Spain's experience suggests that the check to the growth in population resulting from the war was not confined to the belligerent countries. Between 1912 and 1918 the number of deaths per thousand people in that country increased from 21.1 to 33.4. This is partly due to the influenza epidemic. ARAB VOTERS IN ALGIERS leged to have occurred from the war stocks sold to the French Government by our War Department: Every day for several months these American stocks have been the subject of ugly rumors. They are said to be disappearing most mysteriously. Stories are current that millions of francs' worth of goods have been stolen on account of the criminal negligence of the guards. There are also daily attacks in the press upon the gentlemen in charge of the liquidation of this property. So large are the warehouse camps at Gièvre, Montoire, Miramas, and Verneuil, where these goods are stored, that a person needs an automobile to get about. At each point the Americans had fifteen thousand men stationed, to look after the property. The French Government has only one thousand. When the Americans set out to equip their army, they plunged ahead without much thought of economy. Shiploads of every kind of material arrived in LE TEMPS comments in a recent issue upon the probable effects of the law of February 4, 1919, granting political rights to the native Mohammedan population of Algiers. The purpose of this legislation is twofold. It confers upon all the natives, except farm-hands, fellahs, and city laborers who have not performed military service, the privilege of becoming naturalized as French citizens. The exceptions mentioned apply only to the present generation, since universal military service was introduced in 1917, and henceforth every young Arab will be entitled to naturalization on his release from the army. Although nine tenths of the younger natives are thus eligible to citizenship, properly checked, but this was the exception. very few take the trouble to acquire this privilege. Of the fifty thousand Arabs in Algiers, only one has so far applied for political rights. The reason is their unwillingness to abandon native customs and usages, which they are free to follow while they retain their old status. Among these are the right of polygamy, easy divorce, and the Mohammedan law of inheritance. In addition Arabs are permitted to vote in local elections. Wherever they have expressed their sentiments the native voters appear to have been 'against the government.' AMERICAN ARMY SUPPLIES IN A CORRESPONDENT of the Corriere della Sera, writing from Paris in May, mentions the extensive pillaging al quick succession: arms, harnesses, canned goods, soap, gasoline, toys,- actually children's toys, blankets, dry goods, paper, ploughs, automobiles, and coffins. The Americans brought over four hundred thousand coffins to France. They proposed that every soldier should be properly buried. Their actual deaths were only about eighty thousand, so there is a surplus of some three hundred thousand coffins. All this stuff was brought in by the train-load and piled in vast quartermaster sheds. Sometimes it was Some of the coffins are packed full of pails of lard. A big bale marked 'woolen underwear,' may be found to have cotton goods inside, and a box marked 'paper' will contain a typewriter. Then there was evidently more or less fraud: in some cases of bottled goods only the uppe layers were filled and the lower ones empty. At Verneuil there were two million (sic!) Mexican saddles; at Miramas, thousands of handcuffs. Who is going to buy such quantities of Mexican saddles and handcuffs? It is not surprising that the bureaucrats have lost their heads in all this confusion. THE GERMAN ELECTIONS ALARMISTS who profess to see in the results of the recent German elections evidences of the growing strength of the reactionaries are perhaps misinterpreting an apathetic for an aggressive state of public sentiment. In an account of the political situation in Germany on the eve of this election, Theodor Wolff, editor of the RadicalLiberal Berliner Tageblatt, writes in the London Nation of June 5: 'Members of nearly every party are in ill-humor and are disillusioned. Friends of the past do not believe in the restoration of their ideals, and adherents of the new order have not seen their hopes realized.' He foresaw that women would prove an unpredictable factor in the coming vote. They were more influenced than men by the rising price of food and the demands of servants, and more easily persuaded to draw political conclusions from these disagreeable incidents. The outcome of the election indicates that as a result of something more than a year of real parliamentary government, the average German citizen has made up his mind pretty definitely either in favor of the old social system,— which does not mean necessarily the old political system, or in favor of going still further with socialization and other radical changes than was ventured by the recent coalition government. The great political issue in Germany is not between a monarchy and a republic, but between parliamentary government and a Soviet government plus proletarian dictatorship. The election seems to have removed that question from practical politics for the present by showing that the people are overwhelmingly in favor of parliamentary institutions. COAL FROM TURKEY THE partition of Turkey, while it resulted in Italy's receiving but minor territorial concessions, has given that country valuable commercial advantages in the