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lisky) in this circle, I doubt if it is as yet more than a group of literary frondeurs. The orthodox Socialist position, to which the Independents give the most confident expression, is, of course, that this Treaty, as cruel as the Peace of Brest, will last no longer. They foresee an early change of opinion, perhaps a revolutionary change, in France and Britain, and predict that the International will insist on the revision of the Treaty. That may be the one sane hope, but no one who has watched English opinion this week will be disposed to expect much in the way of action at an early date from our Labor Party. In any event, could a League of Nations, tied by its present Constitution, ever force Poland to disgorge her unjustifiable acquisitions? I cannot myself believe that this faint hope, fed with a few perfunctory resolutions from London and Paris, will have life enough in it to induce the German worker to desert the leadership of the Extremists. The two real forces in Germany to-day are the new volunteer army on the one hand, and the revolutionary workers on the other

the machine gun and the strike. This new Pretorian Guard, raised by Noske to crush Spartacus, numbers about 450,000 men. A large proportion even in the ranks are ex-officers, and the inducement to join it is chiefly abundant food, good clothes, and high pay. The 'Free Corps' are not a united family, and a more or less open feud exists between two groups of them in Berlin. The signature of the Treaty will require the disbandment of three fourths of this new force, and the whole of the relics of the old army (about 3,000,000 men). The immediate future might depend on the accident whether a civilian ministry chooses the Corps which are to survive, or whether an enterprising Corps chooses the ministry. A powerful caste is

about to be ruined, and in any event the disbanded men and officers will be potentially revolutionary material. That Germany in its present condition can be policed by an army, however efficient, which numbers only 100,000 men, seems to me improbable. If Noske or a successor attempts to do with 100,000 men what he has done, none too easily, with 700,000, he will assuredly fail. On the other hand, the adoption of a conciliatory social policy would probably come too late. The popular expedient is to attempt a compromise with the Soviet system, on something like English Guild Socialist lines a two-chamber Parliament, one House on the present territorial plan, and the other on a basis of industrial representation. That would be at the best an unstable compromise, and the Left Socialist Wing would go on fighting for the real thing,' the Dictatorship of the proletariat. The Treaty is triple nonsense. It expects Germany to earn vast sums, and to earn them without the right and facility to trade abroad. It expects some government to impose this servitude on the German workers, yet denies to that government the army which alone might hold them down in outward obedience. It robs 15,000,000 Germans of subsistence. and omits to provide them with a field for emigration.

I am inclined to risk a prediction of the consequences of enforcing this Treaty. They will not be interesting or eventful. For months to come Germany may be forgotten. She lacks the energy or the unity to act, though spasmodic essays at positive action may be attempted. The chief consequences will be negative. The workers will not work, or in so far as they work, it will be fitfully, half-heartedly, like angry, weary, and helpless men. So far from resenting this attitude,

the middle-class employees will largely share it. Already the lines of classcleavage between the hand worker and miserably sweated brain worker have almost disappeared. This 'ca' canny' mood will affect the employers no less than the men. The natural tendency to repair machinery and restart trade will be checked at every turn by the knowledge that between the burden of internal taxation amounting to half the national income, and the load of the foreign tribute, all chance of appreciable profits has disappeared. Banks will refuse credit. for until the first two years are over, no one will know what Germany's liabilities really are, nor until she is admitted to the League will her chances of trade be worth estimating. The ruin will go on unchecked, and the irresistible conviction will grow that the only chance of restarting life lies in repudiating

The Nation, May 24

debts, or in socializing without compensation. The Entente, in short, by this Treaty, is reducing Germany to a despair as deep as Russia's. In the long run, the only possible field for German energy is Russia, and whether Lenine rules or Kolchak, no force can ultimately keep the German population from carrying its skill and science to the mental desert of the East. In the end, the two peoples whom the West has wronged will seek their revanche together. But for a vivid, angry, resourceful, positive movement of protest and resistance, one need not look to-morrow. That in the end would be better for the world, for courage may do much to glorify ruin. Lethargy, despair, decay, the decline of an elaborate civilization, the slow lapse into disrepair of a great machine, that will be the immediate consequence of this Treaty that murders hope.

LITTLE GRAY WATER

LITTLE Gray Water, my heart is with you

In the loop of the hills where the lone heron feeds,
Where your cloak is a cloud with a lining of blue,
And your lover a wind riding over the reeds.

Little Gray Water, I know that you know

What the teal and the black duck are dreaming at noon,
And the way of the wistful wild geese as they go

Through the haze of the hills to keep tryst with the moon.

