It is true that to grind Germany down and impoverish her by her payment of the partial bill for damages would be to postpone the return of prosperity for all the nations; but it is also true that to be too easy with Germany would be bad for her. We do not base any argument on the fact of what Germany would have done if her armies had not been defeated. But we do base an argument on the truths of moral conduct and the old, old fact that sin calls for atonement.

And it is a fact that the idea of letting Germany off as easily as possible is working against the best interest of Germany herself. There are many, many Germans who see the truth of that for themselves.

If you are in doubt about these things, just look for the right answer to this question: If the United States were in Germany's present position, what would this nation do? Of course, you can not even imagine the United States of America having committed such a sin as was Germany's in setting out to conquer the world; we simply are not built that way. But if we had been defeated in a war and were required by the victors to pay a bill of damages (even one representing all the destruction caused, instead of a bill cut down to the last possible dollar, as Germany's was), why, then we would set to work, every man and woman, boy and girl of us, and pay that bill!

JAPAN'S NEW RULER

WHEN the daddies of the present-day WATCH TOWER boys and girls were youngsters, Mutsuhito was Emperor of Japan. In those days, Japan was just getting well started on the way to the high place of international power in which she is now established.

When his son, Yoshihito, came to the throne not so very long ago, as time fliesthere was much curiosity, and some anxiety, as to the course Japanese history would take under his rulership. Broad policies prevailed, and Japan traveled steadily forward on the road of international relations. She prospered. She made her treaty of offensive and defensive alliance with Great Britain. The war came, and she stood with the Allies and rendered important service.

Then Yoshihito fell ill, and the young Crown Prince Hirohito became chief of the Imperial Government. He had long been in training, and had traveled through Europe, studying Western ways.

The assassination of Prime Minister Hara had made Japan's future more than ever a

CROWN PRINCE HIROHITO, NOW REGENT OF JAPAN

naval program and her attitude toward China showed that she meant business, both in protecting her own interests and in joining the other powers in the effort to remove possible causes of war in the Pacific.

In the December WATCH TOWER we asked if some of our readers could tell us the mean

ing of the names of the Japanese princes, printed with a photograph. It was a great pleasure to receive an answer from Miss Rosemary Street, of Princeton, N. J., and we reproduce it for the benefit of boys and girls who may have shared our curiosity:

PRINCETON, N. J. DEAR ST. NICHOLAS WATCH TOWER: In the December WATCH TOWER, you ask what the words No-Miya, following the names of Japanese imperial princes, signify.

Under the religion of Shintoism, the state religion of Japan, the people are taught that the imperial family is sacred, being descended in a direct line from Jimmu Tenno, the first emperor of Japan, who ruled 2600 years ago and is believed

to have been a direct descendant of the Sun Goddess.

The word No means "of" and Miya means "shrine." No-Miya consequently means literally, "of the shrine," and follows the names of members of the imperial family, denoting their divine origin.

It may be worth adding that in Japan there are two kinds of princes-princes of imperial blood and princes not of the blood.

Prince I. Tokugawa, who is here as delegate to the conference at Washington, is not an imperial prince, but is a member of the higher nobility. Very truly yours, ROSEMARY STREET.

There ought now to be an end to the old habit of regarding Japan with suspicion. Japan is not perfect (are we?), and there will be more hard places to get past. The millennium is not here yet! But it will be a great pity, after all that was achieved in the eramarking "pow-wow" of the nations, if new quarrels and suspicions are allowed to spring up. The field has been cleared; we must keep the weeds out.

THROUGH THE WATCH TOWER'S
TELESCOPE

WHILE England was negotiating with Ireland, there was discontent in India and Egypt. Some folks wondered if they would want to be made free states within the empire, too.

You hear talk all the time about inflation and deflation. Does the word convey any clear idea to you? Here is an explanation that would make a professor of political economy laugh, or perhaps cry, but it may help. If you blew up a football bladder too much, it would blow up-over-inflation. To get it to fit inside the cover, you must deflate it partially. If you stuck a pin into it, you would deflate it so thoroughly that you could never blow it up again unless the hole were to be patched; and it would never be as strong as it was at first.

But if you let a little air out through the neck of the bladder, and then fasten it up again, all will be well.

When wages and prices are blown up almost to the exploding point, it is necessary to reduce them all round by easy, natural methods. The pressure must be kept equal at all points. The strain must be shared by all-distributed evenly.

BEFORE the war, the expense of government was running high, but such figures as the six

MILLIONS ON THE WIRE "You are wanted on the wire," is a familiar expression to most of us, and it suggests a message coming over a telephone-wire from the distant speaker to a single listener. But an event which took place very recently has proved that the speaker may give his spoken message to thousands of persons, all of whom hear his actual words reproduced with marvelous fidelity, even as regards all the delicate modulations and inflections which give not only emphasis, but individuality, to human speech.

listen spellbound to eloquent words speeding to them with the swiftness of light itself from some notable speaker thousands of miles away.

