foredoomed to repudiation in that section of the country. The die-hards of commerce and politics should take notice.

It is a long distance from Broadway out here where the cart-wheel silver dollars begin to weigh down your pocketbook and the big soft hat shades the husky form of the out-of-doors man. went one Sunday morning to church,

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and as I was passing out I was courteously approached by an elderly member who recognized me as a stranger and inquired for the place of my residence. When I replied, "New York," his face lighted up and he said: "I was in New York once, and I went to hear a man preach there. Let me see, what was his name? Oh, yes, Beecher, Beecher. You know, he cut quite a figger in his day."

It's a long distance from Broadway, and it has its faults of unreason, but a sturdy National heart beats here, and its conscience, though socially and theologically conventional, is sensitive to economic and political injustice. Out here you catch the sound of the reveille and the early intimations of the onward march while yet the East sleeps stolidly in its tents.

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HE President of the United States has naturally been careful to avoid any military action to check the advance of the victorious Turkish armies in Asia Minor. But the destruction of Smyrna and of the property of American citizens there and the breaking up of the work of American citizens in Asia Minor compel careful consideration of our duty at the present time.

Article II of the Constitution of the United States defines the duty of the President and expresses his powers. The executive power is vested in him. At his inauguration he solemnly swears faithfully to execute the office of President of the United States and "preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution." Under this Constitution he has power by and with the consent of the Senate to make treaties.

Section 3 of this article declares: "He shall take care that the laws are faithfully executed."

Article VI provides that all treaties made "under the authority of the United States shall be the supreme law of the land."

In pursuance of the power thus vested in the President and with the advice and consent of the Senate, a treaty was made between the United States and the Ottoman Empire in 1830. That treaty guarantees to American citizens in Turkey that "they shall not in any way be vexed or molested." "They shall not be disturbed in their affairs." It also provides that "even when they have committed some offense they shall not be arrested or put in prison by the local authorities, but they shall be tried by their Minister or Consul and punished according to their offense, following in this respect the usage observed toward other Franks." A treaty between the United States and the Turkish Government ratified in 1862 confirms these provis ions. Under their protection and with the full consent of the Turkish Government, American citizens have gone to Turkey, established colleges, schools, and hospitals there, and have done a most benevolent work among the native Christians.

By Turkish law a Mussulman who leaves his Mohammedan faith and

adopts another is punishable with death. The work of Americans for the Turks has been, for this reason, very limited; still they have had the benefit of American medical and surgical skill.

During the last year these provisions of the treaties have been shamefully violated by the Angora Government. American citizens have been arrested, taken from their homes for no crime whatever, they have not been tried before their Consul, and the work in which they were engaged among the native Christians has been broken up. More than a million of these native Christians have been killed or deported by the Angora Government. This is just as much, to use the words of the treaty, a "disturb ance" in the affairs of the Americans and a "vexing and molesting" of them as it would be to kill all the persons employed in a factory or for whose supply the factory was working. As long ago as 1855 the Attorney-General of the United States rendered an opinion that our citizens who had gone to Turkey under the protection of this treaty and established schools and colleges and hospitals are as much entitled to this benefit as if they were merchants; that the treaty applied to all lawful business, whether benevolent or mercantile. This has been the practical construction of it from the beginning.

There is no question of making war upon Turkey or doing any act which requires further legislation. The treaties already made and ratified by the Senate are the supreme law of the land. It is the duty of the President to execute them and to obtain, not only indemnity for the past, but security for the future. His executive power extends to the Army and Navy, of which he is Commander-in-Chief, and it is his duty to use the full power of the United States Government to protect, for the future, American citizens in that part of Thrace of which possession is shortly to be delivered to the Turkish Government.

All our experience with the Turks (and the same is true of the experience of other nations) shows that their promises are not to be relied upon. Whatever they may say now to obtain admission to Thrace, they will undoubtedly commit

the same crimes there that they did in Asia Minor, unless this Government makes such a show of force that the Turks will see that the whole power of this Government will be exerted for the protection of our colleges and other American institutions in Turkey and for the security of the many Americans who are living in Constantinople and doing business there.

