mediate, than in learning why the war originally occurred.

Germans attribute the fact of the war to a wrong system of government and diplomacy rather than to the fault of individuals. But they believe individual political and military leaders were culpable for prolonging the war after a reasonable peace might have been obtained.

FIUME is only one of the possible foci of new disturbances in Europe. But it has been brought into exceptional relief because it is almost the sole instance where the American Government has taken a definite stand with regard to the allotment of disputed territories, and because the dramatic episode staged there by D'Annunzio captured public attention. Italy, or at least the cooler-headed element of the nation, seems to have tired of the latter adventure. Enthusiasm for D'Annunzio is obviously on the wane. People now see the conflict between Italy's national interests and the poet's claims. The latter has lost sympathy very rapidly since refusing to recognize the results of a popular vote or alleged popular vote-in Fiume, which was overwhelmingly in favor of accepting an Italian proposal to make that town a free city and a free port under conditions that would protect Italy's national interests.

We are now told that this popular vote was far from being a true picture of public sentiment. Of thirty-three thousand entitled to cast their ballots, only eleven thousand were permitted to do so. Naturally, it was the Slavs who were excluded from the polls.

Several leading residents of Fiume, of Italian birth or descent, have fled the city and are bitterly attacking D'Annunzio for his alleged lawless rule.

the Fiume dispute-D'Annunzio and his still loyal supporters, who possibly would like to establish there a mediæval condottieri principality; the Italian Government, which wishes to make Fiume technically a free city and a free port, practically controlled by Italians; a local autonomy party, including prominent Italian residents, which desires real independence; and the Jugo-Slavs, who insist that the original decision to allot the city to their country be carried out.

A RECENT Italian description of Spain as poised between a rule of anarchists and of Janizaries, appears to be more accurate than most epigrammatic characterizations. Since the review of conditions in that country, which we publish elsewhere, was written, things have continued to go from bad to worse. The de Toca cabinet has been overthrown, partly as a result of army intrigues, and a Conservative ministry has been formed. Since June, 1917, the Officers' Union has exercised a powerful influence upon political events in Spain. Army politics are reported to have undermined military discipline. A story is current that the fall of the de Toca cabinet was hastened by a scandal resulting from charges for breaches of discipline brought against a majority of the officers of a certain regiment. The offenders are said to have been so numerous and powerful that they were able to defy the decisions of a court-martial organized by the minority group. Almost simultaneously with the recent cabinet overthrow, new general strikes and labor disturbances, accompanied by undisguised anarchist and Bolshevist propaganda, occurred at several places.

many in the press of that country's former enemies, as appears occasionally in the newspapers of Italy. This sentiment is especially strong among a certain group of Socialists and in one wing of the clerical party. It also has geographical gradations. People living near a European frontier are apt to be hostile or suspicious of the nation immediately across the border. There are indications that the Piedmontese had less sympathy for France during the war than the people of Lombardy and Tuscany and the provinces farther south; and the Venetian territories, have always been a focus of intense hatred for Austria.

WALTER RATHENAU'S brief description of industrial conditions in Germany formed part of his recent annual report as president of the German General Electric Company. His eminence as an industrial leader and as a writer who has propounded novel and thought-inspiring theories of future industrial organization, and the profound familiarity with economic conditions in his country, which he acquired as organizer and chairman of the Raw Materials Board, give exceptional weight to what he has to say upon this subject.

Rathenau is the first economic writer of Germany to have made an impression upon French thought in this field since the war. A book of considerable pretension and merit, dealing with his theories, has recently appeared in Paris.

While Rathenau is alarmed at the prospect of a setback in Germany's scientific progress, the academic world of that country is congratulating itself upon the fact that it has just supplied three Nobel prize winners. The prizes for Physics for 1918 and 1919 go to Max Planck and Johannes Stark. The first is a distinguished

theoretical physicist of Berlin University, whose investigations of radiodynamics have commanded world-wide attention. The second is an experimental physicist of Greifswald. No chemistry prize was granted for 1919, but the prize for 1918 went to Fritz Harber, a well-known research chemist whose name has recently been associated with advances in the fixation of nitrogen.

