as a matter of course, and of much that they took for granted, I perceive there is also something dull and not very articulate in this European world, something resistant and inert, that is like the obstinate rolling over of a heavy sleeper after he has been called upon to get up. "Just a little longer. Just for my time."

One thought alone seems to make these more intractable people anxious. I thrust it in as my last stimulant when everything else has failed. "There will be frightful trouble with labor after the war," I say. They try to persuade themselves that military discipline is breaking in labor.

HAT does British labor think of the

Woutlook after the war? As a distinct

ive thing British labor does not think. "Class-conscious labor," as the Marxists put it, scarcely exists in Britain. The only convincing case I ever met was a bathchairman of literary habits at Eastbourne. The only people who are, as a class, class conscious in the British community are the Anglican gentry and their fringe of the genteel. Everybody else is "respectable." The mass of British workers find their thinking in the ordinary halfpenny papers or in John Bull. The so-called labor papers are perhaps less representative of British labor than any other section of the press; The Labor Leader, for example, is the organ of such people as Bertrand Russell, Vernon Lee, Morel, academic rentiers who know about as much of the labor side of industrialism as they do of cock-fighting. All the British peoples are racially willing and good-tempered people quite ready to be led by those they imagine to be abler

than themselves. They make the most cheerful and generous soldiers in the whole world, without insisting upon that democratic respect which the Frenchman exacts. They do not criticize and they do not trouble themselves much about the general plan of operations, so long as they have confidence in the quality and good-will of their leading. But British soldiers will hiss a general when they think he is selfish, unfeeling, or a muff. And the socialist propaganda has imported ideas of public service into private employment. Labor in Britain has been growing increasingly impatient of bad or selfish industrial leadership. Labor trouble in Great Britain turns wholly upon the idea crystallized in the one word "profiteer." Legislation and regulation of hours of labor, high wages, nothing will keep labor quiet in Great Britain, if labor thinks it is being exploited for private gain.

Labor feels very suspicious of private gain. For that suspicion a certain rather common type of employer is mainly to blame. Labor believes that employers as a class cheat workmen as a class, plan to cheat them, of their full share in the common output, and drive hard bargains. It believes that private employers are equally ready to sacrifice the welfare of the nation and the welfare of the workers for mere personal advantage. It has a traditional experience to support these suspicions.

In no department of morals have ideas changed so completely during the last eighty years as in relation to "profits." Eighty years ago every one believed in the divine right of property to do what it pleased with its advantages, a doctrine more disastrous socially than the divine right of kings. There was no such sense of the immorality of "holding up" as pervades the public conscience today. The worker was expected not only to work but to be grateful for employment. The property owner held his property and handed it out for use and development or not, just as he thought fit. These ideas are not altogether extinct today. Only a few days ago I met a magnificent old lady of seventy-nine or eighty, who discoursed upon the wickedness of her gardener in demanding another shilling a week because of war prices.

She was a valiant and handsome personage. A face that had still a healthy natural pinkness looked out from under blonde curls, and an elegant and carefully tended hand tossed back some fine old lace to gesticulate more freely. She had previously charmed her hearers by sweeping aside certain invasion rumors that were drifting about.

"Germans invade Us!" she cried. "Who'd let 'em, I'd like to know. Who'd let 'em?" And then she reverted to her grievance about the gardener.

"I told him that after the war he'd be glad enough to get anything. Grateful! They'll all be coming back after the war, all of 'em, glad enough to get anything. Asking for another shilling indeed!"

Every one who heard her looked shocked. But that was the tone of every one of importance in the dark years that followed the Napoleonic wars. That is just one survivor of the old tradition. Another is Blight the solicitor, who goes about bewailing the fact that we writers are "holding out false hopes of higher agricultural wages after the war." But these are both exceptions. They are held to be remarkable people even by their own class. The mass of property owners and influential people in Europe today no more believe in the sacred right of property to hold up development and dictate terms, than do the more intelligent workers. The ideas of collective ends and of the fiduciary nature of property had been soaking thru the European community for

years before the war. The necessity for sudden and even violent coöperations and submersions of individuality in a common purpose, which this war has produced, is rapidly crystallizing out these ideas into clear proposals.

Wil in thearn from reason must have

AR is an evil thing, but people who

an ugly teacher. This war has brought home to every one the supremacy of the public need over every sort of individual claim.

One of the most remarkable things in the British war press is the amount of space given to the discussion of labor developments after the war. This is in its completeness peculiar to the British situation. Nothing on the same scale is perceptible in the press of the Latin allies. A great movement on the part of capitalists and business organizers is manifest to assure the worker of a change of heart and a will to change method. Labor is suspicious, not foolishly but wisely suspicious. But labor is considering it.

"National industrial syndication," say the business organizers.

"Gild socialism," say the workers.

There is also a considerable amount of talking and writing about "profit-sharing" and about giving the workers a share in the business direction. Neither of these ideals appeals to the shrewder heads among the workers. So far as direction goes their disposition is to ask the captain to com

and the ship. So far as profits go, they think the captain has no more right than the cabin boy to speculative gains; he should do his work for his pay whether it is profitable or unprofitable work. There is little balm for labor discontent in these schemes for making the worker also an infinitesimal profiteer.