In dealing with the Turks it must be remembered that it is part of their re ligion to make war upon unbelievers and to kill them unless they become Mohammedans, and that a promise made by a Turk to an unbeliever is not binding. Men are sometimes worse than their religion. They are seldom better. Individual Turks are courteous and plausible, but when it comes to united action, when they have had the power, they have lived up to the precepts of the Koran. We can expect nothing better in the future unless we satisfy them that we are both able and willing to protect our own citizens and the work in which, with the full consent of the Turkish Government, they have engaged. This is not war; it is police protection. Our Government has protected its citizens in this way a hundred times in the past without declaring war. In fact. such bold and manly actions prevent war; just as a well-organized police force is generally effective to prevent a mob or to disperse it if it should assemble.

The President, as has been shown, has full power to send a brigade to Constantinople for the protection of our citizens there and their work. The Allies would welcome this co-operation. The American flag and the power behind it would be as effective as it was when it waved over Corinna Shattuck at Oorfa, and saved a thousand innocent lives.

We may well recall the words of Grover Cleveland in his Venezuela message:

There is no calamity which a great nation can invite which equals that which can follow a supine submission to wrong and injustice and the consequent loss of national self-respect and honor beneath which are shielded a people's safety and greatness.

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to

HE sirocco of Turkish victory that sweeps over Asia Minor is likely prove far more devastating than we innocent outsiders suspect. For a year or more in intimate touch with Mohammedanism, for four months of that time utterly isolated from any English-speaking civilization in the desert of Libya, the writer confesses a fellow-feeling for the Moslem, a personal partiality toward the individual Arab. Such sentiment, however, should not be confused with intellectual approval.

Dr. Lothrop Stoddard in his thoughtful if rather feverish volume "The Rising Tide of Color" presents all the arguments that would warn against a Jehad or Holy War. The imminence of such a struggle is to be discounted, if only on the grounds that the Mohammedan is far too wise and shrewd a politician to delude himself with any thoughts of immediate success. Fundamentally a fighting man, he realizes perfectly how slim would be his chance against the highly trained forces of even a single Christian nation.

It is certain, therefore, that he will not now attempt any aggressive movement that would definitely align against him the armies of England, France, or Italy; that he will not attempt to carry the war into distinctly European territory-barring that territory until lately known as Turkey in Europe.

That he will even attempt to win back his European vilayets is, at the moment, problematical. England's official attitude is a warning. The Turk may well be skeptical, however, as to just how much police strength lies back of England's threat; how strongly the British people would support such an enterprise just at this time. And the Turk's principal virtue in addition to personal courage is the virtue of patience. Secure in his present comfortable position, he can afford to sit tight and await diplomatic developments.

Purely speculative though the opinion be, it is the writer's conviction that the present Turkish triumph will not seriously affect the peace of either the French or the English Mohammedan countries. Algiers and Tunis are too close to Paris, too precious as colonies, to be pried loose from French SOVereignty. Egypt and India have been too long under the stern control of the British military forces. Sporadic uprisings may occur; but any concerted effort by Islam would in Algiers, Tunis, Egypt, or India be pretty sure of instant suppression.

There remains the question of Tripoli -or, as the country is more definitely and accurately designated, Libya.

Libya, that stretch of Sahara desert lying between Tunis and Egypt along the Mediterranean Sea, is technically to

BY KINGSLEY MOSES

day under the dominion of Italy. But the grip of the Quirinal upon this enormous African waste is none too secure.

Taken by force of arms in 1911, Libya is still restive under Italian supervision. There has been no change whatever in the religion of the inhabitants, no swervfrom the strict tenets of orthodox Mohammedanism. Always the most difficult of converts, the Mohammedans of Libya particularly see no attractions in Roman Catholicism; and it is doubtful that a hundred of them have been brought into the Christian Church. Other influences too, among the most powerful the presence in Libya itself of the see of the Senussi, have worked to nullify the best efforts of Roman Catholic missionaries.

Lacking also the colonial experience of France and England, Italy has failed in any material degree to colonize Libya with Italians. Naturally gregarious, the Italian peasant prefers the long ocean journey to the United States, the Argentine, or Brazil, where already are hundreds of thousands of his fellow-countrymen, to a short two days' voyage over the placid blue sea to Tripoli or Bengasi. Opportunity also, in that sterile empty land of the desert, seems unalluring. So Libya remains-and appears likely to

remain-Arab.

