that would ultimately develop a political significance, gave him a position which no other foreign representative could obtain. In his forthcoming articles, Mr. Morgenthau will make the American people acquainted with the commanding figures in this great Turkish episode with Talaat and Enver, the Turks who then, as the head of a kind of Oriental Tammany, were the absolute despots of Turkey; with great diplomatic figures like Von Wangenheim, the aggressive, impetuous, egotistical, hard-working German; with Bompard, the somewhat distant but penetrating Frenchman; with Giers, the politely contemptuous representative of the now obliterated Russian autocracy; with Mallet, the dignified, selfreliant Englishman; with Pallavicini, the venerable, but somewhat hesitating and subservient Austrian; with Garroni, the affable Italian, and with a host of others. These men, really sent to the city of Constantinople by their governments to watch diplomatically the dying agonies of the Turkish State and to gain every advantage possible for the countries which they represented became Mr. Morgenthau's personal and official intimates.

There are probably few Americans who have had Mr. Morgenthau's opportunities to detect more accurately the causes that precipitated the present conflict, for the German ambition to control the Balkans and Turkey was the primary move for the domination of

Europe and America, and, in fact, of the entire world.

Not only great personalities, but great events, will fill Mr. Morgenthau's pages. He will describe the rapid and insidious ascendancy of German influence at the Sublime Porte-the manner in which the German Ambassador transformed the Turkish politicians into tools of Germany, the success with which Germany, a few months before the European war broke out, obtained control of the Turkish army, and the skill with which the German diplomats persuaded Turkey, against the wishes of many of her ablest and most respectable statesmen, to enter the war on the Kaiser's side. The story of the Young Turks, their pathetic attempts to found a Turkish democracy and their ultimate relapse into the most barbarous chauvinism that the world has ever known, will figure in an early. chapter. The part played in world history by three famous pairs of ships-our own Idaho and Mississippi, sold to Greece in 1914; the Turkish battleships Sultan Osman and Mohammed Reshad, which were under construction in England when the war started; and the Goeben and the Breslau, whose arrival in Constantinople was part of the German plot to force Turkey into the war, will be described in romantic detail.

Mr. Morgenthau will make public his many conversations with the German Ambassador,

Von Wangenheim, who freely disclosed Germany's plan for aggression. Day by day, as the German army was advancing on Paris, this German Ambassador became more outspoken in discussing Germany's intentions. "We shall conduct the war differently this time" he gleefully told the American Ambassador on September 6, 1914, the day the Germans had almost reached the gates of Paris. "We do not have to consider, as in 1870, Queen Victoria, the Czar, and the Austrian Emperor, who all wanted Paris spared."

Mr. Morgenthau's description of his visit to the Dardanelles in March, 1915, and of the Gallipoli campaign will make public many details which have not yet seen the light, and particularly will disclose how the attempts of the Allies to force the Dardanelles came within a hair's breadth of succeeding. The panicky behaviour of the Turkish authorities during those momentous days also sheds light upon the barbarous Turkish system. Mr. Morgenthau's interviews with Von Jagow and Zimmerman in Berlin, in February, 1916, will provide material for the historian of America's part in this conflict. His constant attempts to protect foreigners and his unwearying watchfulness over the Christian and Jewish peoples in the Orient provide numerous interesting episodes, not all of them tragical-many of them, indeed, are humorous and grotesque. But the most moving part of Mr. Mor

genthau's narrative will be his account of the Armenian massacres. Americans who have read of the most fearful atrocities of the pastthe Sicilian Vespers, the slaughter of the Albigenses, the massacre of St. Bartholomew

usually regard such outbreaks of bigotry and race hatred as belonging to ancient times. Yet the gruesome fact remains that the most awful and ferocious manifestations of the human spirit recorded in history have taken place in the last three years. Even Abdul Hamid's Armenian massacres shrink into insignificance beside those promoted by Talaat and Enver, the young men who came into power as the standard bearers of Turkish democracy! In 1914, there were about 1,500,000 Armenians in the Turkish Empire; there are now perhaps 700,000. The remaining 800,000 have been killed. As Talaat proudly said, when discussing these massacres: "I have done more in three months in solving the Armenian problem than Abdul Hamid accomplished in thirty years." Mr. Morgenthau will not only describe these massacres in all their terrible details, but he will also tell of his constant but unavailing attempts to stop them. He will relate his repeated personal interviews with the Turkish authorities, and disclose how they accepted full responsibility for the atrocities. Mr. Morgenthau will tell of his repeated appeals to Von Wangenheim, the German Ambassador, to join him in

forcing Talaat and Enver to end this murderous orgy, and how the German diplomats coldly refused to second his efforts.

"This war," Mr. Morgenthau said recently, "is the culmination of a historic process that began in the 17th and 18th centuries, when Prussia, under the domination of the Hohenzollerns, became one of the leading European Powers. The history of Prussia for two hundred years has developed logically and irresistibly. Just as the Roman Empire, starting in a hamlet built on the seven hills, grew until it dominated the world, so the Prussians have fondly imagined that their own

State, beginning with the little patrimony of Brandenburg, is divinely appointed to attain universal empire. It seems ridiculous to Americans, Englishmen, and Frenchmen, who regard their own social and political systems as enormously superior to Germany's, that they should be expected to play to the new German Empire the part that Carthaginians, Greeks, Macedonians, Persians, and Gauls played to the encircling Roman State of antiquity. But such is the rôle which the Kaiser has marked out for us. Germany has made her greatest strides to this goal in my own lifetime. The years following the death of

Frederick were inglorious for Prussia; but when Europe had finally settled down after the Napoleonic era, Prussia began rapidly to forge ahead. The success that accompanied Prussian arms in the sixties-the defeat of Denmark, Austria, and France, and the creation of the German Empire-simply intoxicated the governing caste with the passion for unlimited domination. For the last forty years the Hohenzollern monarchy, in all its manifestationspolitical, social, commercial-has been pursuing this plan for universal empire. Their strength has consisted, not so much in their own prowess as in the criminal carelessness of their neighbors. As Lloyd George says, they planned to murder Europe in her sleep. Germany not alone organized herself, as never was done before, for this war, but took almost equal pains to disorganize the other nations. But this German scheme must not triumph, for it would mean the triumph of force over justice in the government of human affairs.

