documents. I know equally well that Mr. Jonnart is to be its chairman. A better selection could not have been made. But it will require a man of preeminent ability and with all the assistance that a formidable and efficient organization behind him can render, to control and insure the payments that are demanded by a treaty that has no precedent in diplomatic history for its complexity, and for the long period of time over which its execution extends.

Impossible as the situation seems, however, the Germans will shrink from compromising their commercial recovery by public bankruptcy, which would insure permanent military occupation and Allied control. Therefore, they will not resist these financial requirements, except to endeavor to have them reduced to diminish them and to embarrass their creditors. The contest will be more obstinate when we come to the penal clauses of the treaty. Here German diplomats will be able to resist without harming the material interests of their country or retarding the recovery of their financial prosperity. The more obstinately they resist, the more credit they will win for the government in power, and the more applause they will get from patriots at home.

They have endeavored to create dissension among the Allies. They have appealed in turn to their interest and their pity. They have composed notes and cited precedents. They have acknowledged that such acts demanded severe punishment, and they assure us that the stern provisions of the German code will be enforced. They have offered to repeal the recent amnesty and to reassemble a Supreme Court to judge these cases. They have requested the coöperation of Allied judges, and promised to open to them all the records of their own army office.

Republican-Socialist

Wilhelm

strasse would not squirm about in this way to evade compliance, if the safety of only a few underlings were at stake. But the guilty men have shoulder straps and titles yes, stars and crowns! In Germany, barbarism is as disciplined and methodical as science. Instructions and precedents come from above. Robberies and atrocities must not lose their higher sanction. The leaders of the war desired their army to be faithful to German traditions to pillage, violate, and burn. In order to insure the observance of this Prussian doctrine, these decorated, gloved, and monocled aristocrats themselves committed the offenses they enjoined.

In November, 1918, the common soldiers, heartbroken and discouraged, would have delivered these men to justice without regret. But during the fourteen months that have intervened the red cockades have disappeared and the songs of the republic have been silenced. A host of military organizations has afforded an opportunity for the veterans of the war to reorganize and to restore their professional leaders. Goose-step parades have begun again, and the discipline of the old régime is enforced anew. Army units have recovered their generals and resumed

their former designations. At the reviews we see the same old regiments marching to the same music and receiving the same instructions. Hindenburg and Ludendorff are there- and an Imperial Prince lurks in the background.

An order to surrender five hundred of these titled and decorated butchers and brigands will be the signal for the counter-revolution.

Therefore, penal sanctions and pecuniary compensation will be more difficult to obtain because of the fourteen months that have elapsed, during which securities have vanished and resistance has been fortified. All of the handshakes and portfolios of documents in the world will not modify this brutal truth. To-day it is truer than it was yesterday that we have got to struggle breast to breast to overcome our reinvigorated opponent and to escape his toils. The diplomatic battle is going to rage yet for a long time. Every passing week increases the handicap of the Anglo-French, while in the West the American republic has lost sight of all reality while discussing Byzantine theories of state, and in the East, beyond the cordon of little mutually distrustful and jealous nations, unstable and famished as they are, great, unknown, brooding Russia looms.

In order to assure with any probability of success, the execution of the Treaty of Versailles- and this is but part of the diplomatic task before us

two conditions are necessary. We must hasten the disarmament of Germany and we must adopt a definite German policy.

It is not a question of inspecting a naval dock-yard, or destroying a few fortifications along the Rhine. That would be comparatively simple. The problem involves things of a very different character-effective military

forces and units, police schools, prohibited manufactures, stocks in hand, army materials to be delivered and army materials to be listed. For fourteen months Germany's factories have kept in operation; its stock of machine guns has been restored and improved; its flame throwers and poison bombs have been used with success. In the Reichswehr,' a force of one hundred thousand professional soldiers, authorized by the Versailles Treaty, has been organized in such a way as to preserve in skeleton form practically every military organization of the old imperial army. It embraces those parts of the service which were to be abolished-heavy artillery and army avi ation. During these fourteen months, side by side with the 'Reichswehr,' a new organization has grown up, half constabulary, half police, possessing modern arms and depots of ammunition, with its own tactics and units, and so designed that in case of need it could be mobilized on the moment and combined with the 'Reichswehr.' This new chain of organizations bears various names-'military police,' 'temporary volunteers,' 'local militia,' 'railway guards,' 'technical assistants.' Still more recent organizations of the same sort have older designations such as 'university students contingents,' and 'demobilization units.' This revival of former army groups, and the dispersion of equipment among them, and the multiplication of new semi-military societies, have no other purpose than to increase the difficulty of Allied control. How, then, are we to enforce our demands? Will the control commissions deal directly with the German authorities and employ coercion? How are they to prevent the formation of these local and voluntary organizations, and these clandestine depots of military supplies?

The whole military situation should be left in the control of Marshal Foch with the support of the other Allies. Every agency for enforcing and controlling the execution of the treaty should be under his command. But this is not enough. In order to insure the speedy disarmament of Germany, every subsidiary body entrusted with duties relating to the treaty, whether in respect to the collection of money or the fixing of boundaries, should be under a single head. We need a definite German policy.