We are justified in this conclusion because of the fact that there is practically no limit to the number of amplifiers which can be employed.

The essential part of the amplifier, whose name admirably expresses its function, which is to increase the supply of electrical energy available, is the three-electrode vacuum-tube, which is rapidly assuming the greatest importance in the field of practical electricity. As our picture shows, this device resembles an ordinary electric bulb in general aspect, but it contains a more complicated arrangement of filaments.

The simplest way in which to regard this vacuum-tube amplifier is as an electric valve, so highly sensitive that by its means a very feeble electric current is enabled to control a very much stronger one. In other words, the amplifier is connected with a battery from which it obtains a new source of energy-a fresh supply of "juice," as electricians like to say. Thus a very slight current coming over a telephone-wire, and vibrating in unison with the tones of the speaker's voice as caught by the transmitter at the other end of the line, will impart its undulatory movements

NEW YORK MADISON SQUARE GARDEN

to the amplifier, and this will, in its turn, pass them along to the stronger current coming from the battery associated with the amplifier. Thus the feeble original current may have all its fluctuations reproduced with absolute accuracy in a current a million times stronger!

Professional electricians employ two very picturesque terms to express this process; they call it "stepping up" the energy, or "boosting" the energy. The first amplifier station used to step up the energy so that it might carry the President's voice at Washington across the continent, was at Newtown Square. From here the message came over the wire to New York. As shown in our diagram, fifteen stations were needed to boost the energy sufficiently to make it reach the Pacific coast. These stations are called repeater-stations, and the amplifying apparatus is ordinarily termed a telephonerepeater.

But besides the amplifiers, we must have in our equipment special transmitters to receive the speaker's words. The transmitter is constructed on the same principle as that in our ordinary telephone, and is about the same size. It has certain modifi

THE SPECIALLY SENSITIVE

cations, however, which make it far more sensitive. The transmitter contains loosely packed grains of carbon, about the size of the particles of granulated sugar. The waves of the voice cause these to vibrate, and the agitation thus caused gives rise to an electric current in the connected wire. The variations of this current precisely correspond to those of the voice. At the other end of the wire, of course, there is an electro-magnetic receiver, whose office it is to reconvert the electric waves coming over the wire into sound-waves once more.

TRANSMITTER

In all long-distance telephoning, these three elements enter: the transmitter, the telephone-repeater, and the electro-magnetic receiver. But the great achievement of Armistice Day required still another device for its accomplishment. This is the apparatus known as the loud-speaker.

The loud-speaker comprises a sensitive transmitter, like the one just described, an amplifier for stepping up the energy as it comes from the transmitter, a receiver to

change the electric waves into sound-waves, and a great wooden horn (or cluster of them) not unlike an ordinary megaphone. In the present instance, these horns, or "projectors," were ten feet long, while their large rectangular mouths were about three feet by a foot and a half in size.

We are now ready to understand just what took place on Armistice Day. President Harding's words were caught by a transmitter placed on the speaker's stand in front of him. His voice thus generated a small current which flowed as far as the first amplifier, growing gradually weaker all the time; but when it reached the amplifier, a fresh store of energy was set free from the latter's battery. This new and larger current flowed on to the Newtown Square battery, where it was again boosted so that it could reach New York, where it was again stepped up, and so on across the country, obtaining fresh strength at each repeaterstation. Arrived at the city by the Golden Gate, the current from the telephone-line passed to the amplifier of the San Francisco loud-speaker, where it was enormously augmented from the power-plant connected with the loud-speaker. This final current directly operated the receivers of the loudspeaker, whence it issued in the form of sound-waves to the listening multitude. Each word came to their ears at practically the same instant it was uttered in Washington, since the actual time required for the cross-continent trip is not more than one fiftieth of a second.

Since the transmitter of the loud speaker at Arlington was some three or four feet below the speaker, it received only a small part of the sound-waves from his lips. For this reason, the energy of the weak current coming from the transmitter was boosted over a billionfold (as we learn from Mr. Robert W. King, who had the matter in charge) by the loud-speaker at Arlington. He tells us, too, that the total amplification along the transcontinental line was over a hundred million millionfold. When we combine with this the original amplification at Arlington and that at San Francisco, we get the staggering total of an increase of the initial energy generated by the speaker's voice to an amount ten trillion trillion times as great! Just try to set that down in figures and see how many ciphers you have marching across the page!

But more thrilling than these vast numbers is the thought that science has given