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An Invasion of Egypt?

NVER BEY in a recent speech before the
Turkish parliament declared that there were

two million Turks under arms. The inhabitants of the Turkish Empire are numbered as twenty-five million, of whom some, like the Kurds and Arabs of the desert, are uncivilized, and of whom some, like the Armenians and Greeks, are disloyal. Two million men armed out of a population of twenty-five million would be a percentage as good or better than the percentage of England's military forces, and it would therefore be scarcely safe to accept the figures of Enver Bey. But assuming that there are 1,500,000 Turks "under arms" in different stages of training and equipment, the German general staff is not likely to let them remain idle. The task is the usual difficult one of providing coördinated staff work, auxiliary services, and munitions.

The determination and patriotism of the Turkish recruits is attested by numerous neutral observers. There is nothing at all the matter with the raw material. Moreover, in all probability at least a quarter of a million have seen some service on the Gallipoli Peninsula, and some of these troops could be used as a nucleus round which the less trained recruits might be assembled. Imagine an army of

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300,000 or 400,000 Turks enlisted in a holy war of conquest, their transport and artillery service coördinated by German staff officers, and assisted by three or four German and Bulgarian divisions. Such an army could undoubtedly carry out a serious offensive movement.

According to German advices which may or may not be trustworthy, there will be a Turkish offensive, and the object will be the Suez Canal and Egypt. The difficulties of the plan, and its chances of achieving success, are of considerable military and political interest.

From Belgrade to Constantinople it will be the duty of the Bulgarian army to keep the railway open, and this they should be able to do without difficulty, provided there are no new developments in the Balkans hostile to the Central Powers. Over that railway must come the munitions necessary to the Turks, and it is fair to assume that the trainloads will soon be arriving at Constantinople. The question at once arises, will the Turks thus resupplied attempt an offensive against the remaining British and French forces at Seddul Bahr, or will they be content to maintain a strong defensive.

An answer is impossible. There are, however, some reasons for supposing that the Turks will

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PRINCIPAL RAILROADS OF ASIA MINOR AND THE PROPOSED BAGDAD RAILROAD.

simply hold their present positions for the time being. One reason is that the Germans are well satisfied to keep a large allied force immobilized at the Dardanelles; a second reason is that a Turkish offensive would not promise the best results until the Allies attempted re-embarkment, in which case Allied losses would very likely be immense-even in view of the successful British retirement from Suvla Bay. At any rate it is quite possible that the German general staff will devote Turkish energies to an attack elsewhere.

The Turks have four military fronts. First there is the Dardanelles front, in the neighborhood of which are their principal forces; second, the Caucasus front, of less importance; third, the Mesopotamian army; fourth, the front of the Suez Canal, from which all troops appear to have been withdrawn. It is therefore probable that with the exception of the Caucasus and Mesopotamian armies (hardly more than 125,000 men at most), practically all the Turkish forces are at points in direct rail communication with Constantinople. Little is to be gained by an offensive against Russia in the Caucasus, particularly since that front is served by no railroad. Mesopotamia is scarcely more accessible, for the Bagdad railroad is still unfinished. Not only does a campaign against Egypt promise greater results, but at least in view of the problem of communications the project appears to be quite feasible, if difficult.

Except in armies of the very highest class, organized as to staff, practiced in tactics, and disciplined to the last degree, defensive operations will be far more successful than offensive operations. It is one thing to hold prepared positions, even against a superior enemy, as the British did at Ypres last year, and quite another to attack. The fact that the Turks have been fighting well on the Gallipoli Peninsula does not prove that they will fight equally well in an attack on the Suez Canal.

The Germans can certainly not spare their own troops for the invasion of Egypt; they will have to train the Turks to do it, and they will have to train them to a greater efficiency than the Turks have yet achieved. This will take some time; and I should be much surprised if any serious movement were initiated against Egypt before the spring. Of course it must not be forgotten that we are discussing what may fairly be described as a military adventure. But it must likewise not be forgotten that it is the Turks not the Germans who would be risking the lives of their soldiers, and that the object that of bringing pressure on the only country from which Germany as yet holds no gagewould seem well worth while to German diplomats. Meanwhile there are the possibilities of a strong Turkish offensive at any moment in the very restricted area of the Gallipoli Peninsula.

GERALD MORGAN.

is way theatre Arnold Schönberg's Music

The main line of the railway from Scutari, which is opposite Constantinople on the Asiatic side of the Bosphorus, to the Taurus Mountains in Cilicia is reached by long branches from Angora to the east, and from Smyrna to the west. From the Taurus Mountains the railway continues through Adana, Aleppo and Damascus all the way to Mecca and Medina, skirting the Holy Land and the Sinai Peninsula. Assuming a general point of concentration at Damascus, subsidiary camps on the railway further south, and stations toward and into the Sinai Peninsula, the natural difficulties to be overcome in a general offensive appear with one exception to be less than in the campaigns of Poland.

