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meditated wars. Neither did he espouse that exaggerated nationalism which would impose German culture as an all-saving medium upon the remainder of the world. A German world-war would have been as hateful to him as any other. He fully comprehended that the cosmopolitan spirit had suffered seriously in his century, because a monstrously one-sided nationalism' had arisen as a natural reaction against Napoleon's effort to found a world empire. While he conceived a number of powerful states existing side by side as the condition precedent for future wars, he considered them at the same time the necessary condition for the evolution of a world culture.

It would be ridiculous to try to represent Treitschke as a meek and mildintentioned man. He looked dangers directly in the eye. He did not hesitate to place his finger on the wound. But he was never a brutal advocate of force, or a frivolous preacher of war.

[Stampa (Turin Giolitti Daily), August 21]

AN ARMY IN MUFTI

BY CONCETTO PETTINATO

As I write from Berlin, in August, the German army is fighting a second war a passive, silent, clandestine, evasive war. Possibly, none-the-less, this war will have as decisive an influence upon the destiny of Germany and of the world as its predecessor. It is a struggle for survival, an effort of an army to outlive itself. This battle is being fought without the pomp and circumstances of war, without uniforms. Nothing could be more characteristic of the moral decline of the German nation during the past two years than the contraband, poaching sort of existence to which its of

ficers have taken recourse in order that they may continue to exist. Bereft of his sword and monocle, his militant moustache shaved off, a little less pomade on his pompadour, and what has become of your officer? He has vanished. He is transformed into a drummer, a clerk, a salesman, wrapped up in his profession; an inoffensive creature, a colorless fellow lost in an ocean of colorless companions. In the old days commercial travelers who held rank in the army were very particular to announce the fact on their visiting cards. To-day visiting cards are silent, inoffensive, non-committal; the family name and the given name, and that is all. German officers to-day are living at home the way they used to live sometimes when on foreign missions: honest burgers, home-loving, peaceful, ignorant of military matters, smiling the ingratiating smile of a goodhearted, simple-minded man of the common people. What more could you ask for? And then the non-commissioned officers and private soldiers

they do the same. Take away their helmets, take the insignia off their caps, soil their clothes a little with the evidence of honest toil, and the disguise is complete. Where is the soldier? He, too, has vanished. It is impossible to identify him in the crowd of common citizens, eight out of ten of whom still wear the nondescript clothing of the demobilized army. Behold him, as soon as relieved of military duty, a gardner, a farmer, a land-clearer. Of course, as a matter of habit, there is a corporal in charge. If they want to work that way, what objection? What harm is done? 'Union is strength,' and Germany needs much strength to rise again and recover its vigor. The minister of agriculture has taken these demobilized troops under his wing. There are so many swamps

to be drained, so many waste lands to be redeemed. Companies and regiments are transformed into military colonization groups. They are ideal farmers, diligent, disciplined, never striking, and never asking for higher wages. So the problem is solved. Already Germany has six or seven of these soldier colonies. In a few weeks there will be dozens of them.

The officers themselves do not ply the spade, but they do what they can. They organize social circles and cooperative unions-anything not to lose sight of each other. One of these organizations in Berlin is the 'Imperial Employment Office for Officers,' the purpose of which is to place qualified officers in desirable positions, whether in government service, commerce, or manufacturing. Some 4000 have been thus provided for during the last few months; within a year it is expected that 24,000 will have been found positions. It is not an easy matter. These officers know nothing of practical life; they are continually being taken in by fictitious manufacturers, fictitious millionaires, who promise them mountains of gold, and after having despoiled them of a few hundred marks, vanish with the company's funds, the title to the mine, or the patent rights which were to make their fortune.

