The conservative Socialists are greatly concerned as to whether we Independents will honestly vote in favor of the treaty. We are being asked our intention from every side. People cannot conceive such a thing as a party shaping its course strictly according to its principles. German politics are governed so largely by expediency and considerations of immediate tactical advantage, that our leaders cannot comprehend what principles are. Unless we support the treaty, they will not have a majority.

[Svobodnyia Mysli (Free Thoughts, Paris. Anti-Bolshevist Russian Newspaper), November 15, 1920]

MAY IT NOT BE TOO LATE?

BY ARKADY AVERCHENKO

[The author of this sketch is the greatest living Russian writer of satire. He recently escaped from Soviet Russia and is now in Paris.]

I SAY that this happened, because it will happen.

What difference does it make, it make, whether it is the future, the present, or the past? In the tempest of its mad revolutions, the Devil's Wheel mingles everything into a moment: the future instantly becomes the present, and the present disappears into the heap of ruins, known as the past.

When I think of this, I try to imagine that we have already taken Petrograd. At the thought of this, my blood boils in frenzy of joy and its waves begin to inundate my withered heart. We are in Petrograd!

And then cowardly fear fills me. I grow pale, and begin to pray, cravenly, criminally, illogically:

'Postpone all this! Push it away into the recesses of our remoter days! I am afraid.'

Generally speaking, I am brave. Generally speaking, we have all become hardened and beast-like; we are ready to attack a machine gun unarmed. But.

I am afraid of Petrograd.

Two thoughts are at strife within me, like two infuriated dragons: 'What happiness! We shall take Petrograd!'

'I am afraid. Do not take Petrograd! 'What are you afraid of? Petrograd is our dearest aim, our profoundest de sire. What do you fear?'

'I am afraid that we shall take Pe trograd when it will be too late for thos who are in it.'

And this is what I am afraid ofthe possibility of a picture like th following:

In the suburbs of Petrograd, the re treating Red troops were still firing o the advancing Russian army, but th centre of the city was already free. man in civilian clothes, unable to con tain his happiness, separated himsel from the advancing detachment an ran into one of the side streets of th half-dead city. At the end of the stree he saw a bread line.

About seventy men and wome stood in line in front of a door ove which hung the sign, 'Bread upon pres entation of labor cards.'

Like a bomb bursting in a bog, th young conqueror rushed into th group.

'Comrades. No, the Devil with the comrades! Friends, brothers, you are free! The accursed Commune does not exist any more. From now on each one of you is a free citizen of Great and Mighty Russia.'

'What is he talking about?' asked an old man in a frightened tone, turning to a girl whose face was of a greenish hue. 'What has happened to him, anyway?'

'He says that we are free, that the Commune has fallen.'

The old man moved his lips for an instant and then nodded;

'Maybe that's good. Maybe. That means that they'll let my son out of the Extraordinary Commission, if he is still alive.'

A woman scratched her side and asked, 'And how about the day after tomorrow? They promised to give us soap and salt. Does it mean that we won't get it? That won't do.'

you could take my place in the line.'

'Are you crazy, or what's happened to you? Why the Devil should I want that lump of putty you call bread? Am I not telling you in plain Russian that Petrograd is in the hands of the Russian army?'

'And how much bread are they going to give to the second category?' asked a workman with a tired, yellow face.

"There won't be any categories. You'll get as much as you need.'

'He is a liar,' said the lucky individual who stood first in the line, nearest to the coveted door.

'Yes, how is it possible to be without categories?'

'Why don't you go about your business, young man?' said the old fellow. 'What's the use in hanging around here like this? Maybe you want to get into the line, then your place is back there; no objections.'

'But don't you understand: you are free?' continued the young man. "Think of it, if you want to, you can go anywhere you wish without any ‘labor books,' or permits, or extraordinary commissions. Just get into a train and go to Odessa, or Sebastopol, or Kursk, wherever you wish.'

'And what do I want to do there?' snickered the woman who stood

'Friends, brothers!' shouted the the young man, jumping from one to another, seizing them by the hands and swinging their arms like the handles of broken pumps. 'Why do you stand here? Run home and shout, hurrah!'

