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THE LIVING AGE

VOL. 332 - MARCH 1, 1927 - NO. 4301

THE LIVING AGE

BRINGS THE WORLD TO AMERICA

AROUND THE WORLD

THE British public still sticks to the old theory that statesmen in office should not go abroad. But in practice that tradition has broken down so completely as a result of war and post-war exigencies that Mr. Churchill's lingering in the Mediterranean during the inclement season, on the plea that his presence there was necessary to discuss war debts at Rome and Athens, might have been accepted without comment had it not been for the eulogy of Fascism he delivered at Rome, which seemed to range him with Mussolini's other representative in the British Cabinet, Austen Chamberlain, at the reactionary end of Mr. Baldwin's not altogether harmonious bodyguard. This interview enraged particularly the Liberal and Labor press. Rumors are rife that the personnel of the Ministry is to be reconstructed, and, though there is little visible likelihood that any topnotchers will be sacrificed if this is done, the Times has advocated in a vigorous leader that the renovation shall proceed 'from the highest to the lowest.' Gossip has it that the exThunderer's pronouncement was in

spired by Mr. Baldwin himself. Lloyd George is now official leader of a Liberal Party of glorious memory and uncertain future, whose depleted ranks are wasting daily. Sir Ernest Benn is the latest of the more active and prominent members to desert - going over to Labor. A gambler's chance, such as would tempt only the Welshman's venturesome resourcefulness, remains that the ancient organization may be resuscitated, - for England is a country where traditions die hard, - but an American Party in equal distress would be doomed. Lloyd George retains effective control of the Liberal Party Fund, although it is nominally in the hands of a committee. This money, over which there has been so much unpleasant wrangling, is said to have been collected during the war, when England was impoverishing herself with credit tokens in place of cash. No public accounting of it has ever been made. It is said to consist of a capital sum equivalent to more than one million dollars and an annuity or annual income of approximately one fifth that sum, besides special donations devoted to particular investigations. The Tory Morning Post hints broadly that part of the money was raised by selling patents of nobility and part from war contractors. Between 1916 and 1922 the Coalition Government created no fewer than eighty-seven peers. During four years of that period, from 1917 to 1922, 'honors' were conferred on between fourteen and fifteen thousand people.

Churchill

at Rome

Copyright 1927, by the Living Age Co.

The most contentious domestic problem facing Mr. Baldwin's Government is how to make tradeunionism 'safe for democracy. We have previously mentioned that the Ministry is committed to introducing a bill prohibiting general strikes and requiring every strike to be authorized by a plebiscite of the union involved. The London Outlook says an idea is gaining ground that the Cabinet will use its bill principally as a lever to compel the unions to reform themselves, but that the subject will not be dropped until general strikes and mass picketing are prohibited and the political funds of labor organizations are completely separated from their benefit funds. Opposition to pressing any legislation at all exists, however, on the ground that it will disturb the plans for industrial peace upon which many great employers as well as moderate labor leaders have set their hearts. At a meeting of the British Trades-Union Congress, 'to hold an inquest upon last year's general strike,' well toward three million of the four million members represented voted to endorse the action of their leaders in calling it off at the time they did. Of the dissentient minority about four fifths were miners. One would hardly expect a priori that the conservative trade-unionists of Great Britain should show more friendliness for the Red unionists of Russia than their brethren upon the Continent. Nevertheless, possibly because distance lends enchantment to the view, they

recently proposed to the International Federation of Trade-Unions, which has its headquarters at Amsterdam, that a 'Unity Conference' with the Russian Unions be held - a suggestion which the International promptly rejected.

M. Poincaré is accused of keeping his Ministry in power by a hush-hush France policy. No public man must be permitted to make

a noise lest he disturb the still convalescent franc. Above all, nothing must be said about stabilization or ratifying the Washington debt accord. Rumors of divisions within the Cabinet, however, will not down, and the London Weekly believes that British interests are deeply involved in the outcome of the struggle between pro-Thoiry and anti-Thoiry principles which they express. 'The success of M. Briand might well lead to the formation of a European bloc directed against what the Anglophobes call British domination, while his defeat would quite likely be followed by a revival of the FrancoRussian alliance, which, in its turn, would throw Germany and Italy together, and thus leave the balance of power in British hands.' France is heartened somewhat by the results of last year's census, which indicate that her population, including Alsace-Lorraine, now approaches forty-one million - an increase of one and one-half million during the last five years. More than two thirds of this, however, is accounted for by immigration. France's treaty with Rumania, although, to quote Auguste Gauvain of the Journal des Débats, it 'does not modify in any respect the policy of the two contracting Governments, but merely confirms agreements previously made and well known,' has offended Moscow, which interprets it as guaranteeing Bessarabia to Rumania. The Russian Foreign Office expressed this opinion in terms that were considered offensive by the Paris press.