The Imperial Employment Office for Officers in Berlin has branches in the other principal cities of Germany. Only a few steps from the head office of this society, a so called 'National Economic Union for Demobilized Soldiers and Soldiers in Regular Services' has opened quarters. This office proposes to do for private soldiers what the 'Imperial Employment Office for Officers' has done for the latter. It likewise has branches in several important cities. Now it must be admitted that the discharged troops are

not in happy circumstances. If they cannot get paying employment, they receive the usual inadequate out-ofwork allowance by the government. But the officers do not have even this recourse. To be sure, the government pays them a pension, but the drain upon the treasury for this item has become SO heavy-3,900,000,000 marks that the pensioners are kept waiting month after month for their allowances. This is not due to the bad faith of the government, but largely to the confusion which reigns in the public offices on account of the heavy work of demobilization. Moreover, the old military units have become inextricably intermingled on account of transfers of personnel made for the purpose of evading so far as possible Entente control. The situation is still worse in case of the demobilization allotments. A veterinary officer in a regiment of field artillery, who was discharged on March 31 in connection with the reduction of the standing army, is still waiting for the three months' salary which he should have received at that time.

The result of these conditions can easily be imagined. Officers try in every possible way to evade by deception any reduction in rank which they cannot prevent in a legal manner. The Minister of War sympathizes with them. In reducing the army to the hundred thousand men permitted by the Entente - an army no stronger than Prussia possessed in 1757, when the kingdom of Frederick the Great had only three million inhabitants the authorities have vainly attempted to prescribe a fixed ratio between officers and privates. Commissioned officers retained in the service number 4000, including 4000, including four generals, 14 lieutenant generals and 36 major generals; but in final analysis the whole thing works out so that the new Ger

man army, including its artillery specialists, transportation men, carrier pigeon sections, and its 101 bandmasters, will have an officer or a noncommissioned officer for every two private soldiers. Each of them has the privilege of selecting one of these two private soldiers as his aide. This will go on for twelve years; for as is generally known, Germany is forbid den to train any new officers for that period. Such a situation has its humorous aspects, but also its serious ones. The serious side is the fact that Germany is thus keeping in service a large number of officers and underofficers who will be hereafter totally unfitted for civilian pursuits, and it is meantime preserving the old traditions of the former army. The army itself may disappear, but the mold in which it was cast remains. Tomorrow the 40,000 officers and noncommissioned officers, who are naturally chosen from the most efficient men in the former army, might easily train and drill 200 men a piece, and we might suddenly find soldiers springing up all over Germany as though the country had been thickly sown with dragons' teeth.

What I have just described has been done by the government, which has already alloted two and a half billion marks for this purpose in the present budget. But the army is also helping itself and doing so effectively. The important thing is that the old units should not get scattered, that they should not allow the old ties of comrades to become relaxed. German education is well adapted to strengthen such ties. Volunteer corps and city militia companies continue these old traditions. They may be dissolved temporarily, but they continue to exist in fact. They may take to ambush, they may feign disappearance, but they are still there. Everyone admits

it. East Prussia is full of such organizations. A certain land settlement colony there, which I chance to know personally, may always remain likewise the Third Courland infantry regiment, formerly part of the famous 'Iron Division.' Change their coats again, give them back their old names, and you would find these organizations precisely what they were before. If they are not still the same regiments and battalions, in any case they are the men which formed those regiments and battalions. Up to within a few weeks these new voluntary formations not only enrolled mainly discharged soldiers, from famous old military units, but they would take no one who had not been a member of one particular unit. Recruiters took advantage of the fact that during the prevailing depression these men could not find employment elsewhere. I recall having seen personally, on several occasions, patriotic posters affixed to the walls around Berlin, calling the working people to arms and indicating the location of the recruiting offices. This practice was started all over Germany by the Fatherland party, founded by Kapp, under the pretext of maintaining public order. Last year that party, which had disappeared for a time during the early months of the republic, turned up again with a new name, "The League to Combat Bolshevism.' When this designation lost credit on account of the slight probability of a real Bolshevist peril for Germany, the league was again rechristened. This time it called itself simply 'Escherich's Society.'

