able to our present purpose. None of our countries would accept a Confederation at the present moment. My endeavors are on a smaller scale, namely, no confederation, but defensive alliances between the five victorious (Eastern) states of this

war-Roumania, Jugoslavia, Greece, Czecho-Slovakia, and Poland - stretching from the Baltic to the Mediterranean. In such an Alliance the vanquished states, Austria, Hungary, and Bulgaria, will be accepted with pleasure, provided that, like ourselves, they consider the Treaties of Peace as definitive.

THE Japan Advertiser publishes a two-column interview with Mr. Karel Pergler, Czecho-Slovak minister to Japan, upon the Little Entente, in which he interprets the new alliance as a bar not only against Hungarian aggression but also against the project to restore the Habsburgs. Speaking of Vienna, he says:

It is said that the collapse of Austria Hungary has reduced the people of Vienna to a sad plight. Indeed, that is so. But it is simply evidence of the fact that prior to the war, Vienna was a parasite living upon the wealth, especially of the Czech countries; and this, in fact, was one of the reasons urged for the dissolution of Austria Hungary. Has Vienna a vested right to be maintained or supported by others either as a ward or a parasite? I am not insensible to the powerful human aspects of the question nor am I a chauvinist. I recognize that Vienna should be reasonably aided during the inevitably difficult period of transition. . With reference to the conflict between Russia and Poland, Czecho-Slovakia, Roumania, and Yugoslavia unite in a watchful attitude of neutrality. A speedy resumption of economic relations with Russia is necessary.

THE AUSTRIAN ELECTION

THE election which was held in Austria on October 17 is likely to have a far-reaching influence upon the history of the young republic. An extraordinary opportunity was afforded to the working classes of that country to attain their political object when the old empire was destroyed. They have succeeded in establishing a republic upon the broadest possible democratic basis and have enacted what is regarded as a model code of

laws for the protection of labor. They have avoided communist revolution such as afflicted Budapest and Munich.

On the other hand none of the little powers which emerged from Germany's defeat has faced such difficult problems as Austria, and the SocialDemocratic party has incurred that unpopularity which befalls any party in power during an economic depression. Its bourgeois opponents are divided into the Christian Socialists, or Liberal Clericals, and the so-called Greater Germans, who stand for a German Nationalist programme. The Christian Socialists are hostile to a union with Germany and friendly to an alliance with reactionary Hungary. The German Nationalists are hostile to the republic, but secretly in favor of union with Germany. Like every other European nation Austria has also a Communist party whose hatred of the orthodox Socialists is greater than its hostility to their bourgeois opponents.

Yesterday's election is said to have resulted in a victory for the Christian Socialists. If so this indicates a swing of sentiment in favor of restoring the monarchy and of closer relations with Hungary. In other words it represents a step toward the realization of the French plans in Central Europe described by Sisley Huddleston in the article we print this week.

'DANGEROUS LIVING' IN JAPAN NICHI NICHI, one of the oldest newspapers of Tokyo, and for many years the chief organ of the Japanese government—although not although not now an official daily prints the following observations upon the sources of the social unrest, which is felt as keenly in Japan as in Western industrial countries:

Many people speak of dangerous thoughts,' and the authorities are busy taking steps to

m

control them, but in our opinion this question is unimportant. The fundamental cause of trouble ties in dangerous living,' by which we mean the living of those who care about their own interests alone, completely ignoring those of others. For instance, a man recklessly motors on the street, throwing about dust, as if there were no pedestrians. Many large mansions exist in the heart of the city, and their owners act as if they were ignorant of the scarcity of houses for ordinary men. Compared with European cities, Tokyo has only small parks, yet there are many extensive gardens of wealthy men in the midst of the city. Donations of the rich to the relief fund for the Nikolaievsk victims are said to be very small. The merchants who own large mansions, and who behaved themselves arrogantly during the war boom, are now squeaking for help to relieve the difficulties caused them by the depression. The Cabinet is now said to be in an impasse. We need not care much about this;

what we should care about is the fact that the community is now politically in a cul-de-sac, a state of affairs which sometimes causes serious developments. The authorities should try to ascertain the tendencies of the community.

If the country is to be relieved of 'dangerous thought,' an end must first be made of ‘dangerous living.'

THE 'ORGESCH' AND THE JUNKERS

THIS sub rosa German military society continues to be an object of acrimonious debate in the German press. Vorwärts, which has been conducting a campaign against it, insists that its East Prussian branches consist substantially of the old junker military bodies, camouflaged as agricultural societies in the country, and as patriotic lodges in the cities. They are controlled by a former General Staff officer, Captain Preu, who draws a salary of forty-eight thousand marks a year. Advisory officers attached to these societies receive from twelve hundred to two thousand marks, besides food and lodging. Summarizing its information, Vorwärts says:

The Orgesch in East Prussia is not as it is in Bavaria, a non-partisan society, but an outright class organization of city property holders and farmers to fight the Socialists and proletariat.

