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THE LIVING ACE

VOL. 329- MAY 29, 1926-NO. 4273

THE LIVING AGE

BRINGS THE WORLD TO AMERICA

A WEEK OF THE WORLD

DEBT SETTLEMENTS

ITALY is jubilant over the ratification of her debt pact with Washington, while France is depressed rather than elated at the signing of her debt accord with us. Italy's official press interpreted the Senate's ratification as a Fascist victory over intriguing Freemasons, conspiring Socialists, and other enemies of Mussolini in America. France faces the prospect of remaining a debtor of the two great Anglo-Saxon Powers to the average amount of well toward two hundred million dollars annually for more than half a century with anything but rosy anticipations. Le Figaro summarized the advantages of the accord as, first, a reduction in the sum total of payments, and, second, the incorporation of the commercial debt in the general settlement. Its disadvantages are that there is no safeguarding clause and no written. engagement relieving France in case of Germany's default, and the fact that the reduction in total amount is considerably less than was granted Italy. Senator Debierre impressed upon his countrymen in L'Ere Nouvelle that

every move that France makes toward substituting certainty for uncertainty in her financial affairs is a step toward stability and strengthened solvency, and in the long run toward assured national prosperity. That apparently is the chief consolation that the country draws from the settlement.

How nervous the public mind abroad has become under the obsession of these obligations to America is indicated by the sensational rumors that find credence there regarding our intentions concerning them. Shortly before the agreement was signed in Washington a report was current on the boulevards to the effect that President Coolidge proposed to insist upon America's right to 'control' French finances, which suggests putting Paris in the same category with Peking. In Brussels, Wall Street rather than Washington is feared as a financial master. Pertinax, the peppery leader-writer of L'Echo de Paris, has this to say upon that subject:

Having satisfied all the demands of her creditor, Belgium requested from him a stabilization loan of a hundred million dollars. The creditor examined her budget

Copyright 1926, by the Living Age Co.

and made her cut down her allotments for national defense. Then he discovered that certain administrative expenses were not figured in the railway budget, but had been shifted to the general budget of the Government. In order to assure himself that the roads would be run on a strictly sound business basis, so as to be safe security for the loan, he demanded that they be placed under an international board of control and that the English General Manse should be appointed to manage them. When the Cabinet at Brussels objected, he modified his demands and asked for gilt-edged securities to guarantee his advances; and not trusting those of Belgium itself, he asked for four hundred million francs of the stocks

and bonds of the Société Générale de Belgique which operates the rich mines of Katanga in the Congo. . . . We know what to expect in connection with private advances (from America) by the recent proposal of the Foundation Company. M. Doumer, before leaving the Ministry of Finance, rejected the offer of a loan, which was to be secured by a mortgage on certain property belonging to the Government, including the buildings occupied by the Ministry of Justice, the Ministry of the Interior, the Navy Office, and other structures.

TURBULENT POLAND

PREMONITIONS of the present troubles in Poland have darkened that country's horizon for several months. Back of them lies the Government's inability to live within its revenues an ambition to put on Rolls-Royce style with a Ford income. Vast sums have been spent upon the army, as was natural enough for a young country with powerful and restless neighbors on either frontier. The desire to develop a great seaport that would render the country entirely independent of the Free City of Danzig for a salt-water outlet is also natural. It was normal, considering all the circumstances attending setting up a new administra

tion, for the Civil Service to get out of hand and become more or less of an economic incubus. A hundred very necessary things that the nation wanted and that required money had to be done, and it was very natural that politicians should embark the State upon new enterprises and take a chance of getting money later to finance them. But the inevitable result of all this has been inflation. To be sure, stern measures were taken to check this evil. A new currency was introduced and was kept for a time at par. But this rehabilitation resulted in a shrinkage of liquid capital and a business crisis which the country did not have resources to tide over. Moreover, the Government's deficits continued. When the Cabinet tried to cut down the railway staff, for example, to the number that was properly required to operate the trains, the politicians put in a veto. And this went on throughout the public services. Land reforms, urgently demanded by and long since promised to the peasants, were deferred and again deferred. Finally, the economy programme began to touch the military establishment and was resisted there. Meanwhile personal factors aggravated the situation.