But it will not be enough to keep informed of what is occurring in Germany and to enforce strictly the treaty it has signed. There is no profit in perpetuating our hatred and distrust. We must take measures to prevent the partial or total, the overt or concealed, reappearance of our former peril-Prussian Imperialism. Neither the strict enforcement of our contract with Germany, nor a vigilant

army of observation, will alone afford a guaranty against this possibility— a possibility that is rapidly becoming a certainty with every additional month that we spend in mere discussion. We must distinguish beween the new forces of reconstruction and the survivors of the old Teutonic organization, between Prussian domination and German unity, between the servants of the Hohenzollerns and the champions of a new era. We should be able to employ certain interests within the new Germany to our advantage and to avail ourselves of cer. tain points of contact with them. We have erected a zone of safety on the east and have established ourselves at the gateway of the Rhine. The military frontier has been pushed back beyond the political frontier. From these points of vantage we should methodically promote a policy of pacific penetration, from which France and its allies will not be the only ones to benefit.

SOME fifteen years ago it was loudly proclaimed that Australia and New Zealand had discovered a magnificent solution of their industrial troubles. Pamphlets were written by capable journalists and littérateurs (foremost among whom was William Pember Reeves of New Zealand) expatiating on the advantages of this new method, and prophesying that in a few years it would simply revolutionize the world's ways of dealing with labor questions. Commiseration was lavished on countries such as Britain and America that had not yet seen the glad light, and it was joyfully proclaimed that the day of their illumination and conversion. would soon be at hand. Yet to-day neither Britain nor America has been convinced; Continental converts are few and far between, and Australia herself is apparently on the verge of wholly abjuring the homage she was supposed to be dutifully paying at the arbitration shrine. It may interest the English reader to follow out the operations of the Acts with intent to find out, if possible, how arbitration failed - and why.

Arbitration was begotten and conceived in the camp of Labor - and Ultra-Labor at that. Capital received the new-born bantling with a scoff, and predicted no good of its future. Australian Socialists hailed the birth with extravagant demonstrations of joy, and asseverated, with ludicrous cocksureness, that industrial strife was now a thing of the past and that reason had

come down to brutish beasts.' It was clearly Astræa redux over again. And in theory the thing was excellent. A tribunal was to be created; a judge appointed of unimpeachable impartiality; evidence was to be taken on both sides and a judgment to be given on the facts which no honest men or body of men would dream of contesting. Surely the reign of peace was at hand, and the days of strife and barbarism once and for all ended.

For a while all was well. Arbitration had the luck to be tried in its early days on a rising market.' Things were good, business was booming, and when the judge awarded shorter hours, better conditions, or higher wages (as he almost invariably did) the flourishing state of Australasian industries. enabled the burden to be borne without undue strain. True, here and there you might find a cynic who wanted to know what would happen when a judge awarded lower wages or slightly increased hours, but nobody took that. kind of question seriously. It would be time enough to bid the Devil good day when you chanced to meet him.

Arbitration courts had not been running very long before it was discovered that the new system of settling industrial disputes had some notable blemishes to 'mar the fair face of its still perfection.' It came as a shock to the enthusiasts who had pinned their faith to the image to find that, in spite of the existence of the judicial machinery for settling disputes, the strike

might still be resorted to. When complaints were made with regard to this egregious defect, Australia's leading arbitration judge elucidated the position in pithy phrase thus: 'You may have a strike or you may have arbitration, but you cannot have strike and arbitration at the same time.' But the Australian Labor Unions paid but scant respect to the judicial dicta, and it became no uncommon thing when a trade was discontented with a current award of the court, instead of waiting for its legal expiry, to strike by way of compelling speedier attention to its particular grievances.

Striking during the currency of an award was an offense against the law, but offenses on the part of the unions were seldom, if ever, effectively punished, for it was one thing to inflict fines on a couple of thousand men and quite another thing to collect them. And if you could n't collect them there were not jails enough in the country to confine all the offenders who might be implicated. So it speedily became apparent that Australian arbitration was a very lopsided institution.

No better illustration of the essential defect of arbitration could be given than is afforded by the subjoined answer to a question in the New South Wales Parliament. Mr. Estelle, Minister for Labor, in answer to the then Leader of the Opposition, Mr. T. Waddell, gave the following remarkable statement:

300

ments were inflicted on the one side, while the other went off scot-free doubtless pour encourager les autres. Is it to be wondered at that a law administered in this fashion has fallen into contempt? And the most extraordinary feature is that the working class, in whose favor the thing was working ninety per cent of the time, was just the party that came to despise the Act most heartily and to clamor most vociferously for something to take its place. Had there been the paltriest modicum of courage in the Australian Governments (State and Federal) arbitration might possibly have succeeded, but time-serving politicians have been at their old game of emasculating the law, and the result has been pitiful beyond description.

To show how utterly arbitration has failed as a means of abolishing strikes, I cannot do better than quote from the last annual report of Mr. Knibbs, our Commonwealth statistician (July, 1919), who gives the following suggestive table:

$9795.25

$9668.74

66 Nil

Needless to remark, no employee was imprisoned for making default in the payment of his fine. All the punish