JOINING THE MOSCOW INTER

NATIONAL

LAST May the Independent Labor party of Great Britain formally withdrew from the Second or parliamentary International and resolved upon steps toward joining the Third, or 'direct action' International, which has its headquarters at Moscow. It addressed a series of ten questions to the Executive Committee of that body before taking final action. The committee replied in a long document which forms a pamphlet of some 32 pages, in which it asserts the necessity of depriving the bourgeoisie of its political rights and expelling it from Parliament, and affirms that the bourgeoisie cannot be defeated in any capitalist country without civil war and the establishment of a proletarian dictatorship. No party will be admitted to the Third International which does not endorse these opinions and policies. The document is a plain statement of the inflexible opposition of revolutionary communism to any sort of accommodation with so-called parliamentary and legal-method parties, no matter how radical the social programme of the latter may be.

Meantime, most of the German Independent Socialist journals are bitterly opposed to accepting what they characterize as the arbitrary conditions. dictated by the Moscow committee for their admission. They are inclined to insist that a Third International without the support of the most powerful German party will prove a failure. A poll of the leading Independent-Socialist papers shows that twelve oppose accepting these conditions, three are in favor of submitting to the Moscow terms, and one is non-committal. At its late congress the party appears to have split on this issue.

Wilhelm Dittmann's articles upon Russia have 'worked like bombs,' and

he has felt called upon to defend his own frankness, under the title, 'Our Duty to Tell the Truth.' He says that what the German Socialist delegates returning from Russia have published has 'destroyed illusions concerning conditions in Russia cherished by a very large portion of the working classes.'

Another German radical leader, Crispien, in opposing the complete subordination of the Independent Socialist party of Germany to the Moscow International, recently said at a public meeting in Leipzig:

In Russia the Soviets have become bureaucratic organizations. I do not condemn them for that, I merely state the facts. In Russia a widespread dissatisfaction exists among the peasantry and a majority of the working people. Peace has not come. Production does not increase.

This dissatisfaction has caused the dictatorship

which at first was over only the bourgeoisie and peasants to be extended so that it is now over the working people as well. The constitution has been amended. Section 25 provides that working people who are politically unreliable shall be deprived of their political rights. So the dictatorship over the working people themselves has been constantly extended. Things are not as they should be even in the Communist Party itself. In Moscow the very sparrows twitter from the roofs that the dictatorship is a dictatorship of five men, who enforce rigid obedience even from their own party associates. Let the Russians be governed that way if they are willing, but we should not be asked to endorse that sort of thing in Germany.

It will be recalled that the Italian and Spanish Socialist parties have already declared in favor of the Third International. The French delegates to the Moscow Congress have brought back conditions for the admission of the French Socialists likely to be quite as unpalatable as those dictated to the German Independents. The Moscow policy is to evict from the Socialist parties of Europe all moderate or compromising leaders. Hitherto Socialist policy has proposed to supplant the Capitalist régime gradually by partial

conquests conquests a so-called minimum programme. This was a policy of evolution. It was to be promoted by strikes for higher wages, and by social welfare laws. Provisionally it was a trade union programme. The new Socialist group ruling from Moscow looks toward the immediate and complete overthrow of the Capitalist system by direct action. It calls for new agencies, Soviets, shop councils, industrial rather than trade unions, peasant councils, and the like.

DEPRESSION IN THE EAST END

THE Daily Telegraph reports that London's East End industries are facing an acute crisis on account of the bad state of retail trade, and the loss of the former colonial market for cheap clothing, boots and shoes, due to the increased cost of production in England itself. The spokesman for a group of East End employers said:

The chief industries here are clothing, furniture, and boots. The clothing factories may be described as empty. My own firm has in its service at the moment only one tenth of its usual number of employees. Big firms, which in the ordinary way can keep seventy cutters occupied, have now only three or four cutters. . . . Owing to the bad state of retail trade, accounts are not coming in well. Many of our people have all their capital locked up in raw materials and manufactured goods.

There is an unusual surplus of casual labor. One of the largest furniture firms in London has discharged eight hundred of its employees on account of the shrinkage of demand caused by the high cost of furniture and the lack of houses. Every labor exchange in the East End is thronged with applicants for work. Surplus labor in the dock area is estimated at over twenty thousand men.