Little Gray Water, folk say and they say

That the homing hill-shepherd, benighted, has heard
A song in the reeds, 'twixt the dawn and the day,
That was never the song of a breeze or a bird.

But I know you so silent, so silent and still,
And so proud of your trust that you'll never betray
What the fairies that gather from Grundiston Hill
Tell the stars before morning to witch them away.

Punch

W. H. O.

LETTERS FROM AMERICA

BY JOHN MASEFIELD

'Niagara.

'ALL the way, I had remembered the tales of the roar of the water, and how it can be heard for miles, but what I heard was only the train, and even when I stood in Niagara, within 500 yards of the American fall, I hardly heard it; what I heard was the rapids above the fall, which are picturesque and beautiful, in spite of the ice, yet perhaps nothing out of the way in the magnificent sense. They are a rush and a wild crying of rather clear greenish water much broken by falling and by rocks and by the big Goat Island in the middle of the falls.

'I wandered down the stream and quite soon saw the edge, with the water going over the edge, and nothing beyond the edge except the Canadian shore 400 yards away. Just at the edge the water greened and went very fast, so I hurried up, right to the rail by the brink, and as I came within ten yards (going in the direction of the stream) I heard the fall's big voice, and then, when I looked over the edge, it was really terrific.

'It is all heaped and built up below with mounds and skulls of gigantic ice, with icicle teeth in their jaws. These mounds come up halfway the height of the falls, and the water goes down into a chasm among them, and ten yards down from the edge it ceases to look like water, but is like teased wool and terror and God knows what; and out of the chasm comes a smoke of water, infinitely strange and like the ghost of water, and this rises. and flies about, overhead and everywhere, and fills the air with drops, and falls on the trees and freezes three inches thick.

'I crossed over to Canada, and

wandered on till I could see the Horseshoe. I suppose the gorge is some 200 feet deep or more, and this vast bulk of water topples into it and comes up again in a mist much higher than the fall, and floats around everywhere, not like mist so much as escaping steam, and in among it are great noble seaeagles, drowsing and drifting and cruising, and underneath is a vast, glacier bulk of ice, with rifts of bedeviled water, and a whirlpool going round and round, churning up ice and trees and chunks of things which might be bodies and slowly freezing, so that the ice near it has big irregular curves in it, where the rings of the whirlpool have frozen.

"The fall itself is not easy to describe. It is rather clear, greenish water, and it is quite quiet, not very deep just before the fall, and it rises and goes over the lip almost like metal, and then seems to see what it is doing, and seems to try to get back, and ceases to be water, or anything like water, or anything on earth, but something rather white and devilish and astonished, and one could watch it all day forever, not with awe, perhaps, but with a kind of kinship with it.

"The air is so mist-soaked that everything near, roads, gorge, and rails, is caked and heaped with hard white ice, and this will sometimes stay till July, they tell me, in its bigger heaps. The noise of the falls is not so terrific, nothing terrible, but is like all big water-like trains going by. Sometimes, they say, when the ice is breaking up and going over in bergs, many tons in weight, the noise is too awful, but not now.

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'I drove to the rapids below the falls. The river below the falls runs in a narrow gorge only 300 feet across, and I suppose the same in height, and you go down the gorge in a cliff railway like the one at Clifton, and if the

wire should snap you would go into the rapids and be dead in five seconds; and then you come out right at the water on a wooden platform with a rail, some 200 yards along the rapids, a sort of little walk; and whatever the falls may be in dignity and majesty, the rapids are in savagery and hellish force. I never saw such water, and how any mortal man could ever have thought to swim it and come out alive I cannot conceive. It is not water changed to something else, as at the falls, but it is water that has become a devil. Before it goes down the fall, it is like the star of the morning, like Lucifer, so pure and green and bright, and at the rapids it is really reëmerging after the fall, the very devil of hell. It comes along with a sort of blind sweeping romp, and then as it sweeps, a great big belly of a wave will rise up from underneath, right in its path, and the first wave will go over it just as if they were playing leap-frog and then they both shout "Hooray, hooray!" and go on with the romp together in the biggest game of all hell.

'What makes it specially fearful is the dead wan color and the thick slush of ice on the top, which makes it almost semi-solid, and to see a semi-solid acting like this makes you marvel. Sometimes you see a big heap of water thrust its snout out of the rush and swim back and bite some big wave coming at it and burst it all to bits, and then it jumps aloft and laughs and smashes itself on a rock with a kind of devilish glee, as one who says, "Well, I killed my enemy, anyway, first."