The latter have culminated in an army quarrel of far-reaching political implications. Before the war, many Polish officers held high rank in the Austrian service, and on account of this advantage became the West Pointers of the new army organized when their country became independent. Marshal Pilsudski and his Legionaries, on the other hand, were irregulars, or militiamen, and the Marshal, despite his high post, never received military training in the army of a Great Power. The two cliques have naturally fallen apart. Not long ago General Szeptcki, Chief of the Army Inspectorate at Krakow, was compelled

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Pilsudski, who had been living in quasi-retirement until his recent sensational reappearance upon the political stage, has been freely mentioned for some time as the candidate for a sort of Mussolini dictatorship. But like Mussolini, his ambitions in this direction have been hampered somewhat by his old record as a Democrat and a Socialist. It simply confuses the situation, however, to attempt to identify the Pilsudski movement with Fascism, and to draw an artificial parallel between that leader and Mussolini. The common soldiers and officers of lower rank are said to be Pilsudski's devoted followers, but the General Staff and the higher officers are intensely hostile to him. How much this military discord has had to do with precipitating the present difficulty it is impossible at the moment to say. More or less Monarchist agitation has existed in Poland for some time. But whatever the outcome of the crisis or the true issues that it involves, the precedent of armed revolt, or the seizure of power by military means, is exceedingly ominous for the young republic.

FOR KING AND COUNTRY'

UNDER this title the Daily Mail published in its European edition of May 3 the strike leader that precipitated the break between Labor and the British

Government, when that journal's printers refused to get out the London issue containing it. The text of this strikingly unincendiary appeal is as follows:

The miners after weeks of negotiation

have declined the proposals made to them, and the coal mines of Britain are idle.

The Council of the Trades-Union Congress, which represents all the other tradeunions, has determined to support the miners by going to the extreme of ordering a general strike.

This determination alters the whole position. The coal industry, which might have been reorganized with good-will on both sides, seeing that some 'give and take' is plainly needed to restore it to prosperity, has now become the subject of a great political struggle, which the nation has no choice but to face with the utmost coolness and the utmost firmness.

We do not wish to say anything hard about the miners themselves. As to their

leaders, all we need say at this moment is that some of them are - and have openly declared themselves under the influence of people who mean no good to Great Britain.

A general strike is not an industrial dispute. It is a revolutionary movement intended to inflict suffering upon the great mass of innocent persons in the community and thereby to put forcible constraint upon the Government.

It is a movement which can only succeed by destroying the Government and subverting the rights and liberties of the people.

This being the case, it cannot be tolerated by any civilized Government, and it must be dealt with by every resource at the dis

posal of the community.

A state of emergency and national danger has been proclaimed to resist the attack. We call upon all law-abiding men and women to hold themselves at the service of King and country.

A WORD FOR THE RIFFI

ALEXANDER LANGLET, of the Stockholm Tidningen, has contributed to the Spectator, under the title 'A War without Doctors,' an account of medical conditions as he saw them in the Rif. Before leaving for a trip to that country, he inquired through the Swedish Red Cross whether it proposed to assist

the Riffi, and was told that the latter did not want the organization's aid, or, in any case, had not applied for it. During a journey of two months through the country, however, he learned that such assistance was not only urgently needed, but was eagerly sought. Only two doctors-one a Norwegian masseur from Tangier, subsequently disabled by illness, and the other a Negro who had been a doctor's assistant in Algiers were in medical attendance upon the Riffi. Both of the two small field hospitals organized by the tribesmen had been bombarded and destroyed by Spanish airmen, and medical supplies were practically exhausted. Spanish aviators have made a point of bombarding Riffian towns and market places, which are, 'unfortunately, particularly good targets owing to the varied colors of the women's clothes,' with the result that the casualties among civilians are unusually high. "The Spaniards, never the French, - especially of late, have frequently employed incendiary bombs and gas. bombs, the victims of which urgently require competent medical assistance. I have come across people who suffered from the results of both kinds of bombs.'

This writer then adds that apart from these facts 'there is another aspect of the exclusion of the Red Cross from the Riffi which lays upon Spain and France a very concrete responsibility toward their own people. Those who are in the very direst need of medical assistance among the Riffi and who suffer most owing to the absence of it are not the Riffian fighters themselves, nor their civil population, but the French and, above all, the Spanish prisoners.' Here the writer pauses to refute tales to the effect that the Riffi are mistreating their prisoners. 'I have ascertained most unmistakably from captured officers that they are treated

as prisoners of war and that all tales of atrocities and other violence toward them are inventions.' Nevertheless, the hardships of these prisoners, who number well toward a thousand, are severe. They have 'the same food as the Riffian soldiers, but, whereas the latter thrive well on coarse bread and oil, Europeans readily contract chronic digestive trouble, decline, and die.'

