toward Scutari, a far less secure haven of refuge than Valona. The Austrian campaign in Montenegro still continues. All told, there are probably not more than 30,000 or 40,000 Serbo-Montenegrins left in this theatre of the war. No danger threatens the Teutonic allies from Scutari or from Valona. Saloniki, the gate of Macedonia, is the only point of vantage which the Allies still retain in the Balkans, and it is against Saloniki, from a military point of view, that the next Teutonic offensive should be launched. A CCORDING to the usually well informed Washington correspondent of the Chicago Tribune, the real explanation of President Wilson's treatment of the European belligerents is to be found in the hope and expectation of a future intimacy between the United States and the British Empire. It would have been manifestly dangerous for the President to express this preference in any overt way, but it has determined the relative emphasis of his protests against the belligerents' violation of international law. Whether the preference for an increasing intimacy with Great Britain exists in the President's mind and has influenced his behavior we do not know, but his interest in maritime commerce and sea power would make the inference plausible. He must know that Great Britain and the United States cannot be really independent of one another, and that a frank recognition of mutual dependence would add enormously to the security of the two countries and their effective influence in international politics. To be sure, whether he knows it or not he cannot say it, but he can say, as the Chicago Tribune says, that isolation from Europe is no longer either possible or desirable for the United States. And having said it he could trust to his fellow countrymen to read the salutary lesson-the lesson that no perfection of friendship with the other free and equal republics of the west will constitute any substitute for a clear and comprehensive understanding with our necessary associates on land and sea-Canada and Great Britain. S ECRETARY GARRISON'S continental army if not already dead is apparently gasping for breath. It was a pretty little child, dressed up to make a good appearance in public, but it was fatally anaemic. Nobody was interested in keeping it alive. Congress was indifferent because Congress lives upon politics, and there would be much more political nourishment in a reorganization of the state militia than in the creation of a federal militia. The military experts were hostile because most of them believe in compulsory service, and they did not want a voluntary system to succeed. They have never patiently and exhaustively tried to devise methods of making service in a national militia sufficiently attractive. Worst of all, the parents of the unfortunate infant were not themselves very much interested in keeping their offspring alive. The administration has no strong convictions about the kind of an army best adapted to the country's needs. It has submitted certain ideas to Congress and the country, but the President has no intention of fighting for them as he fought for the currency bill. The death of the continental army is a pity, because the idea of a national body of volunteer citizens trained during peace is too desirable method of military organization to be abandoned without being seriously tried. But Congress would never agree to it except under compulsion, and the administration is the only agency sufficiently instructed and powerful to exercise the necessary force. Assuming that the administration will not fight hard, the end is inevitable. A a CCORDING to Associated Press despatches from Rome, the total Italian losses from six months of war aggregate 45,000 casualties. The same report gives the number of men now engaged at about 1,000,000 and it is a safe estimate that the average number on the Austrian front since Italy entered the war has been about 750,000. Among a half million men employed by the American railways in positions involving risk to lifetrainmen, switchmen, etc. the annual casualties exceed 50,000. It seems to follow that war-making conducted by Italian methods is little, if any, more dangerous than transportation conducted by American methods. War-making on the eastern side of the Adriatic is a more serious business. Little Serbia has endured more casualties in a single week than great Italy reports for six months. With all due allowance for probable understatement in the Italian reports, the conclusion seems unavoidable that Italy is playing a remarkably cautious game. HERE is a remarkable contrast between the policy of Cavour, the founder of Italian unity, and that of the Italian statesmen of to-day who are seeking to found Italian imperialism. By skillful manoeuvering Cavour succeeded in 1854 in gaining the consent of France and England to the dispatch of Sardinian troops to the Crimea. It was of no direct interest to Sardinia that Russia should be beaten, but by helping to fight the battles of France and England, Cavour won for Sardinia an important place in the Congress of Paris and committed the sympathies of France and England to the cause of Italian union. It is quite another spirit that animates the Italian statesmen of the present. They are spending no blood on any project that does