During my journey in Italy and France I met several men who were keenly interested in business organization. Just before I started my friend N, who has been the chief partner in the building up of a very big and very extensively advertised American business, came to see me on his way back to America. He is as interested in his work as a scientific specialist, and as ready to talk about it to any intelligent and interested hearer. He was particularly keen upon the question of continuity in the business, when it behooves the older generation to let in the younger to responsible management and to efface themselves. He was a man of five and forty. Incidentally he mentioned that he had never taken anything for his private life out of the great business he had built up but a salary, "a good salary," and that now he was going to grant himself a pension. "I shan't interfere any more. I shall come right away and live in Europe for a year so as not to be tempted to interfere. The boys have got to run it some day, and they had better get their experience while they're young and capable of learning by it. I did.”

I like N's ideas. "Practically," I said, "you've been a public official. You've treated your business like a public service." That was his idea.

"Would you mind if it was a public service?"

He reflected, and some disagreeable memory darkened his face. "Under the politicians?" he said.

I took the train of thought N had set going abroad with me next day. I had the good luck to meet men who were interested industrially. Captain Pirelli, my guide in Italy, has a name familiar to every motorist; his name goes wherever cars go, spelt with a big long capital P. Lieutenant de Tessin's name will recall one of the most interesting experiments in profit-sharing to the student of social science. I tried over

N's problem on both of them. I found in both their minds just the same attitude as he takes up toward his business. They think any businesses that are worthy of respect, the sorts of businesses that interest them, are public functions. Money-lenders and speculators, merchants and gambling gentlefolk, may think in terms of profit; capable business directors certainly do nothing of the sort.

was never so strong and never so manifest-
ly spreading and increasing as it is today.
But service to what?

I have my own very strong preconception here, and since my temperament is sanguine they necessarily color my view. I believe that this impulse to collective service can satisfy itself only under the formula that mankind is one state of which God is the undying king, and that the service of men's collective needs is the true worship of God. But eagerly as I would grasp at any evidence that this idea is being developed and taken up by the general consciousness, I am quite unable to persuade myself that anything of the sort is going on. I do perceive a search for large forms into which the prevalent impulse to devotion can be thrown. But the organized religious bodies, "If I had it. In some ways it would be with their creeds and badges and their ineasier."

I met a British officer in France who is also a landowner. I got him to talk about his administrative work upon his property. He was very keen upon new methods. He said he tried to do his duty by his land. "How much land?" I asked.

"Just over nine thousand acres," he said. "But you could manage forty or fifty thousand with little more trouble."

"What a waste!" I said. "Of course you cught not to own those acres, what you ought to be is the agricultural controller of just as big an estate of the public lands as you could manage with a suitable salary."

He reflected upon that idea. He said he did not get much of a salary out of his land as it was, and made a regretable allusion to Mr. Lloyd George. "When a man tries to do his duty by the land," he said

But here running thru the thoughts of the Englishman and the Italian and the Frenchman and the American alike one finds just the same idea of a kind of officialism in ownership. It is an idea that pervades our thought and public discussion today everywhere, and it is an idea that is scarcely traceable at all in the thought of the early half of the nineteenth century. The idea of service and responsibility in property has increased and is increasing, the conception of "hold-up," the usurer's conception of his right to be bought out of the way, fades. And the process has been enormously enhanced by the various big scale experiments in temporary socialism that have been forced upon the belligerent powers. Men of the most individualistic quality are being educated up to the possibilities of concerted collective action. My friend and fellow student Y, inventor and business organizer, who used to make the best steam omnibuses in the world and who

is now making all sorts of things for the army, would go pink with suspicious anger at the mere words "inspector" or "socialism" three or four years ago. He does not do so now.

A great proportion of this sort of man, this energetic directive sort of man in England, is thinking socialism today. They may not be saying socialism but they are thinking it. When labor begins to realize what is adrift it will be divided between two things, between appreciative coöperation, for which gild socialism in particular has prepared its mind, and traditional suspicion. I will not offer to guess here which will prevail.

stinct for self preservation at any cost,
stand between men and their spiritual
growth in just the same way the fore-
stallers stand between men and food. Their
activities at present are an almost intoler-
able nuisance. One cannot say "God" but
some tout is instantly seeking to pluck one
into his particular cave of flummery and
orthodoxy. What a rational man means by
God is just God. The more you define and
argue about God the more He remains the
same simple thing. Judaism, Christianity,
Islam, modern Hindu religious thought, all
agree in declaring that there is one God,
master and leader of all mankind, in un-
ending conflict with cruelty, disorder, folly
and waste. To my mind, it follows imme-
diately that there can be no king, no gov-
ernment of any sort, which is not either
a subordinate or a rebel government, a local
usurpation, in the kingdom of God. But no
organized religious body has ever had the
courage and honesty to insist upon this.
They all pander to nationalism and to
rowers and princes. They exist so to
pander. Every organized religion in the
world exists only to divert and waste the
religious impulse in man.