'Hurrah,' came weakly from one man in the line, as he stepped from one foot to another.

'You are a clever fellow,' said the old man, gazing at the young conqueror with an expression of anger and fear. 'You want me to run home so that

me get soles for my shoes over at the Commissariat of Supplies, I'd be forever thankful to you. And, maybe, some lamp oil.

The young man tried every trick he knew to fire up that crowd, but the bread line, stretching like a long, gray snake, slow and sleepy through hunger, remained unmoved, waiting patiently for the slices of bread; only the first man in the line occasionally rapped timidly on the door, while the rear end of the line grew and grew in length.

The young man, finally grown weary

with his efforts, burst out into tears and went away.

It was growing dusk. The sounds of a military march came from the distance, and shots were heard. The line became somewhat agitated.

'Why are they playing?'

'And just listen to that shooting.' "They say the White Guards have come in.'

'You mean Kolchak? Well, I only hope they'll issue what they promised for to-morrow on the November coupon.'

The line moved about for a minute, and then everything became quiet again.

modest undertaking financially according to present standards. Hugo's father, of the same name, called himself merely a merchant. The young man was sent to a scientific school where he completed his course without incident. After graduating he served a term as a commercial apprentice at Coblenz. His stay there was brief. There was not sufficient field for his energy in the retail trade, and he speedily became dissatisfied with his prospects. For some months he did manual labor as a practical miner both above ground and below. Then in 1889 he entered the School of Mines at Berlin. Twelve months later he joined the firm of Matthias Stinnes, in which his mother owned a fifth interest. But he stayed there for less than two years. Thereupon he severed completely his relations with this grandfather's company and founded his own house, Hugo Stinnes, Limited, with a capital of fifty thousand marks. This was in 1893, when he was but twenty-two years old.

Second act. Rising fortunes: Stinnes became a coal dealer. He soon got control of several pits. He started the manufacture of briquettes. Next he branched out into iron and steel. A little later he controlled river and ocean going vessels. Then he established foreign agencies and began trading heavily in coal abroad. Soon he had thirty coal stations, in all parts of the world. Stinnes' fleet, consisting of thirteen medium-size steamers, owned by himself, traded in coal, wood, ore, and grain, through the Mediterranean, the Black Sea, the North Sea, and the Baltic. He brought English coal from his Newcastle branch to Hamburg and Rotterdam. His great establishment in the latter city was on the black list during the war. From these distributing points he shipped coal to Genoa, Stettin, Königsberg, and

Odessa. By the outbreak of the war he was an industrial merchant and shipmaster of first rank, whose private fortune was conservatively estimated at forty million marks in gold. Since 1903 he has been one of the leaders of the Rhenish-Westphalian Coal Syndicate a man to whom, even under the old régime, the Prussian Minister of Commerce felt compelled to show deference. He was Chairman of the Board of Directors of the GermanLuxemburg Mining and Smelting Company, and of the Mülheim Mine Operators' Union; and also a member of the board of directors of practically every important industrial undertaking in the Rhenish-Westphalian coal district. He was a pioneer in the plan for operating all the traction lines and machinery in that mining district by electric power. Moreover, he was doing all these things on a corporation capital of only fifty thousand marks. This great master of mergers, amalgamator, money borrower, and company organizer, had become the terror of the banking world.

That was before the war. The lion held an important section of the German business world under his soft pads but had not yet thrust out his claws. He was a rich man, a shrewd man, a man of vision; enterprising and ambitious. But he was not yet a giant, a trust magnate, a crusher of competition.

Third act. Do not get a false impression of him. He remained in appearance, in demeanor, in unassuming manners, the simple superintendent of his original mine. Thickset but not tall; erect but not military, a heavy featured man with close cropped hair, a school-teacher's well-trimmed beard, an unimpressive countenance of yellowish complexion. His eyes are somewhat oblique, sly, shifting, not deep, but fixing attention. At the same time

a hail fellow well met. Not much of a talker, but a keen observer. When he does speak, no superfluous words. Nothing but facts. A calculating machine. When he speaks he is calm, cool, has command of data, imposes, although he expresses himself in a sort of weary whisper, a mere murmur. That is true even when he speaks in public. His gigantic enterprises covering all Europe have been conceived in his brain as a sort of mathematical formula, starting out with the equation: X equals four or five or twenty or one hundred or five hundred millions, and ending in a product expressing his interests, his employees' interests, his country's interests, which he always conceives as identical.