The Red Cross organizations of several neutral countries - Great Britain, Sweden, and Holland - and the Turkish Red Crescent, a Mohammedan society of a similar character, have applied for permission to send medical aid to these people. "The reply of the Spanish Government was that the Riffi could not be regarded as belligerents but only as rebels, and that no international intervention, “même purement charitable," would be permitted. France, in spite of direct applications,

among others, privately to M. Steeg (the Resident-General of Morocco) and M. Painlevé, has preferred to maintain diplomatic silence.'

ABYSSINIA IN THE LIMELIGHT

WE have already referred to Italy's alleged designs on Abyssinia and Britain's also alleged benevolent attitude toward them. After all, Abyssinia borders on the Sudan, from whose torrid plains its plateaus afford a cool and convenient refuge, so that a slice of her territories might make a desirable economic appanage, at least, to the new cotton empire England is creating on the Upper Nile. Of course, Abyssinia is a full-fledged member of the League of Nations, and, even if she should fall under the effective jurisdiction of an Italo-British entente, she might be permitted to keep a sort of conscience-saving ghost of self-rule. She owes the preservation of her

independence amid Europe's scramble for spoils in Africa to two facts — the fighting qualities of her mountaineers, which enabled her practically to wipe out Italy's invading forces at Adua thirty years ago, and the fact that she has been nominally a Christian country ever since the third century A.D., and consequently has not invited the presence of European missionaries whose wrongs might furnish a convenient excuse for annexation.

The present situation, however, is not a new one. Twenty years ago France, Italy, and England concluded an agreement 'to maintain intact the integrity of Ethiopia,' and the diplomatic world recognizes, of course, that an accord with such a preamble sometimes prefaces the benevolent assimilation of the territory or government whose integrity is thus guaranteed. What it is proposed to do now, apparently, is to let Italy connect her barren colonies of Eritrea and Somaliland, which border Abyssinia on the northeast and southeast, by a railroad crossing the latter country's territory. Since airplanes and poison gas have become the recognized weapons of civilization, the Abyssinians themselves are hardly in a position to resist, and, since no signs of petroleum have been discovered in this region, it is not thought that America, either officially or through allpowerful financial agencies, will take a hand in defending the rights of the Government at Addis Abeba. France has interests there. Her people control the only railway to the capital. She has made it quite plain, since the present discussion came up, that she intends to uphold the sanctity of treaties, particularly as Abyssinia is her special protégé in the League.

But

Our readers may recall that sensational accounts appeared in the British press some time ago describing alleged slave-raids starting from Abyssinia as

their base, and the persistence of at least a modified form of slavery in that country. Now the question arises whether this indignation, well justified as it was in a certain sense, did not perhaps have some ulterior motive. The upper waters of the Blue Nile, along whose lower course Britain is investing large sums in irrigation works, flow through Northern Abyssinia, and a great irrigation scheme, plans for which are resting in the files of the British Foreign Office, is said to have been worked out in connection with Lake Tana in that region.

MINOR NOTES

ACCORDING to figures compiled by two Swiss physicians, MM. Hercod and Keller, from the official statistics of seven European Governments, the people of France consume the most, and the people of Germany the least, alcohol per capita in those countries. The figures, computed in litres of 100degree alcohol contained in alcoholic beverages, are as follows: France, 17.51; Spain, 15.81; Italy, 13.78; Switzerland, 11.82; Belgium, 8.99; Great Britain, 6.23; and Germany, 2.71. The absolute consumption of alcohol is highest among the winedrinking nations. The amount consumed in the form of distilled liquors is largest in Switzerland, where it amounts to 3.79 litres, and is next largest in Spain, where it amounts to 2.97 litres. France ranks third in the consumption of spirits with 2.32 litres. Apparently, therefore, high wine-consumption and high spirits-consumption go together. Belgium imbibes more alcohol in its beer than any other country, or 7.23 litres, while Great Britain ranks second with 4.88. Germany apparently belies her bibulous reputation as the land of Gambrinus - partly on

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