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NE encouraging fact is the manifest distress of the interventionists, who had hoped for a far more grandiose undertaking in Siberia. For the present no serious attempt at fomenting civil war in Russia can be made, and it is possible that the presence of American troops, together with an economic mission, will open a means of communication that will bring the facts of the Siberian situation to the American people. And certainly the facts are less favorable to a "reconstitution of the eastern front " at Lake Baikal than are the canards manufactured in the various capitals and dated Vladivostok or Shanghai. But the interventionists will take hope in the possibility of diverting the expeditionary force from its original purpose. The commander of the combined Allied forces-who will be a Japanese-will not await instructions from President Wilson as General Pershing had to do in northern Mexico. It is easy to conceive that cir

cumstances may bring about fighting, even though the commander is endeavoring to the best of his ability to keep within the limits of the President's policy. It is to be borne in mind that there are thousands of clever men in Russia and in the Occident who will do their best to bring about a clash between the Soviet forces and the Allied force. Whether they will succeed or not no one can possibly predict. But so much is clear: limited liability intervention in Mexico, where all the conditions were under our control, was a quite different thing from apparently limited liability intervention in Russia, where our control of conditions is negligible.

S we go to press it looks as if the German retirement between Soissons and Rheims would cease at the line of the Vesle. The German Staff may decide to yield the territory between the Vesle and the Aisne, but if so it will do so not because it has no alternative but because it prefers for reasons of subsequent convenience to stabilize the front on the second line rather than the first.

After their exhausting fighting and rapid advance of the past three weeks the Allies can scarcely be in a position to exert a very powerful pressure on the present front, while the problem for the Germans of concentrating to defend the line either of the Vesle or the Aisne must be comparatively easy to handle. Assuming, then, that the second battle of the Marne is practically over, it remains to be seen what its consequence will be. Have the Germans retired only with the intention of returning to the attack a few weeks later with renewed force? Or will they be obliged to surrender the initiative in the west as they did in the fall of 1914? The first alternative is the more probable, although it is difficult to understand how, after their recent

failure, they will dare to launch a major offensive against one portion of a line which, as recent experience proves, cannot be held securely on the other portions. But the second alternative cannot be dismissed as peremptorily as it would have been two weeks ago. There are symptoms of real weakness in the German strategic dispositions. Apparently they did not dare to save the Marne salient at the expense of weakening Prince Rupprecht's army. They must have feared an attack from the reenforced and renewed army of General Haig. If this is true to any considerable extent, they may be obliged to surrender the initiative now and accept further losses of territory in order to consolidate a defensive position.

N an interview recently cabled to this country

John Spargo declares that after a thorough inquiry he has not discovered more than a negligible

amount of defeatism either in France or Great Britain. An overwhelming preponderance of sentiment among the labor men and socialists in both countries is heartily in favor of continuing the war until victory is assured. This is true, and it always has been true. The impression to the contrary is the work of people who differ from the labor representatives as to the test of victory, and who for that reason have sought to fasten the stigma of defeatism upon the British and French labor parties. The latter have suffered from systematic misrepresentation of their position and programme at the hands of their opponents and of the press. They have never believed in abandoning military resistance to the German army as long as the German government persisted in using it as an instrument of international aggression. In this sense they will fight to the bitter end for victory, but by victory they have always meant, not merely the result of such a defeat to do away at least in the defeat of the German armies, but the ability as part with the cause of future wars. For that reason they have persistently tried to revive during the

war itself the method and the spirit of international political discussion and criticism. That is why they have insisted on the definition of Allied war aims and upon the desirability of an inter-belligerent conference provided an agreement could be reached

to the conditions of such a conference.