not offer visible and immediate profit to Italy. There were enough unoccupied Italian troops to fill the valley from Belgrade to Nish and to make the Teutonic irruption into Serbia impracticable. Their presence would have kept Bulgaria out of the fray, and would have immobilized large Teutonic forces on the Hungarian frontier, with an advantage to the Allies as a whole that would have been incalculable. But was there not a chance that the profit might have fallen to Serbia or Russia? Doubtless there was; and the current variety of Italian statesmanship, unlike that of the great Cavour, takes no chances. M UCH has been written about what should be the relation of a statesman to the people of a democracy. No better answer could be given than to point to Secretary Lane's annual report. The head of a highly technical department of the government, a man dealing daily with very complicated facts, Mr. Lane has nevertheless succeeded in making his work understandable and alluring. His report is an example of the art of popularizing knowledge in its most inspiring form. There is no condescension in it, but a gifted enthusiasm and the warm assurance that its writer is singularly in tune with the very best of America. "I make bold to express the hope that no other policy of this government may be allowed to stay the internal development of this country." This is its first sentence, and it goes on to express the fear that the strengthening of the military forces will leave the government 66 so immersed in matters military and naval as to overlook these matters of less dramatic and perhaps less immediate concern." These are words which might be printed on the little bits of cardboard and tacked up over the desk of every official, every editor, and every citizen of the country. I A Negligible Germany extremely N another column there is printed an disquieting letter from Mr. Hilaire Belloc about the temper of the prevailing public opinion among the western Allies in respect to Germany. It was written to correct what its author fears may be a misinterpretation of the French and English attitude. THE NEW REPUBLIC has published several articles by correspondents suggesting that French and English opinion would be satisfied with an inconclusive ending to the war or a minor victory. Mr. Belloc seeks to expose any such falsification of the facts. His experience, his birth and his traditions, and his large circle of acquaintances combine to give authority to his judgment about French and British opinion. From the fulness of his knowledge he de clares without hesitation or qualification that the two countries are united in the "determination to reduce the enemy to impotence." Any achievement short of this would be regarded by them as utterly and culpably inadequate. Neither does he leave us in any doubt as to the proposed contents of the phrase "reducing the enemy to impotence." He means the killing of the German nation as an effective political organism. A political unit known as Germany will of course survive the war, but it will have been started on a journey which is to end in negligibility or extinction. ... The object of Mr. Belloc's letter is not to justify the "determination" of French and English public opinion but to establish its truth. He asserts parenthetically that if the "Prussian tradition is allowed to survive," " the old and rooted civilization of Europe is doomed "; but what he is most interested in establishing is the reality of the intention to exterminate Germany as a political body, and its entire practicability. If the Allies get Germany down, they will never give her a chance to recover. As a matter of sound political policy they will protect themselves by doing to Germany what Rome did to Carthage, or what so many victors in the wars of the past have done to their vanquished foes. Although Mr. Belloc is very much more of an authority on French and English public opinion than we are, we refuse to accept the fidelity of this report. Undoubtedly most of the official statements which have been made in public about the object for which the Allies are fighting assert rather less sharply the same general purpose of reducing Germany to political impotence. Undoubtedly also these statements reflect a widespread and sincere conviction held not only by the ruling classes in the Allied countries but by many of the people. But surely they express a temporary flood of angry and righteous resentment rather than the quality of determination necessary to carry the proposed program into effect. The deliberate policy of making the German nation politically negligible in the future history of Europe would require for its realization a tenacity of purpose and an utter lack of moral scruple which is no part of the prevailing popular state of mind in France and Great Britain. The French and English people are infuriated at what they take to be a dangerous and wanton attack on their security and independence. In their indignation they are making resolutions to do many terrible things to Germany, but if their indignation is really well-intentioned, as we believe it is, they will never seriously seek to do as much as they say. When righteous indignation becomes the excuse for carrying out an unrighteous and unwise policy, it is soon either