Along a shore-line of approximately eight hundred miles, Libya, including the provinces of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica, extends from a point about due south of Milan to a point due south of Smyrna. That is a long journey. And when one considers that no railwaysave two negligible little narrow-gauge lines of twenty miles length-serves the country, and that communication is had along the coast only by steamer and in the interior only by camel-back, one can readily understand the difficulties of keeping such a territory under control.

Southward for perhaps a thousand miles, over the unmapped desert, Italy nominally holds control. But here again there is sovereignty only in name; and recent press despatches report towns not forty miles from Tripoli City in the hands of the Bedouins.

The reason for this tenuous hold on Libya by the Italians is due more to the very nature of the country than to any laxity or inherent weakness in Italian government. To subdue and hold a desert country is one of the most difficult tasks conceivable even in this advanced day of military efficiency. Infantry advance, ever slow and clumsy, is just about impossible in Libya, where military forces must depend wholly for subsistence upon their own lines of communication. Ask any experienced soldier how long he can maintain adequate lines of communication without railways. Artillery movement through the

heavy Saharan sand is out of the question, and may be summarily dismissed; while he who would fight the Bedouin of the desert with cavalry had better consider long and prudently, for the horsemen of the Arabs have been noted through the centuries for their ferocity and consummate skill.

More modern developments serve little. At Azizia, shortly after its surrender as Turkish headquarters in the spring of 1919, the writer personally witnessed the futility of airplane attack. The great rock, outcropping from the sands, where the Turks and Arabs had fought on for six months after the European armistice, stood practically untouched, though it had been constantly bombarded by Italian planes; and all about in the rolling sand dunes of the desert the lately hostile Bedouins camped comfortably, secure in their experience that an airplane bomb dropped into soft sand was about as deadly or dangerous as a pebble tossed into a millpond. The sand gushed up in great geysers of dust, but the shrapnel was smothered.

And there always remains in Tripoli the resentment of the natives against the method of seizure employed by Italy.

From the European point of view, the action of Italy in 1911 was perfectly natural. Certainly, with our vacillating colonial policy, it is no function of an American to criticise; we have enough peculiar problems of our own in the Philippines, Porto Rico, Cuba, and Haiti. Italy wanted a slice of Africa. A generation ago it had nosed into the African cupboard and brought out the driest and most unpalatable bone— Somaliland. Libya looked like fair game. France, to the west, had gobbled the rest of the Barbary States; Spain had a morsel in Morocco; England had most of the meat in Egypt and, with usual good judgment, had pre-empted the fertile and navigable valley of the Nile.

Southward in the Dark Continent practically all the desirable territory had been seized by either England or Ger many. Besides, that country was a long, long way from Genoa or Naples-the leading Italian naval bases.

it.

There remained Libya. So Italy took

It was a poor enough prize; but it was something. Italy hung on, tried hard to develop the land, to make it yield some slight return on the investment of money and blood.

But again luck interposed. Not three years had elapsed before the outbreak of the World War stirred up again the Mohammedan frenzy. Italy, even though not then an active participant in Europe. had to begin operation of a regular troon transport service to Tripoli. Reinfor

ments, and more reinforcements, were demanded. Finally there was open rebellion and bloodshed.

So, while the attention of the world was centered upon the battlefields of France and Belgium, while even Italy turned its eyes toward the Carso and Mount Grappa, an unnoticed but extremely ferocious little war was waged across the wastes of the Libyan Desert, and was being carried right up to the walls and outpost forts of the seaboard cities. Misurata, on the Mediterranean, fell; and Zavia, less than fifty kilometers from Tripoli City, was taken and occupied by the Arabs under the command of Fuad Pasha, nephew of the Turkish Sultan.

In May, 1919, as has been said, an armistice was patched up. That armistice exists on paper to-day. But what the true situation is remains dubious; for news reports from Libya, having their only possible origin in the Italian Censor's office, cannot be depended upon.