Eastern Mediterranean. Among the more important of these is virtual control of the coal regions around ancient Heraclea, on the Black Sea. The collieries lie some twenty-five miles from the port of Zongulvah, with which they have railway connection, and from which about two thousand tons of coal were shipped daily before the war. Production can be greatly augmented, as the Turkish government has hitherto placed many obstacles in the way of scientifically developing this property. MINOR NOTES WITHIN three months more than five hundred families with some capital have migrated from Central Europe to the Argentine. An even larger number have migrated from Italy. One Italian vessel recently arrived in Buenos Aires with eight hundred immigrants, of whom no less than two hundred and fifty had sufficient money to buy a farm. THE overall movement has spread from America to London. In Spain people have taken to wearing rope sandals as a protest against the high prices of shoes. According to recent reports from Buenos Aires, leagues have been formed in that city by people who obligate themselves to adopt the boots and clothing of agricultural laborers. This example is being followed by all classes of society. In its attempt to tax war-profits the French government is facing a decidedly unfriendly attitude on the part of the peasants, who have uncompromisingly resolved to tolerate no inquiry into their profits from the war. As a result the provision for inquisitory proceedings, in order to ascertain farmprofits, has been suspended for the present. [L'Illustration (Paris Illustrated Literary Weekly), May 29] THE ABUSE OF THE RIGHT TO STRIKE BY PAUL BOURGET If we analyze the right to strike, we find that this right is but the corollary of two others: the right to work and the right to liberty. In order that a citizen may occupy a worthy place in society, he must have a chance to earn a living by serving that society-in other words, by useful labor. Even an idler contributes in a way such service; for the capital which supports him in idleness is nothing else than accumulated labor. But if work is to have moral value - I insist upon this adjective-it must be voluntary. Unless this be the case, it will be slave labor, no matter by what fine name we call it. Voluntary labor presupposes the right to stop work and that embraces definitely the right to strike. Consequently some of the highest aspects of human association are involved in this right, and its recognition by law has been justly rated one of the great forward steps of justice and progress. Holding this theoretical proposition clearly in view, let us turn our eyes to the prospect presented by the general strike which we have recently witnessed in France, where we have seen liberty menaced, denied, crushed, by an implacable and anonymous despotism. We saw labor, which should logically have its independence strengthened and its condition bettered by striking, balked and demoralized. We beheld the social compact, which protects us all against atavistic and primitive barbarism, attacked savagely. The fruitful sense of solidarity which makes our people one nation was cur tailed and confined to a single group, and distorted into a dogma of hatred. Does this experience compel us to go back to the doctrines of old-time slavery advocates, and to accept August Comte's dictum that the allsubordinating need of public order can never be satisfied, except by the constant use of restraint? Many motives of various weight lie behind this abuse of strikes. Some are economic, others political, and, under existing conditions, some are even physiological. The nervous demoralization following long wars has always manifested itself in crises of collective psychopathy, incited by incidents which superficial historians mistake for fundamental causes. Among these motives I would emphasize a mistaken conception of what we may call, for want of a better term, the ownership of labor. If this misconception could be corrected in the minds of the proletariat, revolutionary sophistry would be deprived of a dangerous weapon. Ownership of labor is what I have called it. At a glance it may appear a peculiar phrase: to whom could a man's labor belong, if not to the person who performs it? Is it not as much his property as his eyes, his mind, his ability, his free will? But if you analyze labor a little more closely, you will discover that working involves a group of conditions outside the workingman himself. A locomotive engineer enters his cab. Is the locomotive he is about to start, which is his tool of trade, a product of his own labor? No. The n e er S S Let us continue our study of the locomotive. It was constructed by handworkers but after whose design? After plans invented by other workers, men who worked with their brains. But going still further back, it was necessary first to explore the laws of mechanics, and who did that? Scientists and scholars bent over abstruse mathematical calculations and complex laboratory apparatus-men who hardly ever used their hands in direct production. These scientists and scholars, and their colleagues, the physi1 cists, chemists, and geologists,- for all the sciences coöperate in every invention, how were they produced? Where did they study? In universities. And who founded and endowed such institutions? Possibly princes and high officials and noblemen, or wealthy men of the middle class. In some degree innumerable beneficent impulses and efforts have contributed to create these complex instruments of