dissipated or transformed into a blind and malevolent passion. We prefer the first of these alternatives. The meaning of the state of mind reflected in Mr. Belloc's letter is rather military than political. The Allies have a military task ahead of them similar to that which confronted the Germans at the beginning of the war. They must assume the offensive and drive the enemy out of a large amount of occupied territory. The enterprise will subject the morale of their armies to the severest kind of test. The traditional methods of the drill sergeant will not avail to keep soldiers advancing in regular formation under the gruelling losses, the crash and the confusion of a modern attack. That they may survive the shock as a coherent body they need to be possessed by a spirit of fanaticism similar to that which had apparently been deliberately cultivated in the German army, and which in the fall of 1914 was being justified by German intellectuals and moralists. Something similar seems to be happening among the Allies. There has been of late a perceptible increase of hatred against Germany, which, although to a much smaller extent, is receiving a partial justification from French and English intellectuals and moralists. Probably it will become more embittered during the course of the Allied offensive in the spring and summer; but in proportion as that offensive is successful it will diminish. The hatred is the child of fear, and as soon as the fear is robbed of its immediate oppressiveness the anger of the Allies will cease to dominate their minds and compel their wills. The people of France and Great Britain after the suffering and losses of two years will not consent to a continuation of the fighting for the sake of doing to their enemies precisely what they insist their enemies shall not do to them. Even assuming that the Allies have the military power absolutely to break down German resistance, they will not and cannot convert a military triumph into a policy of deliberately extinguishing Germany as a political power. Of course the victors in a war can actually exterminate the vanquished as Rome exterminated Carthage. Or they can extinguish the political influence of a conquered people without exterminating them, as Rome extinguished the independent political life among the Greeks and the Jews. But these vague historical parallels, like those quoted by Mr. Belloc, are irrelevant and delusive. As we know from the history of Poland and the Balkans, modern nations are singularly tenacious of life, and the attempt to extinguish them is more dangerous to the conquerors than to the conquered. Mr. Belloc's policy of reducing Germany to impotence is " illusionary” because it is malevolent. By a supreme effort the Allies might succeed in making and keeping Germany politically negligible, but they would themselves gradually become politically degenerate. They would be subor dinating the political ideal of living and letting others live to the military ideal of slaying your enemy so as to prevent him from slaying you. In order to root out the "Prussian tradition in Germany" they would be seeding and cultivating it in their own political garden. They would be acting according to principles which they were pretending to destroy. They would be " dooming" the European civilization which they were so officiously and hypocritically proposing to safeguard. The Allies will never win security for the future by exacting retribution for the past. They cannot treat Germany as a criminal without playing the part of judge and jailer. They are too good to act as jailer with any conviction; they are not good enough to act as judge. The German nation has made a culpable mistake. The future security of Europe depends chiefly on the recognition of this mistake by a sufficient number of the German people, and whatever the Allies do to Germany they should do nothing to make this recognition impossible. The proposal to reduce Germany to political impotence would not only prevent the mistake from being recognized, but would serve to perpetuate and even consecrate its impulse and its machinery. A Europe which conspired and combined to bring about the political extinction of Germany would be a Europe in which the German nation could survive only as a conqueror. Every German with any vision or spirit, no matter how liberal his sympathies and ideas, would be possessed by a passionate desire to see his country restored to independence, and he would support any government or any policy which looked capable of effecting the restoration. Europe would be rent by an irreconcilable feud which would poison its own internal life and falsify its relation to the rest of the world. As to the United States, its traditional policy of avoiding political entanglements with European countries would be confirmed at the very moment when it was about to be abandoned. As a matter of ordinary prudence we would be forced to preserve and emphasize an isolation which would be our only protection against a corresponding demoralization in our own life. Those Englishmen and Frenchmen who crave to punish Germany will have their opportunity as long as the war lasts. The Germans as a nation have been martial by conviction. They elected to submit their controversy with the Allies to the test of