But there are three objections which must occur to the general staff, none of which can easily be answered:

1. The railway through the Taurus Mountains northwest of Adana and in the Amarus between Adana and Aleppo, has probably not been finished. In the Taurus section (these mountains are 9,000 feet high), engineers in 1913 estimated that nearly twenty miles of tunnels and bridges would have to be constructed.

2. The question of water in the Sinai Peninsula. 3. Can the Turks be depended on for an offensive?

WHEN Arnold Schönberg's "Five Orches

tral Pieces" were played recently by the Chicago and Boston orchestras, no one could make head or tail of them. They were found to contain hardly a single pure chord from start to finish. They have no design that anyone can fathom. They look, on the engraved page, like hen scratches. The sound of them to ordinary ears can be described only in terms of the barnyard. This music bears no discoverable relation to the harmonic system of Bach, Beethoven and Brahms. It is no "radical" music. It is a new music.

Concerning it Schönberg makes this airy comment: "I simply write naturally. My music is the outcome of my personal feeling." This is one of Schönberg's numerous annotations of his own work. And such annotations, taken in the mass, clear the atmosphere immensely, strange as it may seem. "I have not been able to discover any principles of harmony," he writes in his "Harmonielehre." "Sincerity, self-expression, is all that the artist needs; he should say only what he must say, and that according to the laws only of his own nature." What sort of charlatan is this, you ask. Any bumptious amateur would say just that. It is a thing that could be said only by the fool or the genius. And I, for one, believe that the man who wrote the "Gurrelieder" is no fool. If I fail to understand and enjoy the "Five Orchestral Pieces" (as I do) I give Schönberg the benefit of the doubt.

If you have doubts about a man's work, refer to his biography. An artist may "fake" a symphony; he can hardly fake a whole life. He who intends to be a charlatan must take care to write no early works. But it is just Schönberg's early works which are most above cavil. You may reject the "Orchestral Pieces" or the "Six Piano Pieces," but you cannot deny the genius of the "Verklärte Nacht" sextet. What there is of the bizarre in Schönberg's music developed slowly and steadily. There is an

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By this time America has heard the greater number of Schönberg's important works. The excellent performance of the "Kammersymphonie by the Philadelphia Orchestra and the colorful playing of the "Pelleas and Melisande" by the Philharmonic this season nearly completed the list. Unfortunately the "Gurrelieder" is one of the unperformed. The reason is not hard to find. The work demands several choirs of several hundred voices each, together with an orchestra of a hundred and forty men and such instruments as gongs, chimes and "a huge iron chain." The words, by the Danish poet Jacobsen, tell of the love of King Waldemar and Tove of Gurre-a passionate tale that has the ring of the old ballads. Tove dies and Waldemar curses God; and ever after, each midnight, he with his train goes a-hunting madly beneath the walls of Gurre, over chasms and through the air, while the chains in his maniac's cell clank their terrible retribution. The music is that of Strauss, the Strauss of "Also Sprach Zarathustra "-gigantic, regal, terrifying. The sextet, "Verklärte Nacht," composed about this time, is sensuously sentimental in the modern German style, and the songs are grandiose and dramatic. But in the symphonic poem, "Pelleas and Melisande," Schönberg overshot the mark. He attempted a detailed narration in music, and he was right to react violently against a style which overburdens music with "literature."

About this time he fell in with the Munich painter, Kandinsky, who in his maudlin book "Ueber der Geistige in der Kunst," enunciates his "law of inner necessity" with a solemn face, as a scientific principle. His influence intensified the composer's reaction against the modern sentimentalizing

of the art of music, and brought him to a critical attitude toward his materials. "There are relatively few people," Schönberg wrote about this time, “ who are able to understand in purely musical terms what music has to say. The notion that a musical work must awaken some sort of image, and if it does not is worthless, is as widespread as only the false and banal can be."

And then began the "middle period." In this come the "Kammersymphonie," a number of songs, and the D minor quartet, which was played a couple of seasons ago by the Flonzaley Quartet and first awakened the interest of American audiences in Schönberg's work. In these we discover an introspective concern with the musical materials, abstracted from any sentimental "meaning." The style is obviously mixed. There are passages of great sensuous beauty, like those in the Sextet, and again pages given over to the development of thematic material with a cerebral logic and strict economy that can be paralleled only in the great works of the classical period. The form, too, shows Kandinsky's influence. Just as the " fauve" painter slices up his picture and shakes together the parts, so Schönberg slices up the movements of the classical symphony or quartet and mingles and fuses the slices into one movement according to the "law of inner necessity." The structural design can be explained by no book, yet somehow it seems inevitable, as though the sonata form had developed to this stage through sheer inner compulsion.

