AMERICANS IN SHANGHAI

We are told that the American population of Shanghai and the immediately adjacent district now exceeds four thousand, or more than double the number before the war. Moreover these statistics, according to the China Weekly Review, tell only a part of the story of the growth of our interests in China's chief port. Since 1914 Americans have built a school for their children at a cost of about a million dollars, a downtown business club which cost practically as much, a country club which cost half a million dollars, and a church 'which, when completed, will probably run to a quarter of a million.' We infer from this that religious fellowship runs a bad second to club fellowship in the treaty ports. Our trade with China has increased fourfold during the past ten years.

But more important than these material things is the growth of a 'community consciousness.' No longer is the Yankee an unshaven, dusty-shoed, socially impossible adventurer in the East. 'Americans on the China coast have become accustomed to dressing for dinner. It has n't been so many years since the Astor House bar was popularly known as the "American Club," the reason being that it was about the only local club that was open to all Americans. But now the Americans have their own club, and it's more palatial and just as high class as any other nationality affords. So that's that! We do not wish to imply that all Americans in the old days - before

1914 were lowbrow people. There were a few aristocrats who associated with the British, and a half-dozen or so were admitted to the British clubs, and at least one wore a monocle and spats. But generally the Americans were not considered a "high-class" crowd and fit candidates for clubs. But they managed to worry along and make the best of the situation as they found it, and laid the foundations for an American community which probably is the largest outside of the United States, Manila not excepted. And as stated previously, they are engaged in all manner of respectable callings which go to make up a city and help it to grow. We have doctors, teachers, brokers, bankers, realtors, newspaper men, one journalist, plumbers, engineers, electricians, jobbers, stenographers, retailers, motor-car dealers, manufacturers, authors, musicians, movie proprietors and producers, radio broadcasters, and so on; and they have organized a Rotary Club, a university club, a D. A. R., a Mothers' and Teachers' Association, a Women's Club, two volunteer companies, a branch of the Legion, an "Ad" Club, Spanish War Veterans, and a Y. M. C. A.- the latter also to cost a million.'

CURRENT HISTORY WRIT COMMUNIST

COMMUNIST interpretations of international development have their place in every well-rounded survey of opinion, if only for the reason that they strike an arresting note of discord when the melody of the chorus runs too smoothly and soothingly. For example, this is the way the London Labour Monthly sees the sequence of events in 1925: January, Russo-Japanese Treaty; April, Anglo-Russian Trade-Union Alliance; May, Morocco war of independence; June, Chinese national uprising;

July, 'Red Friday'; August, Syrian revolt; September, Scarborough TradeUnion Congress endorses Communist tactics. And then follows: October, Locarno Pact of British, French, and German capitalism, and prosecution and imprisonment of British Communists; November, British-French united front in the Middle East.

The editor observes that this sequence is so clear that it needs no comment; that the Locarno Pact was opposed at first in both France and Germany because it did not primarily arise from a solution of European antagonisms, but only from a compelling force of larger world antagonisms—that is, France's desire to get rid of the German incubus in order to have a free hand to suppress the revolts in Morocco and Syria. The Pact reflected primarily, however, British aims, which were not concerned in the first instance with European questions, but with establishing a common front against Russia, with holding the Asiatic nations in leash, and with identifying Germany with Europe's struggle to maintain her capitalist suzerainty over the rest of the world. The fact that the Communist editor of the Labour Monthly has Indian blood in his veins may incline him to emphasize the racial at the expense of the Orthodox Western-European class-struggle interpretation of current history.

A NOTE ON IRELAND

AN Irish correspondent of the Manchester Guardian is inclined to think that Mr. de Valera's position in favor of having the Republicans enter the Dail upon the abolition of the present oath, which was rejected by the more militant wing of the Party, is a wise one, and that the oath should be abolished as it is not worth the price of a controversy. But he thinks that, once

inside the Dail, the Republicans would disintegrate for the want of a policy. This correspondent then proceeds to discuss the Irish-language question as follows:

'In regard to the Irish language, no Republican cabinet could move faster than we have been moving without raising a revolt against the language. It is indeed an open question whether we shall not see a revolt against the present Government's Irish-language policy. The newly published Report on National Education in 1925 contains a good deal of evidence showing the sacrifices that we and the rising generation are required to make in order to bring back into everyday use a language which is not the mother tongue of nine tenths of the people. We should feel less hesitation about paying this price if we were quite sure that the language that is thus to be born again will prove to be of genuine Irish blood and not the bastard offspring of the school-teacher and the journalist. Some of us, too, remember that for a century or so the only Irish literature that counts has been written in English, and that there is no modern literature worth the name in Irish. Others are influenced by thoughts of the impediment that the revival of Irish may put in the way of our commerce. But on the whole a study of the report suggests that nationalist sentiment will prevail, reënforced, as it is, by the vested interests in Irish that have now been created in one of the universities, in the Civil Service, and in the teaching profession. Our farmers will submit to the tyranny of the enthusiasts, grumbling and grudging after the manner of their kind. Two generations hence the miracle of the resurrection should be accomplished, and Irish may be the house language in the Free State though not in Northern Ireland.'

FASCISM AND THE BIRTH RATE

THE Italian Nationalist press made much of Mussolini's statement, based upon last January's census returns, to the effect that Italy's population is now forty-two million, or three million more than four years ago. Impero intones a hymn of praise to Fascism as the cause of it all:

Never in the history of any other people has there been so rapid a rhythm of population-increase. Our wretched democrats

will draw depressing conclusions. They see in this increase a menace to their favorite antipatriotic theories, because it may be a cause of war. Our Italian renegades are as frightened of this increase as might be a foreign country

whose population was diminishing, and for whom in consequence the increase of the Italian population may be dangerous. But let everybody in and outside Italy know that we are fully conscious of the supreme historical importance of this vertiginous increase. This magnificent prolificity is the practical proof that Fascism came at the right moment.