VANDERLIP IN MOSCOW? ACCORDING to the London Times of September 27:

During the past week a message has been received by the Soviet Delegation stating that Mr. Vanderlip had arrived in Moscow representing big American financial interests, and had already met the Soviet Economic Council there to begin negotiations on the question of commercial relations. The message came in open language, and not in code, but no further information concerning Mr. Vanderlip was given. It is understood that recently a number of representatives of American concerns have had daily interviews with M. Krassin and his colleagues on the same point.

NATIONALIZING GERMAN COAL

MINES

THE report of the commission appointed by the German government to investigate the possibility of completely nationalizing the country's coal mines, has now been published. Both the Trade Union and Socialist members and the proprietors and employers consider nationalization inevitable. The principle difference in their recommendations relates to immediate or gradual nationalization. Commenting upon the report Frankfurter Zeitung says that the private control of mines has received its death sentence; that the coal industry has been for years ripe and overripe for the action now recommended, and that the country would be better off had it been taken earlier. Coal mining is already a monopoly in Germany, and the issue is not between monopoly and free competition, but between private monopoly and public monopoly.

SOUTH AFRICAN REUNION

LATE in September the Dutch peoples of South Africa held a conference at Bloemfontein to discuss the reconciliation between the South African party which follows General Smuts and the nationalists which are led by General Hertzog. While the meeting is thought to have resulted in friendlier feelings, the insistance of the nationalists that secession from the empire

be made a plank in the platform of a reunited party prevented political union.

MINOR NOTES

SEVERAL letters have been received by the executive of the Belgian Miners Federation from the employees of mining companies in the Congo, complaining of their treatment and the conditions under which they work. The Belgian union advised these workers to organize and sent them copies of their own by-laws and regulations. Apparently the protesting miners are exclusively white men, as they are described as coming from all parts of Europe. The result has been the organization of a Congo union, allied with the labor unions in the Transvaal. These facts came to light through protests published in the Belgian labor press against the alleged mistreatment of union officers and the expulsion from the Congo of an English labor organizer.

THE Japanese Diet recently enacted a new tariff law, designed primarily to prevent dumping and to promote domestic manufactures. A Board is to be created to decide whether imported goods are being sold at unlawfully low prices. If that is found to be the case, a surtax will be imposed amounting to the difference between the normal value and the price quoted by the importer. Fuel oil purchased on account of the government is to be free from duty. Heavy additional duties are levied on wines, spirits, dyes, machine tools, and numerous other commodities. The prospective effect of the law may be gaged by the fact that its passage caused a sensational advance in dyes, certain colors rising immediately as much as thirty-five per cent.

ACCORDING to the Journal Economique Européen the Brazilian aningna

fibre promises to help materially in relieving the present paper shortage. It is said to be produced abundantly in Brazil at little more than half the cost of imported Norwegian pulp and to make a superior quality of paper. The sources of economy in using it are not only the fact that it grows in great quantities in the Amazon valley, but that it does not require such costly methods of preparation as northern pulp.

GERMAN captains of industry, either individually or through associations, continue to buy up leading liberal dailies in that country. They have recently acquired every democratic newspaper in Munich, including the Münchner Neueste Nachrichten, and have made such changes in the editorial staffs as were necessary in order to render them completely subservient to their purpose.

AMONG the trade curiosities of the post-war period is an order by the Danish state railways for ten thousand tons of Chinese coal. France has already ordered one hundred thousand tons of the same fuel.

ACCORDING to the London Statist, the world is verging toward an acute coal

crisis, since annual production is now seventy-two million tons less than consumption. This deficit equals sixty per cent of the yearly output of Germany, which is the third largest coal producing country in the world, and is more than the total output of any other country except the United States and Great Britain.

COMMENT ON THE CONTENTS ALBERT SCHINZ, who writes so caustically but entertainingly upon the American press for readers of the liberal Nationalist Revue Bleue, is a Swiss by birth and a cosmopolitan by education, his university studies having been pursued in France, Germany, and the United States. He is well known in the American academic world. SISLEY HUDDLESTON is also a name familiar to most persons well read in the periodical literature of the Peace Conference and the post-war period. His sympathies are strongly with liberalism of the Asquith and Lord Grey type. ROBERT DELL is an occasional contributor to the London Daily Herald, which is published in the interest of the British Labor Party. El Mercurio is the principal organ of the Liberal Party in Chile. Our South American neighbor has recently shown political self-restraint quite comparable with that of the American people at the time of the Hayes-Tilden contest in 1876-1877. The Presidential candidate of the Conservative Party, which has been in power, failed to secure a majority in the electoral college by only four votes, in districts where the popular vote was in dispute. By an agreement between the two parties the contest was referred to a judicial commission, the decision of which, in favor of the Liberal candidate, was immediately confirmed in the regular constitutional manner.