required to overcome the real obstacles was so tremendous and the resulting momentum so irresistible that the national will now keeps grinding away at obstacles which no longer impede its course and which it would do better to leave alone. In the case of the I. W. W. trial, for instance, public opinion had every reason to support the government in suppressing and punishing any agitation against the war and the authority of the United States which resulted in actions obstructive to American success. In bringing these prosecutions, however, the test of guilt should be not the holding of a revolutionary opinion, but the actual commission of obstructive acts. The line is difficult to draw but upon the successful and resolute attempt to draw it will depend the perpetuity of the American democracy. In this as in other respects the danger now is becoming the reverse of what it was during the first few months after American entrance into the war. The danger now is of an insistence on American national unity so overbearing that it will be followed as soon as the war is over by a no less violent reaction. In that case, the American nation might be deprived for many years of the moral union which should be its most valuable reward for the sacrifices and the exertions of the war.

THE

HE Japanese rice riots, which despite the press censorship are revealed as widespread and menacing, are a sign of proletarian awakening. The growth of industry in the Island Empire has been astonishingly rapid and, as in most countries, this early stage of capitalism means a crudely ruthless exploitation of the poor. The accumulating wealth has been narrowly concentrated into a few hands, while the mass of the population becomes daily more impoverished. Money wages have risen but food prices have increased even faster and rents have become almost prohibitive. There is an enormous exodus from the over-crowded rice-paddies to the over-crowded cities, and for these destitute armies of new factory workers there is no adequate provision in Tokio, Osaka and other Japanese cities. No one who has seen the dismal slums of Tokio can imagine a more desolate, comfortless and precarious life than that of these proletarians, forced off the land by an ever-increasing birth-rate and thrown into factories and industrial cities which have made no provision for them. The European war has aggravated all these evils. Wages again have been advanced but food prices have risen to a point, partly through scarcity and partly through a permitted speculation, where hundreds of thousands of chronically under-fed Japanese are in danger of actual starvation.

BVIOUSLY the riots are political as well as economic in character. For more than a decade a strong feeling of resentment has been growing up in Japan against the exclusion of the wage-earner from all political influence. Disfranchised by a high property qualification for voters, the Japanese worker finds the political parties arrayed against him and conducted in the interest of the propertied classes. He has no discretion in foreign or domestic affairs, which are a class interest, and no veto power over immense military and naval programmes, the chief burden of which falls upon him. The strike in Japan is illegal, the trade union is frowned upon and all socialist movements are cruelly repressed. Factory legislation is ineffective and perfunctory, and speculation and profiteering on an immense scale are allowed. Against all this repression the literate Japanese proletarian has secretly rebelled and today we find him for the first time using the weapons that the unrepresented masses have always used, riot, destruction, violence. The riots will be put down, for the government is capable and thorough. It is also, we believe, intelligent. If it is intelligent it will realize that Imperial doles of money and rice will not solve the problems revealed by this deep proletarian unrest and that the time has come to admit the wage-earner to at least a small share in the government of the nation.

ANCHURIA is one

MA

of the regions in

which the war is quite certain to produce important political changes. The former working agreement for the definition of interests between Russia and Japan was satisfactory at the time when it was concluded. It safeguarded Japanese economic and political interests in the south, and gave Russia such control as she required over the road to Vladivostok. Nevertheless, so long as Russia held this easy route to the Pacific, Japan's primacy in that quarter was subject to challenge. She was therefore justified, by the logic of national interest, in cherishing the hope that conditions might arise in which Russian influence might be forced to recede behind the Amur river. Something very like such conditions have arisen out of the Russian revolution. By what principle can the Russian democracy insist upon imperialistic control of this part of the Chinese Empire? On what grounds could Moscow object if Japanese troops, especially operating in conjunction with the Chinese, were to occupy the railway over Manchurian territory from the upper branches of the Amur to the Ussuri headwaters? As a matter of fact the Japanese are actually moving in this direction. And when the war ends, it is difficult to see what nation would have a moral ground for requesting the evacuation of Manchuria by the Japanese. They are likely to remain, and in so doing they will establish themselves as the undisputed masters of the eastern Pacific.