battle, and they have fought in a manner which has added a new brutality to the most brutal business that the conscience of mankind has permitted to survive. It is natural that Frenchmen and Englishmen should wish to do them harm; and if in the course of this war they drink of the same bitter cup which they have forced on the lips of the Belgians and the French, we should be the last to deny that the penalty was just. This kind of retribution the Allies are entitled to exact up to the measure of their ability. But if retaliation is part of the ethics of war it plays no part in the ethics of peace. The perfectly proper military method of doing your utmost to injure the enemy should be abandoned as soon as the fighting is over. The treaty of peace should be determined by political values, and there is no value in politics as fundamental as that of according to other people the same opportunity to live and grow that we demand for ourselves. The treaty which ended the war between Austria and Prussia in 1866 was beneficent because a great politician was wise and strong enough to resist the clamor of the soldiers for terms of peace which would perpetuate the quarrel. The treaty of Frankfort was maleficent because the same politician allowed its provisions to be determined by the military motive of protecting Germany against the consequences of an enmity which had been deliberately provoked. That the Allies will be able to start Germany on a journey of political extinction we do not for one moment believe; but even if they should be able to bring the German army to its knees, they would be mad and wicked to aim at keeping the German people in anything like the same position. IN Southern Prosperity N the end the European war may prove a boon to the South. Though it has caused acute suffering among planters, merchants and manufacturers, it has enforced an invaluable lesson. It has convinced large sections of the Southern people that they cannot build their economic life upon cotton alone. The lesson is not a new one. For decades agronomists and economists have preached against the prevailing one-crop system. It was a wasteful use of the land. It tended unduly to depress the price of cotton. It involved a heavy expenditure for food, fodder and fertilizers. Except in the richest bottom lands of the Mississippi valley, it meant a rapid exhaustion of the soil. It was highly speculative, for it based the agricultural prosperity of a whole section upon a crop which might rise or fall because of factors beyond the South's control. Despite this preaching the South still clung in the main to its one crop. Tradition, routine and shiftlessness worked in favor of cotton. It was the one pay-crop, the crop upon which usurious storekeepers were willing to advance money. Progress towards a diversification of crops was therefore comparatively slow until the ravages of the boll-weevil, and finally the low prices due to the war, gave to it a powerful impetus. When cotton prices sank, the farmers turned to the raising of hay, corn, oats, hogs and cattle. The result has been spectacular. According to the latest reports of the Department of Agriculture, the cotton crop has declined about 23 per cent (from over 15,000,000 to about 11,000,000 bales). Not all this decline is due to a restriction of planting, for the crop itself has been damaged, but the net result of these two factors, aided by bad crops in Egypt and India, by better warehouse facilities in this country, and by the lending of money at low rates of interest by the Federal Reserve banks, has been to enable the South to market its cotton at leisure and secure better prices. But the most significant development has not been the reduction in the planting of cotton but the correspondingly increased planting of grain. While the cotton crop has decreased 23 per cent, the corn crop has increased 33 per cent, or 301,000,000 bushels over that of a year ago. The combined production in the Southern states of wheat, corn and oats is now 1,598,000,000 bushels, an increase of 27.4 per cent over the previous year, as compared with an increase of only 911⁄2 per cent for the whole country. The total value of grain crops in the South amounts to $1,330,388,000, or considerably over 40 per cent above the average annual value of the cotton crop during the last decade. The consequence of this partial escape from the obsession of cotton is a nearer approach to normal economic conditions. Six months ago cotton was selling at eight cents a pound, and there remained unsold one and one-third million bales in excess of the stocks of a year before. Merchants and manufacturers found their business restricted and their credit impaired. To-day the South is beginning to recover. Cotton is selling at twelve cents, and corn, oats and other agricultural products bring better prices. The South is regaining from cereals and live stock a part of what it has lost in cotton. It is the first fruits of an accelerated agricultural revolution. No revolution takes place without counter-revolution, and no progress without reaction. We may therefore expect that as soon as cotton prices again rise, the cry will be "Back to cotton." The white fibre still holds the imagination of the South, as it did in the early years of the last century