Their

POLITICAL interests and economic conditions in the Scandinavian countries have been profoundly modified by the events of the past four years. In some respects, the influence of the Great War was to draw their governments closer together, although popular sympathy was inclined more strongly toward the Entente in Norway and Denmark than in Sweden, where the upper classes, at least, were favorable to Germany. More recently the creation of a circle of new states around the Baltic has changed their political outlook. Sweden and Denmark have intimate social, commercial, and cultural ties with Finland and Esthonia, and to a less extent, with Courland and Lettland. national prestige has risen in those new governments in proportion as that of Russia and Germany declined. At the same time, conflicts of interest have arisen between Sweden and Finland. Denmark faces the delicate problem of adjusting her boundaries with Germany in such a way as to remove old causes of discord without creating new ones. All the Scandinavian countries hope to profit by the removal of German maritime competition. Naturally, the Germans will be distrustful of Denmark until the boundary question is settled. The present Berlin Government watches with sympathy the growth of the Socialist and Liberal movement in

ALL is quiet along the Danube for the moment. Liberal and Socialist Europe is protesting against the alleged 'white terror' at Budapest, which promises to win for the Communists of Hungary the sympathy which they completely alienated during their period of power. We publish a criticism of the Communist régime in that country by the leading Socialist paper of the former Austro-Hungarian empire, as a representative document of political opinion.

Farther down the Danube, Belgrade has become the stage for a very different scene in the shifting drama of the post bellum period. Half wrecked by sieges and battles, that city has become the capital of a kingdom including people of most varied race, culture, and civilization. Two alphabets, four religions, and three political traditions must be harmonized by the new government. Some of its recently acquired territories escaped the ravages of war and enjoyed exceptional prosperity during its continuance. Other territories suffered the ravages of predatory incursions, obstinate defense, and ultimate invasion and occupation. How are the financial burdens of the government to be distributed among these territories? Boundary controversies and a new international policy also present difficult and delicate problems. In a word, tasks of both construction and reconstruction demand the simultaneous attention of Serbia's statesmen.

Bulgaria seems still to be in the torpor of defeat and despair. The European press reports little from that country, except occasional rumors of peasant unrest.

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Roumania, like Serbia, emerges from the war, with so much new territory that its original provinces are practically submerged by these accessions. Representatives to parliament, from what were but recently alien jurisdictions, outnumber the delegation from the former kingdom. Old party lines have been obliterated. A new division is arising between the Nationalists, who represent the chauvinist imperialism that has followed military success in several of the recently victorious governments, and the Peasants party of radical land reformers, who have won eighty-six seats in the new parliament and will have the silent support of the Liberal and Socialist electorate, which did not participate in the last elections.

Cutting across these divisions is a temporary cleavage between the newcomers and the Old Guard, in which the newcomers seem to have the mastery. Cabinet changes have followed each other in quick succession. Like Serbia, Roumania profits from the fact that the new populations which it receives from Austria-Hungary are better educated and occupy a higher cultural level than the people of its original territory. On the other hand, the former Russian province of Bessarabia has been swept by Bolshevist propaganda and many of its delegates will ally themselves with the radical agrarians of the old kingdom. The land question in Roumania presents the same critical aspects that the labor question and Socialism exhibit in the industrial countries of Western Europe. Old Roumania consisted of large estates, tilled by what was but recently a semi-servile peasantry.

Conditions in Bessarabia are similar. Legislation was drafted last spring to provide for the subdivision and compulsory sale of these large estates. But the spirit of restlessness and revolt in the peasantry has been stimulated rather than stilled by the concessions so far made. The radical element has found a popular leader in General Averescu, the former commander of the Roumanian army. The recent election resulted in heavy losses for the old Liberal party which enjoyed the prestige of having embraced the side of the Entente during the war, but has forfeited the support of the people by its dissensions and inefficiency during the period of the armistice.