FFICIAL relations between the governments of the Allies and the Russian Soviets are not so unfriendly as might be inferred from the interventionist press despatches. The American consul at Moscow remains at his post-having destroyed his records, to be sure-and the nationals of the Allied nations, after a brief period of ugly threats of arrests and reprisals, appear to be free to go about their affairs or leave the country. At Vladivostok, where the friction might easily have become serious, the Allies have not yet found it necessary to proclaim martial law, although insistently pressed to do so, especially by persons thousands of miles away who pretend to understand local conditions in Vladivostok better than the commanders on the spot. The appearance of a British force at Baku, cooperating with the local Soviets against the Turks and Germans, would be the most hazardous enterprise in history if the Allied governments were not in some way managing to convey to the Russian people an impression of good faith. The Russian situation is hazardous, but there is not yet any sufficient reason why friends of Russia and of democracy should give up hope. The counter-revolutionary forces are hard at work but their influence with the Allied governments should not be overrated.

G

ERMANY does not intend to back up the Bolsheviki, whatever the Allies may undertake against them. All shades of German opinion as represented by Germania, the Tägliche Rundschau, the Kreuz-Zeitung, the Tageblatt and Vorwärts are in favor of leaving the Russian Reds to their fate. All this is perfectly intelligible. It was impossible for imperialistic Germany to do business with Russia under the Soviet government. All the German effort expended in propaganda was wasted: the Bolsheviki were too shrewd ever to forget that whatever the German government might promise while its energies were occupied by war, it was by inherent necessity their implacable enemy. Kaiserism can not tolerate any kind of democracy in Russia. On the other hand, an anti-Soviet government, set up under Allied auspices, will doubtless exhibit an initial anti-German tendency. But the Germans do not despair of their ability to capture it in the end. They captured the Finnish conservative government in spite of the fact that that government received its first official recognition from France. The Svinhufvud government of Finland, drowning in a sea of social disorder, was in no posi

G

ERMAN and Austrian indignation over British recognition of the Czecho-Slovak state is sufficient evidence that such recognition was not an empty form. It has been one of the cardinal points in the war aims of the Central Powers that the Allies should be brought to the point where they would agree to raise no questions as to the " internal conditions of the Dual Empire." This meant primarily the questions of an independent Czecho-Slovakia and an independent JugoSlavia. British recognition of the Czecho-Slovak nation amounts to a proclamation that no peace conference will be held which does not admit to consideration questions pertaining to the subject nationalities of Austria-Hungary. It would be monstrous for the British state to recognize the Czecho-Slovaks as independent allies and later to subscribe to a peace in which their interests were not even considered. Italian negotiations with the Jugo-Slavs may be regarded as of the same effect. Italy could hardly sit in a peace conference which excluded from consideration a political entity with which Italy had made political and territorial conventions. Such recognition of the Austrian nationalities will later prove to be valuable countermeasures against German peace offensives. It is to be hoped that the United States will lend the weight of its official recognition to the national claims of the Czecho-Slovaks and Jugo-Slavs.

M

ODERN languages are to occupy a new place in the British system of education, if the recommendations embodied in a recently published government report are adopted by the educational authorities. The government is urged to create fifty-five professorships and one hundred and ten lectureships in modern studies, and it is further recommended that large numbers of scholarships be created and subventions granted to students wishing to complete their courses in foreign universities. The committee which prepared the report offers a valiant defense for modern languages as an instrument of culture, by which " we mean that training which tends to develop the higher faculties, the imagination, the sense of beauty, and the intellectual comprehension." Especial emphasis is laid upon the utilitarian value of modern languages. The British cannot afford to go out into the world to reconquer their trading position handicapped by their ancient ignorance of foreign tongues. It is worth noting that the committee displays none of our American sentimental aversion to the enemy's tongue. As keys to current contributions to knowledge the committee ranks the modern languages in the order of French, German, Italian, Russian and Spanish. This is the significant order for America also from a cultural point of view. From a utilitarian point of view American educators would probably be justified in giving a higher ranking to Spanish, at least.