Apparently, however, Mussolini's enthusiastic statement is to be discounted slightly, for the actual increase was 2,172,078, or a little more than half a million a year.

MINOR NOTES

CRITICS of the rising generation in America, and especially of the criminal propensities manifested by what seems to be an abnormally large number of youths approaching maturity, may draw some comfort from the fact that this is not a peculiarly American a peculiarly American phenomenon. A series of crimes of astonishing violence committed by juveniles has recently appalled thinking people in France. Several young lads waylaid a butcher boy employed as

a collector and killed him for the sake of two hundred francs-equivalent to between five and ten dollars that he was carrying. While this crime was on the front pages of the papers, a fifteenyear-old farm-hand killed his peasant employer and the latter's aged mother and escaped with their savings. The Apache is said to be the hero of many boys who grew up without parental conneously quiet-loving people in Switzertrol during the war years. Simultaland have been scandalized by the pranks of British public-schoolboy excursionists. Parties of intoxicated boys and girls have created several unpleasant incidents at winter-sports centres in that country. According to a dispatch to a London paper, 'girls give beer parties at the local inns to all the men indiscriminately, and as whiskey costs only eight shillings and fourpence a bottle it is drunk instead of beer by both sexes.'

'No frames sold without the pictures, the impecunious Paris artist's burlesque studio-sign, had its counterpart in China during the World War, when the manager for one of our largest oil companies discovered that his bestgrade case-oil was being peddled upon the streets of an interior town by the dipperful at a price actually lower than that asked for his very cheapest grade of bulk-oil. Upon investigation it turned out that the Allies were using a lot of Chinese lard. It had to be shipped in oil-tins and boxes for lack of better containers. The demand had become so great that the oil merchants could actually get enough for the cans to enable them to undercut the cheaper grades of oil on the market.

ACCORDING to a note from Hawaii printed in The Young East, a Tokyo Buddhist journal, Japanese of the younger generation in our Mid-Pacific

Territory are in many instances becoming Christians because they are losing their knowledge of Japanese and cannot fully understand the services in the Buddhist temples. Realizing that the Buddhist religion is likely to die out in Hawaii with the passing of the older generation, for this reason, the Buddhist leaders there have brought to the island an English Buddhist priest, Bishop M. T. Kirby, Ph.D., who was formerly a priest of a Hongwan-ji temple in San Francisco. He lectures at the principal temple in Honolulu to large audiences, including many Europeans, both upon the practices and beliefs of Buddhism and upon comparative religion.

Ar the last meeting of the Krupp Works the directors reported that the company had closed its last year with

a loss of fifteen million marks, or well toward four million dollars. This was incurred chiefly in operating its shipyards at Kiel, although there were also deficits in some of its mining operations and in locomotive-building. The big farming-concession in Russia gives better promise, though it is not yet being an actual profit. The machinery owned by the firm, destroyed by the orders of the Interallied Commission, was valued at a hundred and four million marks, or twenty-six million dollars. "The machines destroyed numbered 9300, and had a total weight of about 60,000 tons. The dies and tools sacrificed reached the prodigious total of 801,420, their weight being 9588 tons. Further, 379 presses, tempering furnaces, oil and water tanks, cooling plants, and overhead travelers were scrapped on the Commission's demands.'

We print below a press report of the salient paragraphs of Premier Briand's appeal before the Chamber for the ratification of the Locarno Accord.]

GENTLEMEN: If you examine, article by article, from a purely juridical standpoint, the Pact submitted to you for ratification, you will find that it is like all similar contracts you can interpret it in various ways. You may imagine that it benefits such or such a nation, that it is better for one country than for another. That is a quibble with which I shall not waste the time of this Assembly.

I have followed the various interpretations given to this Agreement in the different countries concerned. What have I observed? When the German Cabinet was preparing to ask the Reichstag to ratify it, I read a letter from Marshal Ludendorff to his old army-comrade, Marshal Hindenburg, begging him to oppose it because it was a serious humiliation for Germany. I read numerous articles intended to prove that Germany had been duped at Locarno, and many speeches by German public men of different Parties appealing to the Reichstag to reject this Accord.

We have heard speeches from this very tribune dwelling upon the great advantages that England derives from this Agreement. One honorable speaker characterized it as a wonderful bargain for Great Britain, and thus explained From Le Temps (Semiofficial opportunist daily), February 28

the enthusiasm with which her Foreign Minister was received on his return. I think that was an exaggeration. I read articles in English newspapers, after the Locarno Agreement was signed, dealing quite as roughly with Mr. Chamberlain as our French papers have dealt with me. Speeches were delivered in the House of Commons denouncing Mr. Chamberlain for agreeing to such a compact and condemning him bitterly for letting himself be made the tool of France. One British member went so far as to say to him: 'You let M. Briand put you in his pocket without knowing it!' Whereupon Mr. Chamberlain, with that gentle and mild philosophy, with that subtlety and delicacy, that comport so well with his nobility of soul and his loftiness of mind, answered with a smile — and how patly: "The pocket of my friend M. Briand is not big enough to hold me.' (Smiles)

Gentlemen, these are amusing episodes, but I think the question before us should be considered in a more serious mood. The best thing about the Locarno Agreement, in my opinion, is that it does no injustice to any of the signatory Powers. It is not designed to enable any country to get the better of another. (Excellent! Excellent!) In order to judge it, one must understand its true spirit, which is not the spirit of narrow and selfish nationalism. It has been conceived and agreed upon in a European spirit, with a view to enduring peace. (Applause from the Left, the Centre, and the Extreme Left) Does