production. All these contributors have added something to the output of the workingman, whose service they have rendered possible. They retain a right of ownership in that service. Enter a factory, descend into a mine, visit a studio all the people there employed, whatever they may be doing or thinking or planning, are consciously or unconsciously participants in some joint serv Analysis enables us to isolate a truth regarding capital and its different forms which we are prone to overlook. We are accustomed to look at wealth from a single aspect that of money. But if we consider it in its truer and broader sense,- and that is the sense in which I would employ the word here, it is accumulated labor; and even the most destitute members of society really derive the benefit of a great capital, both intellectual and physical, for which they are the trustees, and-let us tell them frankly the debtors. I am not speaking of the security which society affords the humblest workman. His existence, and that of his wife and children, are no longer at the mercy of brute force. They are guaranteed against that physical oppression, that 'right of the fist,' which prevailed in the Middle Ages. His personal savings belong to him; the public protects them. But this is not the great blessing for which even the man without property should be deeply grateful to society. The great blessing is that he is a functioning member of a civilized state. That alone is a birthright so precious that millions and millions of men of former generations would have envied him its possession, had they been able to conceive so great a blessing. To-day, how many millions of men are without it in the uncivilized and barbarous portions of the globe. How small, after all, is the civilized world compared with the vast areas where life and property are still insecure! The right to strike becomes an abuse, as soon as it denies the fundamental law, that the labor of the individual can never be distinct and apart from the labor of the rest of the community, and as soon as it attacks society, of which revolutionists persist in seeing only the drawbacks, without comprehending the blessings they enjoy under a civilized government and the intolerable sufferings which would be their lot in a state of social chaos. Were the proletariat to succeed in its present efforts, this success would be punished, like all other errors of heart and spirit, by a veritable return to barbarism. First of all would be the stagnation of industry. It is the most chimerical of delusions to fancy that the sciences, upon which the industries of to-day are based, represent a permanent acquisition which the human race can never lose. In the same way that there is no disease in the abstract, but there are diseased people, so there is no science in the abstract, but there are scientists. In other words, if the sciences are not cultivated in the minds of men, they will disappear and vanish. A dictatorship of manual workers, excluding intellectual workers, would, if it continued long enough, lead to the disappearance of our scientific knowledge, and a speedy decline of industrial processes and equipment. When machinery is no longer designed and constructed true to the theories and principles which underlie the applied sciences, it will no longer be improved. Mechanical equipment will not be replaced. Engineering and technology will decline as they have already done in Russia. Indeed, the frightful experience of that country already shows the ruin that ensues under the dictatorship of men of brawn alone. Such a system requires a militarist system of production, where output and consumption are enforced and rationed under rigorous tyrannical control. to strike, which our French Bolsheviki would employ to enforce their theories, ends with this disconcerting paradox: 'As a corollary of the right to liberty, the right to strike carried to excess produces slavery. Conceived as defending the dignity of labor, it finally debases it.' Another example of the errors into which we inevitably fall when we defy the laws of nature. Socialist doctrinaires propose to reduce all classes to one. Now the existence of these classes is a fact. That they exist in response to a law of nature is a second fact; for there have been classes in all ages, in all climates, and among all races. That these classes are in conflict with each other is a third fact. But the class-struggle, which is the very essence of social life, presumes the coexistence of classes. These rival classes cannot dispense with each other. A moralist wrote in the eighteenth century: 'Everything is interdependent. The air belongs to man and man belongs to the air. Nothing exists for itself alone.' This great vital law of interdependence has been instinctively realized by the French proletariat during the recent struggle. They must learn to comprehend it fully, to appreciate its fundamental necessity and broad justice. The day when they do appreciate it fully, a danger will have been averted which now menaces, not only our own country, but all European civilization. Let us have faith that this danger will vanish as others have vanished before. The proletariat is as deeply interested in averting the peril as is the bourgeoisie. We do not want a movement to deprive the workman of the right to strike, but to guarantee that the employment of this right shall be legitimate, and compatible with the highest interests of society, which is Consequently the abuse of the right superior to any single class. |