When Schönberg passed into his third period he threw over completely the harmonic system which had been consecrated during five centuries. In the "Orchestral Pieces," the two groups of "Piano Pieces," and in certain works which have not yet been heard in this country, he writes nothing in his scales or in his chords which can be related to anything we have heard before. The "Piano Pieces " are severe and, at first hearing, undeniably ugly. The "Orchestral Pieces " are of the same stuff relentlessly technical and musically "pure." Report says that the "Lieder des Pierrot Lunaire," which are "twenty-one songs for speaking voice and small orchestra," are like nothing else yet heard under heaven. I shall not attempt an apology for these works, with their apparently wanton aimlessness and harshness. We may ultimately decide that they weren't worth the trouble. The only thing I can be sure of is that we must hear them-hear them often and with open ears-before our judgment about them will be of any worth.

Schönberg's annotations on these works, or rather on his development among them, go far toward explaining his art. He says, for instance, that music must be understood in its own terms which means, I take it, nothing esoteric, but merely that music

must be heard instead of being seen. But he adds that it may be necessary to clothe your works in some visible dress, as Wagner clothed his dramatic music. So for the London performance of the "Orchestral Pieces "-as "abstract" as any music ever written-he supplied a few highly imaginative program notes, stating that the pieces "seek to express all that dwells in us subconciously like a dream," and much more of the same sort. But when he writes for the few he strikes a different note. In the "Harmonielehre," which is for the most part a conventional work thoroughly grounded, like his early music, in Bach, he offers, I think, one of the most enlightening dicta concerning music that have yet been made. "The alleged tones which are believed to be foreign to harmony do not exist. They are merely tones foreign to our accepted harmonic system. Tonality is not a hard and fast compulsion which directs the course of music, but a concept which makes it possible for us to give our ideas the requisite aspect of compactness. Beauty does not appear until all unessential detail disappears."

Notice what he has done in these few sentences. In the first two he has denied all inherent law and principle in music; he has asserted anarchy in the strict sense of the word. In the last he has set up the severest standard which classical art evolved.

W

Then notice the third sentence. "Not a compulsion but a concept." Can you think of a neater expression of the pragmatic notion of law? No other comment by a musician about music has ever seemed to me so fundamental. It bases musical procedure not upon the eternal verities but upon the actual conventions of musical speech held in common by composers and audiences. It makes composition an act of creation, not of discovery. It makes music a part of the process of living. It makes the audience (the democracy) and the specialist (the servant of the democracy) the two poles of the magnet of art-creation.

Go back to your "later Schönberg" with this in mind. Assume him innocent until you have found him guilty. Blot from your mind, if you can, that feeling of yours for tonality which was artificially fostered in you in the first place. Look for what the composer tried to do, not for what somebody else thought he ought to have done. See if you cannot feel that rigid excision of “unessential detail" on the testimony of your ears, not of your "critical principles." If you can't, then to the rubbish heap with Schönberg and his music. But if you can, acknowledge generously that you have had that most delightful of experiences the experience of finding yourself wrong.

HIRAM KELLEY MODERWELL.

Where Women Disagree

OMAN suffragists are lacking in consideration. Having poured out their strength in the fall, they were repulsed in four Eastern states. Under such circumstances they should have subsided. Beaten in New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts by considerable majorities, beaten in Pennsylvania by the inertia of Philadelphia, its unpatched spiritual puncture, it was their plain obligation to stay beaten. But they decline to stay beaten. In spite of their downfall the suffragists persist. In spite of their lavish expenditures, mental and physical, they continue to draw on their resources-resources fed by a purpose so recurrent as to seem unconquerable as naturalness itself. They are neither exhausted nor discouraged. And the very leaders who most spent themselves in unfavorable campaigns now undertake, worn but tireless, the organization of national action.

The terms of that national action have just been defined by two national suffragist conventions at Washington, D. C. Outside suffrage circles those terms remain vague. Inside suffrage circles, because of the divergences of the two conventions, they are not wholly understood. But there is no real reason

for confusion, and the sharper the differentiation the better.

So far as federal legislation is concerned, all the suffragists assembled in Washington met to work toward the same objective. That is the simple equal franchise amendment to the federal constitution, known to suffragists as the Susan B. Anthony amendment. Although they agree on this objective, the policies of the two organizations thereafter disagree.