President Hindenburg took an active and dignified part in reconstructing the German Cabinet. Indeed, Germany

it was in response to his direct appeal to Dr. Marx, the Centrist leader and hold-over Chancellor, that the factions in the Reichstag subordinated their differences sufficiently to agree upon a Ministry. His letter closed with urging that 'the new Government should, even though it may contain no members of the Left Parties, nevertheless regard it as a special duty to protect the just interests of the working classes.' It is not wholly reassuring that the struggle between the Left and the Right in Germany should be centred so largely upon gaining control of the Reichswehr. It is still more remarkable that the reactionaries and the Russian Bolsheviki, inspired perhaps by their common hatred of Poland and their desire to overrun the Baltic States, should show a disposition to join hands in this struggle, to the immense discomfiture of German Communists, who see their Social Democratic enemies acquiring all the merit of fighting Monarchism and reaction, while they themselves are becoming objects of suspicion with the mass of workers. Of eleven members of the new Ministry five are Roman Catholics - a fact which has given rise to the rumor that the Vatican had a hand in bringing together the German Nationalists and the Clericals. Naturally the Holy See is laboring for peace in Europe, and it is not unlikely that its recent approval of Briand, its condemnation of the Royalist-Nationalists in France, and its benevolent intervention if such there was - to secure a German cabinet pledged to the Locarno policy, fit into the same pattern. Incidentally, of course, the Vatican seeks a concordat with Germany, giving it additional in

fluence in the schools, and a relaxation of the anticlerical laws in France.

Sweden is engaged in a controversy over land disarmament somewhat simi

Sweden and

Poland

lar to the one in our own Congress over naval disarmament. Nearly two years

ago the Social Democrats

and Freethinkers put through a law reducing the standing army to two thirds its former strength. The reduction in the number of officers was thirty-seven per cent, and of underofficers forty per cent. Opponents of the measure, although unable to prevent its going into effect, have continued to attack it, and have organized a National Defense Union to continue their propaganda for a stronger army. The same body is also behind the new naval programme outlined in an Experts' Memorandum last December, calling for the expenditure of one hundred and five million crowns for new cruisers, destroyers, submarines, and an airplane carrier. Several alleged terrorist conspirators, including three members of the Sejm, were arrested late in January in Vilno for plotting to overthrow the Polish Government. They represent the White Russians, and are suspected of working hand in hand with Moscow. Almost simultaneously other arrests were made in Galicia, where the Ruthenians are again stirring. This unrest among the national minorities, plus political discontent among certain groups of the Poles themselves, accounts for the new censorship laws which make a person liable to fine or imprisonment either for printing or for uttering in a public place statements construed to be of a seditious character - that is, hostile to the present Government. Pilsudski is not credited with Mussolini leanings. Both he and the Italian Dictator are former Socialists; but Pilsudski seized power as a champion of democracy and not of class or party dictatorship. Yet he is forced by the logic of events to keep more or less in step with Horthy, Primo de Rivera, and Mussolini. His position is strengthened by the favor of the peasants, who associate the marked rise in the price of farm products in Poland with his Administration. These increased prices, however, bear heavily upon city workers and landless rural laborers.

Spain and

Portugal

Spain has begun a campaign in favor of popular education, if the announcement that fifteen hundred new schools are to be established the present year is more than an empty promise. About one half of the adult population of the country is illiterate, the proportion varying in different provinces, and reaching seventy per cent in some parts of the South. The new project does not go very far toward remedying existing deficiencies, for more than two thousand teachers would be required in Madrid alone to provide adequate instruction for the school-children of that city. Spain has come forward also with a formal claim to Tangier, the anomalously governed African seaport opposite Gibraltar. Great Britain and France are not favorable to these pretensions, while Italy is assumed to endorse them. At present the city is governed by a French administrator, with a British and a Spanish assistant. The public works are under a Spanish engineer, and the Civil Service is recruited from all nationalities. An international legislature, consisting of representatives of the subjects of the three Powers appointed by their consuls-general, enacts ordinances for the district. Italy and the United States have never joined in the Tangier Convention, and take no part in this government. Spain's dissatisfaction with the present arrangement is based on the fact that Tangier affords a convenient rendezvous for discontented

elements among the Moors, who use it as a base for fomenting disturbances against the Spanish authorities in Morocco. Abd-el-Krim formerly received many of his supplies through this port.