Revolution and Dogma

W

E do not know what Nicolas Lenin thought on that day in October, 1917, when the proletarian revolution conquered Russia, but to the minds of his followers there must have come hopes more daringly optimistic than any that have visited the poor of the world in all the centuries. Tomorrow the cooperative commonwealth. The peasants would have their land, the workmen their industrial freedom, the proletarians and the poor full control of government. Thereafter, no exploitation and no misery. The Russians and, in rapid course, the peoples of all the world would labor and live in freedom and peace.

The men who engineered this revolution and dreamed these dreams did not for a moment expect that they would be unopposed. They were not utopians expecting the rich to give up their riches willingly. They believed in compulsion, in a bloodless, or if necessary, a bloody overpowering of all classes antagonizing the revolution. Nor did they believe in half-measures. The capitalists were to be deprived of their capital without any pretense of compensation; they were to be driven out of state offices and out of the control of industry. They were not even to be politically represented until conditions had been created which rendered the perpetuation of capitalism impossible. The wage-earners and peasants, freely cooperating, strongly united by a faith in socialism, were to take immediate and complete possession of government and business and rule the nation in the interest of the masses. There was to be no compromise and no concessions.

Today this confident mood is already a thing of the past. The Russian Socialist Revolution, having overcome the opposition of all the capitalists, has struck against an infinitely more formidable and potent resistance. The revolutionists are faced with the problem which eternally challenges all societies and all social forms, that of making a living, of producing and distributing goods, of maintaining an effective economic organization. To accommodate itself to this sheer necessity of self-preservation the revolution is obliged to take

account of stock, to smother cherished dogmas, to make a temporary composition with former antagonists, to learn from capitalism. It is forced "to halt the offensive (against capital) for the present."

All this one can learn from the perusal of a long and truly remarkable statement by Nicolas Lenin, published in the Pravda of Petrograd on April 28, 1918. It was, we imagine, a difficult statement for a revolutionary leader to make. It is blunt, courageous, intelligent, based on a deep knowledge of history and economics and infused with a flaming revolutionary spirit, and at the same time it is

as cautious, concrete and prosaic as though written by an American business organizer. "Keep accurate and conscientious accounts," adjures Lenin, "conduct business economically, do not loaf, do not steal, maintain strict discipline at work." "The success of the revolution," he continues, depends on the ability for practical organization." We must " effect a complete change in the mood of the masses" and " turn them to regular, uninterrupted and disciplined labor." We must purchase the services of " a thousand first class scientists and specialists" and though we pay each of these capitalist "stars" twenty-five, fifty or even a hundred thousand rubles a year, they will be cheap at the price. Before we take over further properties we must learn to run efficiently those we have already taken. "The levying of contributions on the bourgeoisie-a measure which in principle is undoubtedly acceptable and deserving proletarian approval " -" should give way to a system of regularly collected property and income taxes." In other words, management" is better than conquest" and, for the present at least, a reasonable system of taxation is more productive than a drastic system of wholesale confiscation.

Does this read like Poor Richard's Almanac? Perhaps. Yet the fundamental spirit of Lenin is diametrically opposed to that of Franklin. This Russian does not care about mere accumulation either for the individual or, beyond a certain point, for society; if he talks of production and distribution, and of the discipline and organization necessary to secure these, it is because he realizes-is forced to realize that without production there can be no socialism. He clearly recognizes-what most revolutionists ignore-that the mere conquest of political power does not perpetuate a real change unless the class that has attained power is able to keep the economic process going. It is with evident reluctance that he makes this temporary compromise with capitalism. Yet such compromise is fatally necessary. Dogma, even the most revolutionary dogma, must in the end surrender to facts. Lenin, in other words, now sees that a policy of

have hoped for was time to permit the training and education of the masses so that they might hold and use the power they had seized. Doubtless Lenin had few illusions as to the probability of success. Internal opposition, the "shameful" peace with Germany, the growing menace of warring nations, the intellectual unpreparedness of the Russian masses, the disintegrating after-effects of almost four years of war, the errors and gross transgressions of the Bolsheviki themselves-all these were signs that the power to act would pass, that the hour of opportunity was brief. Perhaps our conclusion is fanciful, but to us this memorandum of Lenin seems like an appeal to the opinion of a world not yet born even more than a plea to a bewildered Russia alone and friendless and menaced by foreign foe and civil war, by disruption and famine.