This conviction that the world kingdom
of God is the only true method of human
service, is so clear and final in my own
mind, it seems so inevitably the convic-
tion to which all right thinking men must
ultimately come, that I feel almost like a
looker-on at a game of blindman's buff as
I watch the discussion of synthetic politi-
cal ideas. The blind man thrusts his seek-
ing hands into the oddest corners, he
clutches at chairs and curtains, but at last
he must surely find and hold and feel over
and guess the name of the plainly visible
quarry.

Some of the French and Italian people I talked to said they were fighting for "Civilization." That is one name for the kingdom of God, and I have heard English people use it, too. But much of the contemporary thought of England still wanders with its back to the light. Most of it is pawing over jerry-built, secondary things. I have before me a little book, the

Tmentarestess in the European com

HE impression I have of the present joint work of Dr. Grey and Mr. Turner,

munities is that while the official class and the rentier class is thinking very poorly and inadequately, and with a merely obstructive disposition, while the churches are merely wasting their energies in futile self advertisement, while the labor mass is suspicious and disposed to make terms for itself rather than come into any large

schemes of reconstruction that will abolish profit as a primary aim in economic life, there is still a very considerable movement toward such a reconstruction. Nothing is so misleading as a careless analogy. In the dead years that followed the Napoleonic wars, which are often quoted as a precedent for expectation now, the spirit of collective service was near its minimum; it

an ex-public schoolmaster, and a manu-
facturer, called "Eclipse or Empire?" The
title "World Might or Downfall?" had
already been secured in another quarter.
It is a book that has been enormously ad-
vertised; it has been almost impossible to
Escape its column long advertisements, it
is billed upon the boardings, and it is on
the whole a very able and right spirited
book. It calls for more and better educa-
tion, for more scientific methods, for less
class suspicion and more social explicit-
ness and understanding, for a franker and
fairer treatment of labor. But why does it
call for these things? Does it call for them
because they are right? Because in accom-
plishing this, one serves God?

Not at all. But because otherwise this

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strange sprawling empire of ours will drop
back into a secondary place in the world.
These two writers really seem to think
that the slack workman, the slacker
wealthy man, the negligent official, the con-
servative schoolmaster, the greedy usurer,
the comfortable obstructive, confronted
with this alternative, terrified at this idea
of something or other called the Empire
being "eclipsed," eager for the continu-
ance of this undefined glory over their fel-
low creatures called "Empire," will per-
ceive the error of their ways and become
energetic, devoted, capable. They think an
ideal of that sort is going to change the
daily lives of men.
I sympathize
with their purpose, and I deplore their
conception of motives. If men will not
give themselves for righteousness, they will
not give themselves for a geographical
score. If they will not work well for the
hatred of bad work, they will not work
well for the hatred of Germans. This "Em-
pire" idea has been cadging about the
British Empire, trying to collect enthusi-
asm and devotion, since the days of Dis-
raeli. It is, I submit, too big for the mean
spirited, and too tawdry and limited for
the fine and generous. It leaves out the
French and the Italians and the Belgians
and all our blood brotherhood of allies. It
has no compelling force in it. We British
are not naturally Imperialist; we are some-
thing greater-or something less. For two
years and a half now we have been fight-
ing against Imperialism in its most ex-
travagant form. It is a poor incentive to
right living to propose to parody it.

The blind man must lunge again. For when the right answer is seized it answers not only the question why men should work for their fellow men, but also why nations should cease to arm and plan and contrive against nation. The social problem is only the international problem in retail, the international problem is only the social one in gross.

My bias rules me altogether here. I see men in social, in economic and in international affairs alike, eager to put an end to conflict, inexpressibly weary of conflict and the waste and pain and death it involves. But to end conflict one must abandon aggressive or uncordial pretensions. Labor is sick at the idea of more strikes and struggles after the war, industrialism is sick of competition and anxious for service, everybody is sick of war. But how can they end any of these clashes except by the definition and recognition of a common end which will establish a standard for which, that is, every other issue can be the trial of every conceivable issue, to

subordinated; and what common end can
there be in all the world except this idea
of the world kingdom of God? What is the
good of orienting one's devotion to a firm.
or to class solidarity, or La Republique
Française, or Poland, or Albania, or such
love and loyalty as people profess for
King George or King Albert or the Duc
d'Orleans, or any such intermediate object
of self abandonment? We need a standard
so universal that the plate layer may say to
the barrister or the duchess, or the Red
Indian to the Limehouse sailor, or the
Anzac soldier to the Sinn Feiner or the
we two doing for
Chinaman, "What are
it?" And to fill the place of that "it," no
other idea is great enough or commanding
enough, but only the world kingdom of
God.

However long he may have to hunt, the blind man seeking service and an end to bickerings will come to that at last, because of all the thousand other things he may clutch at, nothing else can satisfy his manifest need.

London, England

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