When he visits his enterprises, the managers receive him with icy fear. A glance, a question, a searching inquiry into some minor detail which he had at his fingers' ends and alas for the employee who cannot answer readily on the spur of the moment. His face clouds. He can be masterful and brutal. Yes, indeed, he keeps his men under close rein. He must be credited with that.

credited with that. His business letters are often more general in their contents cold disquisitions on economic matters. I have seen such a communication written before the war in which he discusses the growing brevity of business crises. Such letters are manifolded and sent to all his branch offices.

Fourth act. The War: This was a crisis in which the man, favored in an unexampled way by fortune, fairly exceeded himself. When the storm broke his money chests were already filled to the brim. Now war earnings flowed in like a spring freshet. He multiplied his fortune exporting coal to neutral countries at fantastic profits on exchange. To be sure many of his foreign enterprises were sequestered;

but this was compensated by the dizzy expansion of his business at home. When the German army overran Belgium and northern France and took control of the coal and iron mines in these regions, and again when the Hindenburg programme stimulated the production of munitions to the utmost, Stinnes was a frequent visitor at the Great Headquarters - a man constantly called in as an expert advisor, and soon a master mind behind the scenes when important questions of policy were being weighed. At the same time his flood of profits rose higher and higher. And the excess profit tax? A bagatelle. How much money did he have deposited in neutral banks? How much did he have seeking new investments? The time came when he could not place all his funds through ordinary banking channels. His capital kept madly multiplying. And his influence upon the economic and political policy of the government kept pace with his expanding wealth. Only one thing he refused. one thing he refused. He would not indulge in display. He insisted on enjoying his riches and his power in cold retirement, remote from noisy, curious guests and flatterers.

In 1916 he entered Hamburg, and purchased the great shipping enterprise of Eduard Woermann, buying the latter's interest in the Woermann and the German-East African Lines. The Hamburg American and North German Lloyd Companies shared in the transaction. It is characteristic of all his business enterprises that he seldom undertakes anything alone. It might be that his own shoulders could not carry the colossal burden. He either gets in new partners or gives the old owners a share in the enterprise; but he holds the reins in his own firm right hand. The wagon must follow the path in which he guides. He thus secured a foothold in our great Elbe

port. A year later he absorbed the famous old firm of H. W. Heidmann, founded in Hamburg back in 1848, with all its steamship lines and wharves. Minor enterprises followed in quick succession. Albert Ballin remarked in a tolerant way: "The Hamburg-American Company cherishes the wish to link its interests more largely and directly than hitherto with those of our great industrialists and great banks.' Six months later, in January 1918, the 'Hugo Stinnes Maritime and Foreign Trading Corporation' was registered at Hamburg. Contracts were given to Kiel shipyards for building eleven steamers. Stinnes planned to handle all his foreign trade after the war with his own vessels, and thus to make himself wholly independent of fluctuations in foreign charter rates. Simultaneously he was buying up smaller firms engaged in the shipping business and coal trade. On one occasion he purchased at one stroke seven great estates in East Prussia, and many smaller pieces of property adjoining them, in order to insure himself an independent supply of mine timber. Eventually, the time came when the capital of the original company at Mulheim was raised from fifty thousand marks to five million marks. Then, in September 1918, Stinnes and his associates bought a controlling interest in several large lignite mines.

Almost immediately afterward Germany collapsed. What would a revolution do to all these enterprises and projects which might be crushed like a house of cards? Ballin despaired, and died two days after the armistice was signed. What now of Stinnes?

Fifth act. Stinnes waited for the first violence of the revolution to subside. He fought to survive. He did not lose courage. Perhaps some reorganization would be necessary. He disclosed his democratic sympathies and