ANY tendency to "defeatism" which exists in

the British and French labor parties arises from a fear that some of the Allied governments will prolong the war unnecessarily and make impossible a desirable peace by insisting on excessively drastic terms or by subordinating political to military victory. These fears were originally aroused

by the publication of the secret treaties and by the terms offered to Austria-Hungary in the Prince Sixtus negotiations. They have not been allowed to control the action of the French and British labor parties, partly because of their abhorrence of the way in which the German government treated Russia and Rumania, and partly because of their confidence in President Wilson's political management of the war. But they might come to the surface, in case Germany adopted a conciliatory peace policy or in case the Allied governments should adopt an unnecessarily unconciliatory one. But these conditions are not likely to be fulfilled. Unless we are wholly mistaken the labor parties of France and Great Britain, precisely because they believe so firmly in the necessity of final conciliation, will be more likely than their opponents to reject terms of peace which would compromise the issues of the war rather than authorize an advance towards an ultimate solution.

ILITARY cooperation between two countries like France and the United States must inevitably lead to an increased intellectual commerce between them; and many of our leaders in science and learning have been expecting great advantages to American scholarship from the increasing contact with the subtle and refined spirit of the French. Few, however, would have predicted that the earliest manifestation of this increased intellectual cooperation between the two countries would occur in the field of legal science. Not many years ago legal learning in this country was utterly provincial. Complete ignorance of foreign experience and thought in the realm of law characterized the leaders of our bar. Many of them, like Surrogate Fowler, expressly preached such ignorance as a duty of proper patriotic pride. For this reason the article which Professors Duguit, Demogue, Haurion and other leaders of French legal thought have recently contributed to the Yale and Harvard Law Reviews are of more than technical interest. They are signs of the larger outlook and more scientific training which is dawning for one of our most influential professions. For the breach in the dead Chinese wall which has so long surrounded our law we are largely indebted to the efforts of a group of enlightened law professors like Wigmore, Pound and Freund who have worked arduously in the conviction that a more vital training for our lawyers is a necessary prerequisite for genuine improvement in the administration of the law. By their own teachings and writings, and by arranging for a series of translations from foreign works on the history and philosophy of the law, they have been endeavoring to transform legal education from the trade school

model to that of the liberal scientific ideal. Those who are afraid lest the new learning weaken our cherished national ideals may be reminded that in the Revolutionary period and in the formative period of our national life, our leading statesmen and jurists-witness the writers of The Federalist, Kent and Story-drew freely on French legal literature.

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HE Department of Justice has reached an arrangement with the Harvester Trust by the terms of which the trust, in consideration of the dropping of the pending suit, agrees to divest itself of certain properties within eighteen months of the close of the present war, and otherwise to restrain various activities that appear monopolizing in the eyes of the Department, if at the end of this period "the foregoing measures have not proved adequate, in the opinion of the Government, to restore competitive conditions." One is reminded of an incident in the life of Bismarck. On one of his visits to Petrograd the designing German found himself puzzled by a sentry cutting a small triangle in the centre of an immerse lawn. What was the sentry guarding? The officer in command of the garrison could say only that a sentry had always been posted there. But Bismarck, for reasons we now understand, had to get to the bottom of all things Russian; accordingly he set a squad of Ph.D.'s at work on the problem. After months of research it was discovered that in the days of the great Catherine a violet of an otherwise unknown species had appeared at this spot, and a sentry had been posted to guard it. Our Department of Justice would restore competitive conditions, rare violet of a remote golden age! Would it were not extinct! But the Department of Justice guards the spot where it was, while the old world travails in agony to bring forth a new.

MRi

R. LLOYD GEORGE'S speech comes as the culminating point of a series of reports upon commercial reconstruction which look significantly back to the resolutions of the Paris Confer

ence. All of them ask for the exclusion of German trade as the coping-stone of the new industrial edifice. Not less important is the Prime Minister's statement that imperial preference is inevitable. It looks as though there were a genuine diversity of outlook between Mr. Lloyd George and Mr. Wilson. Certainly it is impossible to reconcile these suggestions with the latter's answer to the Papal peace offer. Nor is it easy to understand the sources of support upon which Mr. Lloyd George is counting. Both Lancashire and Scotland are firmly opposed to anything that would depend upon a protective

ing the futility and even the improbability of a military victory over Prussianism which was not associated with an increase of democracy in American domestic and foreign policy.