The smaller organization, the Congressional Union, specializes entirely on the federal amendment. It elects to disregard the process of ratification state by state so far as immediate action is concerned. It considers federal action on the suffrage amendment the summum bonum, and it believes in concentrating agitation for suffrage on the party that has power at the moment. For that purpose it believes that all women should judge the government at Washington solely with respect to its attitude toward the suffrage amendment. It believes that women should work with all parties when necessary, but it believes also that in the states where women have the vote, that vote should be used solely for its leverage on the obdurate legislators at Wash- National Board then sought to deal with its deposed ington.

The larger organization, the National Association, has a different policy. And how the Union came to diverge from the National may perhaps be gathered by glancing at the National's history.

At its inception, naturally, the National Association did not concentrate on federal legislation. Itself the result of a union between state and national workers, it sought both types of enfranchisement from the start, but because the Western states offered the line of least resistance the work in the states became paramount. It was, in fact, a necessary preliminary to work on the hill at Washington. The early suffragists were pioneers. They were voices crying in the wilderness. They had in them that obduracy of disinterested principle which nothing on earth can alter, but they were not, like Messrs. Roosevelt and Harriman, " practical men." They presented their Susan B. Anthony amendment without any reference to lobbying-possibly with a shrewd recognition of the inutility of lobbying. But to the cause they were consecrated. It was a righteousness of which they were priests and prophets. The actual fruition of the educational campaigns in the West, however, began to qualify the National's attitude. With the increase in the number of suffrage states, moreover, the prospect for federal amendment changed, and the National came to be more than a centralization for propaganda. It began to be a centralization for federal policy.

At Philadelphia in 1912 the first effort at sustained leverage on Congress was ordained. Miss Jane Addams and others brought about the appointment of a congressional committee to lobby in Washington for the federal amendment. At the head of this committee was placed a young devotee to the cause, Miss Alice Paul, who, like Miss Lucy Burns and Miss Anne Martin, had worked for suffrage with the Pankhursts in England. At Washington, in 1912-1913, Miss Paul and Miss Burns went among the legislators on the hill, and they amplified that work by forming an auxiliary of their committee, the Congressional Union. But before the convention of 1913 this offspring of 1912 developed a character by no means anticipated. The Union, in the view of the National, aimed to hold the "party in power" strictly responsible for the passage of the federal amendment. As the National had always proclaimed itself non-partisan this stigmatization of a given party as anti-suffrage was deemed unwarranted. As an appointee of the National, Miss Paul was held to account for this policy in 1913. She declined to abandon it. After much discussion a new capitol committee was nominated by the National, headed by Mrs. Medill McCormick, to conduct lobbying in Washington on non-partisan lines. The

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appointee. But Miss Alice Paul was firmly convinced that her policy at the capitol was the right Backed by one of the former contributors to the National, Mrs. O. H. P. Belmont, she decided to extend the Congressional Union as a national organization for the purpose of securing passage of the Susan B. Anthony amendment. As she clung to her policy of discriminating against the party in office, the National refused to affiliate her Union.

Meanwhile the effect of Miss Paul's secession stimulated the National's federal policy. Although convinced by a large majority that it was a great mistake to antagonize any party as such, the National proceeded by means of its workers at congress to organize pressure on individual anti-suffrage congressmen from their home districts. And an attempt at political inventiveness was shown in the formulation of another suffrage amendment, the Shafroth, which aimed to circumvent the state rights objection of the Democratic party.

In 1913-1914 the Congressional Union sought to give effect to its federal policy by opposing the re-election of Democratic congressmen as such. Since it campaigned principally in the equal suffrage states, however, it found itself compelled by its logic to attack some of the ablest and strongest federal advocates of suffrage. It justified this action on the ground that no Democratic congressman had left the party caucus that condemned suffrage, while Democratic congressmen had left the party caucus because of the duty on beet sugar. Beet sugar was more important to Democrats than woman suffrage. In the eyes of Senator Thomas, who had worked night and day for suffrage at the capitol, this opposition was ridiculous, unreasoning and unjust. It was, at any rate, quite dubious in its political effect. Had the Congressional Union marshalled all enfranchised women against the Democratic party, its leaders might have inspired fear and a contrite spirit and a federal amendment. As it was, they caused immense irritation among the partisan women voters in the suffrage states. They seemed political fanatics to pro-suffrage congressmen, and they do not appear to have brought about any incontrovertible defeats. They assert that as a result of their efforts, however, the Democrats at Washington are much more amenable. They indicate that President Wilson voted for suffrage. Whether these results are the outcome of the anti-party policy is a point much in dispute.

At Nashville in 1914 the members of the National were agitated as to the rival claims of their own congressional policy and the Union's congressional policy. For a time a minority hoped that Miss Paul's views might be made to prevail, but the overwhelming majority of the delegates opposed the

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