Escherich is a Bavarian head forest warden, who holds a commission as captain of reserves. His efforts to organize armed groups of reactionaries in Bavaria have succeeded. The Agrarian League is backing him strongly, and he has the support of the Catholics and the Bava

rian People's Party, both of which are bitterly hostile to socialism and to Prussian republicanism. One sees the influence of this movement in the agitation which the Bavarians are conducting just now against disarmament of the bourgeois classes. The Agrarian League has formed a committee to organize resistance to this law, has spread agitatory reports among the peasants, and has attempted to recall two members of the Reichstag, belonging to the People's Party, who ventured to vote in favor of the disarmament bill. So the German government has a difficult task before it. The real reason why the Independent Socialists opposed the disarmament act is not as the con

servative papers represent

because they want to keep the way open for an armed revolution of the proletariat, but because they believe the government is not strong enough to compel the Conservatives to submit to such a statute. The authorities might succeed in disarming the working classes, who have in their possession only rifles and machine guns. But the wealthy bourgeoisie control the country districts, and can easily accumulate considerable arsenals on their great estates. They are even accused of collecting cannon, bomb throwers, flame throwers, and similar military equipment. So the disarmament law will not make Germany any safer for itself or for its neighbors.

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the German papers. At that time Mr. Rykoff said: 'Our nationalized textile factories are not producing more than 10 per cent of their normal output. In 1919 only 11 per cent of our 164,000 looms were in operation, and only seven per cent of our 7,000,000 spindles. From January to March, 1919, between 100,000 to 200,000 poods of textile products were manufactured, while between September and November of the same year only 25,000 to 68,000 poods were manufactured. This is the status of our textile industry, which used to rank third in the world, following that of England and Ger.. Before the war the permany. centage of locomotives requiring repairs never exceeded 15 per cent. Now the number has risen to practically 60 per cent. In other words, only 40 out of every 100 locomotives are in working order. . . In order to supply the spinning mills of the Moscow district with cotton about 10,000 tons a month must be brought from Turkestan. Actually, only two trains a month are available for this service, so that it will take decades to bring from Turkestan the 120,000 tons which the mills are prepared to use annually.' Rykoff added that the number of cattle in the country had greatly decreased, and that the flax harvest was only a fraction of what it was before the war.

Hardly less astonishment was caused in by a statement of the German foreign the minister, Dr. Simons, in the session of ach the Reichstag on July 26, in which he said that the Soviet theory had certainly been overworked in Russia, but that nevertheless we could not overlook the fact that the Bolshevist government 'has accomplished a tremendous task of reconstruction in the economic field.' He mentioned esGpecially the able way in which the new authorities there had solved the problem of central power stations. To be sure the same minister referred to Bolshevism, only the following day, in quite different words, designating it as 'a devouring flame which conPesumes everything it touches.' On this second occasion he asserted that Bolshevism was already decayed at the heart, and that its mission would never be to conquer the world. So Dr. Simons refuted himself; for it is obvious that a 'flame which consumes everything' can not perform a tremendous task of reconstruction. Apparently the minister has received contradictory information -information contradicting not only what the opponents of Bolshevism write and be tell us, but the information which the Bolsheviki themselves officially give us. For example, let us take the address to that Rykoff, Chairman of the Bolshevist Supreme Economic Council for All Russia, and consequently in charge of all the economic measures of the Soviet government, delivered at Moscow on January 25, 1920, to the Congress of Russian Economic Boards and Trade Unions. Extensive extracts from this address were published in

VOL. 20-NO. 1002

Early in July, a correspondent of the Manchester Guardian, who had just returned from Russia, brought back some very interesting material upon the economic conditions there. This material is particularly valuable because that great English newspaper has been very favorable to the Soviet government, and has urged its recognition by the government of England. This correspondent gives us the following data regarding transportation: In 1914 Russia pos