As a consequence of their general attitude the tories have protested vigorously against the use of military exigencies as the excuse for consummating economic and political reforms. They have insisted, whenever a war emergency seemed to demand some innovation in political or economic policy, upon a promise to return to the status quo ante as soon as the war is over. They have of course some measure of justification in assuming this attitude. Many decisions taken during the abnormal emergency of war will need reconsideration at a later date and under more normal conditions, and the truth of this statement may be accepted even by those who question whether the alteration in social and economic facts will permit a return to the status quo ante. But conservatives are not justified on this ground in opposing economic and political readjustments which by their very nature cannot later be reconsidered, but which would none the less improve the administrative efficiency or the popular morale of the nation during war. The kind of national moral unity which contributes to military victory during war is gravely injured by postponing until the end of hostilities the satisfaction of grievances whose existence has impaired national moral unity during peace. A prolonged and exhausting war places a terrific strain upon the whole fabric of class, sectional and popular loyalty. It brings out the imperfections in the existing national organization. Some of these imperfections, such as profiteering, the exploitation of labor and the waste in the distribution of food, can be dealt with by temporary measures which can later be reconsidered. Others, such as the enfranchisement of women and the grant of Home Rule to Ireland, call for practically irrevocable remedies. But if the latter are dodged, because the decision is irrevocable, the government which connives at the evasion suffers a loss in national moral vitality. The unity of a democratic nation both in war and peace depends upon its ability to recognize genuine grievances and in applying the needed remedies.

President Wilson did not exaggerate in declaring the submission to the states of the Federal Amendment to be "an essential psychological element in the conduct of the war for democracy." The refusal after the experience of the past two years to grant political equality to women by the simplest, the quickest, and the most decisive method would form a contemptible exhibition of American masculine ineptitude and of moral obtuseness. It would justify English, French, Russian and German

radicals in doubting the sincerity of a nation which raised such a hullabaloo about its democracy but which persisted in condemning half of its population as political inferiors and outcasts. It would justify them in asking whether a nation which was capable of such flagrant hypocrisy would not be equally capable of arming to safeguard the world for democracy and then of using the resulting increase of power, as our Navy League would have us use it, for the sake of America "über alles." But worst of all, it would divide Americans against one another. Many of the ablest and most public spirited women in the country would be chagrined and disheartened at the refusal by Congress to do what it could to grant them official partnership in the political democracy for which their brothers and husbands and sons are fighting. They would feel keenly the hypocrisy, the injustice, the sheer callous pigheadedness of such a refusal, and they would feel it all the more because the Congressional refusal would compel them to expend on suffrage agitation a fund of political energy and social aspiration which they would prefer to use in contending against the enemies of democracy abroad rather than in this country.

The suffragists are not putting a pistol to the head of Congress and threatening to shoot in the event of a refusal to redress their grievances. If American women are still denied equality of political responsibility they will not, except in the case of a small minority, either rebel or sulk. They will continue to behave just as if their masters had kindly granted to them an official share in the democratic cause on behalf of which they are laboring and suffering. ing and suffering. But neither will they abandon their present course of combining with war work suffrage agitation. If they were to connive at their own disfranchisement at the very moment when throughout the world women were triumphantly vindicating their title to full political and social partnership with men, it is they rather than their opponents who would be exhibiting political ineptitude and moral ignorance. tude and moral ignorance. For they would have a perfect demonstration of the inability of their opponents to be converted by anything except force majeure.