when the price went up to forty-four cents, or in the 'fifties when the South believed that cotton ruled the economic and political destinies of the world. Despite possible recessions, the tendency in the South must be towards a continuing economic expansion, which will make the role of cotton culture relatively less important. Industrially the South is coming into its own. It is beginning to utilize its varied resources. A diversified agriculture, an increase in large and small-scale manufacturing, and an expansion of commerce are all steps from a specialized agricultural dependency of Europe and of the North mous. to a better balanced agricultural-industrial economy. In this development agriculture must for a long time remain the chief factor. It is, of course, true that the opportunities for industrial and commercial expansion are immense. Already North and South Carolina are second and third in the manufacture of cotton, and Georgia is fifth. As many bales are consumed in the factories of the cotton-growing states as in all the rest of the country put together. The lumbering industry increases rapidly, and mining is becoming one of the greatest of industries. Birmingham begins to rival Pittsburgh, and all over the section lesser industries are growing rapidly. Mineral resources have hardly been touched, and the waterpower available for manufacturing is enorBut even greater potentialities of progress inhere in Southern agriculture. Only a portion of the land is as yet used and that ineffectively, and vast tracts of fertile swamp land are waiting to be reclaimed. The rural population is still greatly in excess of the urban, and agricultural workers represent a far larger proportion of the total population in gainful pursuits than in any other section of the country. The chances for agricultural development easily outweigh the vast opportunities in mining, manufacturing and commerce, and what Sidney Lanier said over thirty years ago is still true to-day: "A vital revolution in the farming economy of the South, if it is actually occurring, is necessarily carrying with it all future Southern politics, and Southern relations, and Southern art, and such an agricultural change is the one substantial fact upon which any really New South can be predicated." Here lies the crux of the problem. Farming in the South is even more ineffective than in other parts of the country. Though the yield per acre compares favorably with that of the North, the yield per family or per farm is small. The Census of 1910 shows that the product per farm is only a little over $600 in the South Atlantic states, and a little under $500 in the South Central states, while the yield in the North Central states is almost $1,100. The comparison is not conclusive, but it at least suggests the startling difference between the standards of living on the farms of South and North. In 1910 the value of all farm property in the South was only $25.31 per acre, as compared with $40.93 in the West and $66.46 in the North. This is more than a mere difference in figures. It is a difference in civilization. The primary cause of this inferiority of Southern agriculture is that the farms are cultivated by ignorant labor. The South has not yet completely adjusted itself to the problem of living without slavery. So long as negroes could be marshalled and led and driven on great plantations, a reasonable degree of efficiency might be obtained, however improvident and stupid the slaves. To-day the agricultural prosperity of the South depends largely upon the intellectual and industrial advance of the negro population. A shiftless, untrained, lazy man, be he black or white, will not launch out into new experiments, but will continue to exploit and kill his land in the bad old way. The low standard of education in the South both among poor whites and negroes, though this standard is steadily rising, is still the chief drawback to its steady and rapid progress towards better agriculture, and a higher civilization based on prosperity. The whites may draw the line ever so sharply against the negroes, but in the end the two races are tied together by that strongest of ties, common economic interests. Southern culture depends upon Southern prosperity, which depends upon agriculture, which in turn depends upon the negro. You cannot displace the negro by Italians or other European immigrants, and you cannot kill off the black men nor deport them. As the South advances, as the agricultural revolution, with its demand for higher skill, progresses, the necessity for a general raising of the standards of living and capacity of the negro agricultural population becomes more insistent. Industrialism in its broadest sense-which includes agriculture-sets its stamp wherever it rules. In the South we already have the Southern "Yankee," who is quite as nearsightedly shrewd as was his brother of Connecticut. We have child labor, the exploitation of women, truck stores, the demand for a protective tariff, welfare work and a budding class-consciousness. But the best thing that has developed historically out of industrialism is the insistent demand in the interest of all that every child shall receive some measure of education and equipment for life. In the South this would seem to be the next step. |