'I could have watched the place for hours and days and months. Captain Webb tried to swim it. I cannot think why he was allowed to try. A wave just picked him up and squeezed him. against another wave and killed him dead, as he must have seen would happen. No human being could live in

such water. It has force enough to light the world and grind the world's bread beside.

'Chicago, in the winter, is about as black as it is painted, that is, about as black as Manchester, perhaps a shade blacker, since they use a softer coal, but the people are so kind that one thinks of it as black but comely. I spoke this afternoon, and when I had done a woman got up in the hall and cried out that she wished to put it to the vote, "Had not America quite forgotten our old quarrels?" and everybody got up and cried out that they had, long ago. This was a kind thing to have done, it was a gentle thing.

'In every room in every hotel in this country there is a modernized Bible which I generally read a little of. Just now I am reading the story of David, which is not a bad tale, and full of color, but, my God! what a savage desert tribe and way of life and (as the lady said of Mrs. Campbell as Cleopatra), "How unlike the quiet home life of our own beloved sovereign." It is a good saga though, and I think if I can convey to L exactly what Jehovah meant to that bloody old ecstatic Samuel, it will make a good tale when "King Arthur" comes to an end. They say that in California there are still many giant sequoias (the big red-wood trees) which were growing in the time of David, and were fine trees at the time of Christ, and were really worth looking at at the time of Shakespeare, and are world famous to-day, and are still not at their best. I lay awake last night thinking of it with a kind of awe, of that enormous blind calm power and will to live. I think I'll go to see those trees if I can, but not any other wonders I won't go to see wonders which you can't see.

'Los Angeles.

"The 7th was a day of adventure, for I was asked to a big camp to speak at a mess. So I went and spoke at the camp, which is one of the biggest aviation camps in the world. Last July it was a vast flat plain, covered with scrub, which they call mezquite and chaparral. (Mezquite looks like leafless apple trees which have been buried, so as to hide the trunk. Chaparral is a sort of ever-greenish, ever-brownish thorny shrub like berberis, only short.) Now it is an immense and splendid city, humming with life and machines, with great roads and theatres and irrigations, and a vast populace of mechanics. And there I met an airman, who would take no denial, but that I should come up with him, as it was a good day for flying.

'So I put on a leather coat and leather cap and goggles and I saw my machine on the ground (a very trim and rakish little thing, one of the fastest "ships" in the world), and I said what Cæsar said to the boatman under my breath. Then I climbed into my seat and was strapped in, and was told not to monkey with the machinery, which was quite the last thing I ever thought of doing. Then they turned her round, head to wind, and my driver got in, and after some preliminaries they touched her off.

'For the first hundred yards or so, it was just like being in a motor car, but as we ran along the ground the thing became alive, like a very eager, wonderful, trembling horse that was on her mettle and was going at a big leap, and I felt all her excitement, and wanted to pat her on her neck and give her a lump of sugar, and her cylinders became louder and louder, and her rush more wonderful, and then suddenly we were off the ground and slowly rising, and no longer conscious of motion, except that there was a

VOL. 15-NO. 734

roaring gale in one's face, and a great roar from the propeller. Then, looking down, I saw the ground like a vast chess-board, and people like dots, and then we began to tilt in great circles as we climbed, and that was a deep emotion, but still I was far less conscious of flying than I have been at sea in a sailing ship when working aloft. Then, presently, a lot of smoke began to drift slantingly down upon us, and I thought, "Is this smoke from the engine?" It was a thin smell-less, faint white smoke, and soon I realized that it was not smoke at all, but cloud. Soon we were in the cloud, out of sight of light or land, except in rifts and gleams, and then presently we were in a new world.

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'We got above the cloud, which was a high-flying fine-weather "cumulostratus, and looked down upon it. And, from above, it looked as though a land of vast sand-dunes, such as Trebetherick, had been covered with deep snow, and now lay white and dim and wonderful, like a land in a dream, with the sun shining on it; and then in rifts and patches there was the world, infinitely far below us, and looking just like aeroplane photographs of it. But what was most wonderful was to see another aeroplane far, far below, like a kestrel, just over the cloud, and her shadow under her on the cloud. You may remember that Hauptmann lyric about the hawk:

'Far under me my shadow

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My shadow drifts with me.

'My man stopped the engines, and we floated there in utter silence but for the wind, and in a stillness and steadiness so strange that we could not tell that we were moving; so then we talked for half a minute, and then he touched her off again, and we went for a cruise.

'Coming down was so gradual that it did not rouse much emotion, and the

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