RUMORS of prospective commer. cial agreements among the states of the former Austro-Hungarian monarchy are beginning to reach us in dispatches from abroad. This topic has occupied the Austrian papers for a considerable period. Die Neue Freie Presse, the principal organ of the industrial and financial leaders of the old monarchy, which has always been liberal in its sympathies, has urged from the time of the armistice maintaining the old commercial relations of the former Austro-Hungarian states. Now the Czech Minister of Trade has adopted the same attitude. recent public pronouncement he said that, in spite of all efforts to extend their export trade to the West, the former

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Austro-Hungarian monarchy remained the principal taker of Czecho-Slovakia's products and manufactures. In his opinion the Czech Government should renounce a policy of high tariffs and regulate its foreign commerce on an approximately free-trade basis. Austria is also reported to be considering overtures to Hungary, looking in the same direction. This might result in an economic Danube federation, such as has been frowned upon by the Entente authorities at Paris when proposed as a political measure. Austria is not anxious for closer political connections with Hungary, but it does desire closer commercial relations, and would like, probably, an eventual Zollverein embracing all the new states formed from the territories of the old monarchy.

AT the end of the year Professor Hans Delbrück retired from the editorship of the Preussische Jahrbücher, which he had held for thirty-six years. During the first of this period, from 1883-89, he was associated in this position with Heinrich von Trietschke, the brilliant historian of unhappy memory, whose intellectual leadership did so much to carry German public opinion and political theory astray. Delbrück represents a different school of historical thought, and during the war, while a consistent defender of the general policies of the government, was inclined toward liberal constitutional reforms and a conciliatory peace policy.

HAVING Spent the month of October in Vienna, I am tempted to jot down a few impressions of my visit to that unhappy, but ever-delightful, capital. I had last seen it in the days of terrible suspense and anxiety which followed upon the outbreak of our war with Germany on August 4, 1914, and preceded the departure of the British Embassy on August 14. The last thing in the world that was in the thoughts of the Viennese when, as the result of Count Berchtold's provocative note to Serbia of July 23, they hailed with delight the prospect of a final settlement with that troublesome neighbor, was a war with England. But the AustroHungarian declaration of war on Serbia (July 28) was followed in rapid succession by the mobilization of the Austrian and Russian armies, the mobilization of the German army, and the German ultimatums, which produced a state of war throughout the greater part of Europe, and later of the world.

Sir Edward Grey's desperate efforts to preserve the peace, as he had succeeded in doing the year before, by means of a conference, were scornfully rejected, and the great war had to come. The monarchy blindly imagined that it could march into Serbia and reduce it to impotence and subjection without drawing Russia into the field. Something like this had happened in 1908 over Bosnia and Herzegovina. But now the provocation was altogether too great. Russia took up the

gauntlet, and Europe fell into two hostile camps.

The course of events in Vienna in July and early August, 1914, is plainly set forth in the deeply interesting Red Book, Part I of which was published by the Republican Government of Austria. It is now clear that the advisers of the Emperor Francis Joseph made up their minds quite early in July that only by a successful war with Serbia could the position of Austria-Hungary as a Great Power be maintained.

Count Tisza alone, the Hungarian Prime Minister, stood out against this fateful resolution. The note to Serbia was purposely drawn up in terms impossible of acceptance. Germany stood behind, and she was, unfortunately, represented at Vienna by a statesman imbued with the conviction that only by war could Germany be made secure. She was threatened, as he believed, by Pan-Slavism from the East and by anarchy from the West. Count Tschirsky was the channel through which the German communications reached the Austrian Government.

During the months that preceded the Serbian crisis of 1914, Vienna had been in anything but a warlike mood. The army of the monarchy had been recently mobilized to compel the withdrawal of Serbia from the Adriatic coast, which she had reached in the course of the first Balkan war. It had been a costly effort, and there was no wish to renew it. Serious financial