It is a significant fact that no conspicuous American male anti-suffragist has followed Mr. Asquith's example and allowed himself to be converted by the contribution to the democratic cause which women have made during the long harrowing process of the war. Yet can any one search the record with an unclouded mind and doubt whether women have not earned the right to full political and social partnership with men? Wherein have they failed in this exacting test of civic ability and virtue? Have they shown any greater reluctance

than men to pay the necessary cost of the war in labor and suffering? Have they betrayed any less courage and fortitude in accepting sacrifice and danger? Have they not been as flexible and alert as men in adapting themselves to novel and trying circumstances? Have they not discovered a heretofore neglected ability to occupy exacting technical, executive and consultative positions? Have they not risen at least as well as men to every political and social responsibility imposed upon them and to every practical opportunity placed in their way? Their net gain from the war, as William Allen White has finely said, has been a gain in fellow

safeguard democracy, and we pledge in return that hereafter you shall be fully consulted about the national policy in the interest of which you have so cheerfully and so loyally labored and suffered." We pity the American man who fails to divine the sheer moral obliquity which may prevent him from endorsing those words.

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An Allied Economic Agreement

have played a subtle and indispensable part in a great political enterprise, and in asking Congress to do what it can to incorporate them in the body politic they are only asking for a belated grudging acknowledgment of a manifest and implacable fact.

In one respect only has women's part in this war been sharply distinguished from that of men. They have not carried arms. They are killed by bombs, but they do not themselves kill. Many anti-suffragists will consider this difference of function decisive. Southern senators will still doubt whether any part of the population which was not capable, if necessary, of fighting its way to the polls is entitled to the vote. Political publicists to whom the state is fundamentally the organization of power to preserve order will still doubt whether any citizen should vote who could not be enrolled in a posse comitatus. The difference is, it is true, decisive, but it is decisive in favor of granting the suffrage to women, not in refusing it. Every nation which enfranchises women proclaims thereby a final repudiation of the politics of compulsion and binds itself in honor to cultivate the politics of consent. That is why President Wilson did not exaggerate when he declared that the action of Congress on the suffrage amendment would have "an important and immediate influence upon the whole atmosphere and morale of the nations engaged in the war." By incorporating in the body politic the sex whose influence and power must always depend upon persuasion and consent rather than compulsion America would be consummating democracy in the way which would most sharply distinguish it from Prussianism. American men would, in effect, be saying to American women: Although for merly we denied to you any sufficient responsibility for the foreign policy in which our part in this war originated, you have assumed your full share of the sacrifices at a time when without such cooperation we men would have failed. We interpret your aid as an indication that in the future as in the present you, the physically weaker sex, will assist us to use force in so far as force may again be needed to

restrictions to be imposed upon Germany after the war, there is a rational core demanding serious consideration, however little we may like the spirit that appears to animate them. Without doubt it may be necessary to place ourselves in a position to impose drastic restrictions on German trade after the war. Control of world trade will be found to be one of the chief bargaining assets of the Allies when peace negotiations are actually opened. Accordingly, whether Germany is to be admitted to equal participation in the benefits of such trade, or to be placed under more or less severe handicaps, are questions that ought to remain open until the proper time comes for closing them. Apparently Lloyd George attempts partly to close them by the threat that the longer the war lasts the harsher will be the terms imposed upon Germany. The position appears to us untenable. If it were accepted generally by the Allies, much of the bargaining value of the Allied control of trade would be lost. We are going to demand that Germany relinquish various territorial conquests, and in return what will we offer: access to the trade for which she is yearning? According to Lloyd George, no; we shall continue to restrict her for her past sins. That may be human nature; but it is not business.

On the other hand, to take the extreme liberal position and proclaim that when peace comes, no matter on what territorial and political terms, Germany shall automatically come into full possession of equal trading rights, is also to waste the Allied assets at the peace conference. Germany will make no concessions on account of Allied trade control if she is morally certain that the world's markets will be opened to her for nothing. It is true that no responsible Allied statesman has promised Germany that peace, whatever its terms, will make of her a most favored nation. But Germany is not likely to concern herself greatly over words when she can rest her calculations upon a broad basis of facts. She knows perfectly well that unless the Allies can present a solid front in matters of economic policy their control of trade cannot extend beyond