Portugal's last revolution, suppressed with the loss of a thousand lives or more, was a revolt against the military dictator who seized the Government last year. But its ulterior motives are as obscure to anyone not conversant with the personal rivalries of the country's politicians as are those of some of our Latin American republics. Only the other day Portugal concluded an arrangement for repaying her war debts to Great Britain, and there has been some talk of closer relations, if not of political union, with Spain. This old idea has been revived, apparently by discouraged Monarchists, who prefer Alfonso to any representative of the late royal house of their own country, and by business men, who anticipate trade advantages for Oporto and Lisbon in freer intercourse with Western Spain, and see the desirability, in these days of hydroelectric development, of unified control over the rivers which rise in Spanish territory and flow through Portugal. Another motive for seeking closer relations with Spain lies in Portugal's precarious hold upon her African colonies, which she can never hope to exploit adequately with her own capital and resources, and which may fall into the hands of another country - presumably Italy or Germany.

Fascist militants continue to find new objects of attack. Last January they issued a decree which Italy at Home and virtually forbade boys' clubs Abroad except those directly af

filiated with the Fascist

Boys' Brigade. An exception was made for Catholic Boy Scouts in towns of over twenty thousand inhabitants, but those in smaller communities were ordered dissolved. The Pope promptly instructed the Cardinal Secretary to disband these associations, in order to save them from the humiliation of dissolution by the civil authorities. The Fascist press, particularly Tevere, has also begun a bitter campaign against the Y. M. C. A., which it accuses of being antipatriotic, democratic, Freemason, and American, and therefore utterly non-Italian. A similar but less aggressive campaign is also directed against the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, which labors under the onus of having originated in Great Britain. Italy is reported to be seeking an understanding with Turkey, which up to the present has been intensely suspicious of her designs in the Levant. Conversations between the Turkish Minister of Education, a close confidant of Mustapha Kemal, and Mussolini held in Rome last month are interpreted as foreshadowing an alliance between the two countries. But Italy's main diplomatic drive last winter was in the Red Sea country, more specifically in Yemen, where a treaty has been concluded with the Imam which Corriere della Sera characterizes as 'the most important event of the year' - presumably in that particular quarter. That journal interprets the agreement as an important tie between the Arabs and the West. 'This free and progressive Arab State has asked and obtained our friendship without any clandestine negotiations to render the action ambiguous or dangerous to third parties. We are afforded an excellent example of the concrete results that a policy of prestige invariably yields when it is pacific and does not contemplate territorial acquisitions.' England, whose Government

com

monly walks arm in arm with Mussolini in the Near East, is said to find this development most unwelcome, for the Imam's territories lie close to Aden,

and Great Britain has made many efforts to win his friendship. These overtures have been repulsed, however, for the Arab chieftain is extremely jealous of his country's autonomy. Just what considerations persuaded him to show favor to his Italian neighbors, whose province of Eritrea lies within what we must now call reasonable swimming distance across Bab el Mandeb Strait, is not yet clear. Possibly the importance of the treaty has been exaggerated; some reports make it as favorable for Mussolini as his Tirana Treaty with Albania. On the other hand, England may profit from it in Egypt, whose native leaders look with an unkindly eye upon the extension of Italy's influence in the Red Sea area, and are jealous of the increasing prestige of that country in the Levant. These fears seem to have reconciled them in some degree to British control, which they may not like per se, but find infinitely preferable to that of Rome. The hostility of the Syrian insurgents to France has been tempered somewhat by a similar sentiment.

East of Suez

On January 18 what the London press describes as 'the magnificent Council Chamber of New Delhi' was opened with imposing ceremonies. A royal message to the Indian people was read, and the Viceroy, Lord Irwin, delivered the equivalent of a conciliatory and hopeful speech from the Throne. The delegates are reported to have been greatly impressed by the sumptuousness and dignity of their new quarters, which seemed to many of them concrete evidence of an enduring Imperial connection. Historical associations cluster around the old Mogul capital which Calcutta, the former trading headquarters of the East India Company, never possessed. The All-India Legislative Assembly, which has one hundred and forty-four members, forty

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