"It would establish Kaiserism, Junkerism, or autocracy, call it what you will-I mean the usurpation of power by a small band of selfperpetuating rulers who arrogate to themselves the right to govern the hundreds of millions of human beings who average better than the kings. Think of the spectacle of Ludwig II of Bavaria, legally declared insane after years of misrule or non rule of his kingdom, succeeded by another insane man, Otto. Think of a people of a modern state bowing down to lunatics for forty-seven years! And a war-mad Kaiser wants now to establish his rule over all of us. Think of the weak-minded Czar Nicholas influenced by his wife and the power of Rasputin-think of a system by which his feeble intelligence could mar the happiness of 170

millions of people, a system responsible for the ignorance which makes Russia, in anarchy, the prey of Germany to-day, the evil results of one autocracy playing into the hands of another. Think of all the nations, our own included, being at the mercy of the war-crazed William, who said to his armies of the East in 1914: I am the instrument of the Almighty. I am His sword, His agent. Woe and death to those who are opposed to my will! Woe and death to those who do not believe in my mission! Woe and death to all cowards. Let them perish, all the enemies of the German people! God demands their destruction; God Who, by my mouth, bids you do His will.'

"Shall all the wonderful development of democratic Europe, and with it our own democracy, be cut down by one fell swoop of the Hohenzollern axe? There is no compromise. Bernhardi was right. For autocracy it is world power or downfall. And to us is given the greatest opportunity that men have ever had to establish our principles all over the world. Our democracy is now as it has always been, a vigorous, militant, proselyting spirit. It is the religion of freedom to be spread among all peoples.

"It is impossible to admit that the hundreds of millions of freemen of the world who are doing the thinking, inventing, improving, and upbuilding of humanity, will consent to delay the inevitable death struggle between the two. There must be no compromise. The present civilization has been intrusted to us. We must not waste it or permit this great heritage to be destroyed. We must hand it down to our children not weakened, but strengthened and no longer menaced by autocracy."

T

BY

HE victims of A. C. Bidwell and his fraudulent International Automobile League are strewn so thickly throughout the United States that it is impossible to relate his story in any community without one or more persons grinning sheepishly. For Bidwell amassed a fortune by making it his aim to gather them in as fast as they were born, even to the speed of one a minute, if he could find them that fast.

Yet thousands of "members" of this League do not yet know that the Government has closed up the concern and that Bidwell pleaded guilty in Federal Court to the charge of using the mails to defraud. They merely know that it cost them ten dollars to get into the League and from thirty to one hundred dollars to get out of it, and that they charged up the loss to fraudulent advertising.

Bidwell might have been gathering his second and third crop of suckers by now had not the Associated Advertising Clubs of the World turned upon him and his activities the great vacuum cleaning system with which it is ridding advertising of the fakirs and crooks who have used this modern business force known as publicity to rob the public of both money and confidence.

The International Automobile League is not the only get-rich-quick scheme which has been overhauled in the house-cleaning. Within a period of about a year, several hundred thousand dollars' worth of advertising offered by unworthy enterprises was refused by the newspapers of the country, following information-reports issued by the National Vigilance Committee of the Associated Advertising Clubs. Without the aid of advertising, most of these frauds wither and die. Committee has proceeded on the theory that the public has a right to believe advertising and that the damage being done by dishonest advertising is not confined to the financial loss suffered by victims of the grafters.

The

For instance, when W. Baer Ewing hunted

up a young mechanic named Paul Ford in Minneapolis, and borrowed his name so he could call a new concern the "Ford Tractor Company," and thereby trade on the name of a nationally known manufacturing institution, it was realized that the advertising campaign to sell stock in the new company would not only cost the "investors" money but would in the end tend to destroy their confidence in legitimate investment opportunities.

Or when the International India Rubber Company bloomed forth in South Bend, Indiana, and sought to sell its securities because it was located at the home of the famous Studebaker family, and because it had imported a man named Studebaker as its president, it was all too evident that the degree of success attained in this effort would be proportionate to the financial loss of its victims with an accompanying destruction of confidence in advertising and legitimate business.

So it was with a score or so of large frauds that were promptly nipped in the bud by the dissemination of inside information gathered by the Associated Advertising Clubs. In some instances the Government, through its Post Office Department, issued fraud orders. against the companies concerned, and in others indictments were returned by Federal grand juries against the promoters, the evidence being furnished by investigators employed by the Advertising Clubs.

War conditions, with attendant prosperity for certain classes of labor, have encouraged the fakirs to offer so many new and alluring investment opportunities that it has not been possible to head them all. But the public has been warned and it is fairly easy to recognize the breed. The offers of fabulous returns for the investment of a few dollars in an oil stock, offered at 3 cents a share, ought to be sufficient to warn any thinking person to beware. Or the carefully veiled promise of large dividends in this or that new company,