Realpolitik in Business

WHAT

THAT, in essence, is that hideous thing, visibly embodied in the present German government, that the civilized world is determined to destroy, though millions of lives must be the cost? It is an organization of selfish personal, family and caste ambitions, inhuman, insatiate, utterly ruthless in its methods but apt at slavering over its designs with pretenses of efficiency and promises of a better lot for mankind. By fair means or foul, indifferently, the forces of greed coming to a head under the Kaiser's helmet would subject all Europe, if possible the whole world, to a common dominion. Why? In order that thereafter the peoples might be governed efficiently, free from the shackles of petty nationalisms and the risks of war. So argue the Kaiser's apologists, volunteers or conscripts.

All this, the insatiate ambition, the ruthless Realpolitik, the paid or abject apology, is readily intelligible to Americans, because we have it all, in experimental proportions, in certain of our own businesses. There is very little in which the "German spirit" could instruct the packers' combination, whose methods are once more set before a jaded public attention by the summary of the report of the Federal Trade Commission. Here are five great corporations, Armour and Company, Swift and Company, Morris and Company, Wilson and Company, and the Cudahy Packing Company, narrowly controlled by a small group of individuals, who set before themselves a score of years ago the purpose of seizing the whole marketable supply of the animal food of a nation, and who have since begun to reach out for the control of other foods, lest the vegetarian fail to pay tribute, and foreign food supplies, lest alien producers and consumers

remain freer of extortion than our own blood. How well they have succeeded is indicated by the fact that of animals slaughtered for interstate trade their shares in 1916 were 82.2 per cent of mature cattle, 76.6 per cent of calves, 61.2 per cent of hogs and 86.4 per cent of sheep and lambs. In 1917 Armour and Company at one stroke made themselves the greatest rice dealers in the world, and handled nearly a quarter of the wheat sold in Chicago, the world's greatest market. The packers dominate in the market for hides; they hold a powerful position in the canning industry; they handle half the interstate trade in poultry, eggs and cheese. Their banking interests are vast and far reaching. Abroad, they have established themselves in a dominant position in the meat exporting countries of Latin America and are steadily proceeding toward control in Canada and Australasia. The German Kaiser once vowed that no important international transaction should reach consummation anywhere in the world without acknowledging the interests of Germany. The packers apparently, have vowed that there shall be no transactions in the import or export of food that do not recognize the packers' interests and pay tribute to them.

Such appear to be the packers' ambitions: by what methods have they proceeded to realize them? By the crooked methods of business Realpolitik. "The power of the Big Five has been and is being unfairly and illegally used to manipulate live-stock markets; restrict interstate and international supplies of foods; control the prices of dressed meats and other foods; defraud both the producers of food and consumers; crush effective competition; secure special privileges from railroads, stock-yard companies and municipalities; and profiteer." While keeping up a show of competition, the Big Five have operated under the tightest of compacts. They have manipulated prices in such a way that the producers of live stock have come to feel that of all forms of gambling stock-raising is the most risky. They have used their control over stock yards, cattle loan banks, refrigerator cars, storage warehouses, to choke out competitors who could not have been beaten in an honest fight. They have tampered with the organs of publicity upon which producers and consumers rely for their technical information.

It might have been supposed that when their country was engaged in a life and death struggle with German Realpolitik the packers would have felt something of a sacred fear about continuing their grasping and unlawful practices. They had profited immensely in the period before our entry into the war. Considering that most of the millions they were making were going into the hands of half