The difficulties, then, that menace the maintenance of Italian dominion in Libya are three:

First, the comparatively recent conquest of the country, a matter of only eleven years past. The writer spent some days with a famous sheik of the desert, one Mohammed Shulabi, who is reputed to have been himself the leader of a terrible attack on Italian bersaglieri from which scarcely a man escaped. What Mohammed Shulabi thinks now no one may say, for the Arab is not communicative to comparative strangers. But what other chief men of the race feel is very evident in the very manner in which they eye their Italian overlords and in their muttered curses of hatred as the Italian soldiers, always—and prudently-fully armed, pass down the suk of the city.

Second, the failure of the Italian Government adequately to colonize the country with loyal Italians. Where here in

New York (an American city, despite all that some of its detractors may maintain) we have huge colonies of Italians living almost precisely as they would in Caserta or Reggio or Bari or Trapanitalking the same tongue, eating the same food, prey to the same superstitions, flaunting the same flag-in the towns of Libya, from Buchamesh on the west to Tobruch on the Egypt line, is heard no syllable of the soft Latin tongue. Here the Koran is in every tent and Dante is unknown; here fez replaces borsalino. and the sandal takes the place of the boot. What few civilians, clustered about iron café tables, do speak the Latin tongue turn out to be, upon closer and disappointing investigation, mongrel Maltese from Valetta or Levantine Jews. And, in the third place, there are the almost insuperable obstacles to a purely military control. In Algiers and Tunis, not to speak of Morocco, the Atlas Mountains supply great tracts of arable and fertile country, welling with water. In Egypt is the incalculably precious Nile, along which-in addition to its fertilizing properties-troops may be moved with speed and security for hundreds of miles. But, in Tripolitania, in the interior of Cyrenaica even, twenty miles from the littoral, are none of these tactical advantages. Forever and forever the sands of the desert stretch southward, hill upon hill. Across the glaring emptiness of this awful desolation, tortured by the unbelievable heat of the summer sun or frozen by the gale of winter blasts from the bitter Adriatic, any defending forces must move painfully in pursuit of the will-o'-the-wisp enemy. In full possession of the vast herds of camels and of thousands of beautiful Arab horses, the Bedouins can strike, and run and strike again with miraculous speed.

And, untrammeled by any Hague conventions, the Arab knows war only in its most primitive aspects. To kill the

How? Well, that

enemy is his ideal. doesn't matter very much. The night attack is his favorite pastime; the slitting of hostile throats while his victim sleeps is a peculiarly pleasant sort of play; the maiming or horrible cicatrization of "Christian dogs" is all a part of the game.

It is that sort of thing that Italy has to face in Libya. And if the Turkish uprising in Asia Minor spreads its spirit unchecked, it is that sort of thing that is almost certain to happen.

The loss of Libya would seem a small thing as measured in the great balance of world affairs. To Italy, indeed, the bereavement might not be unbearable; for the arid land is unprofitable enough as it stands, and constitutes a constant and annoying drain upon the royal treas

ury.

But with the Turk actually triumphant in his own ancient provinces of Asia, daily threatening a return to lost lands of Thrace, a single victorious campaign in the territory of a strong Allied nation would lend him a confidence that might well prove enormously difficult to subdue.

A thousand years ago the Christian nations were at bay in their own lands. And while there is no danger of another such situation in our living generation, the advance of the champions of the Crescent is worth more than superficial attention.

The Turk, winning Syria, wins back a land long Moslem. The Turk, winning Tripoli—all Libya-wins back a land where Christian influence has for a little time at least been omnipotent.

And there is, it may be added, a sinister significance in the circumstance that those strangers from "the parts of Libya about Cyrene" (Acts ii.10)-who on the first Day of Pentecost spoke the Apos tles' own language-should be now wholly converted to the tongue of the Prophet.

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N considering the finances of Europe, and the question whether and to what extent the United States should press for payment of the debts due to her, it is easy to understand the situation of France and Great Britain. These countries are hard hit by the war, but both of them are obviously solvent. Britain has balanced her budget, repaid more than one billion dollars of external and internal liabilities, reduced the amount of her paper money, and brought her exchange sterling within ten per cent of par gold; while France is de clared by the Bankers' Trust, after an elaborate investigation, to be as wealthy as she was before the war (this being the reward of her thrift), and if her budget does not yet balance, the reason 's that she has undertaken the restora

BY P. W. WILSON

tion of her ruined provinces on a large scale; debiting the cost, not to taxation, but to German reparations, which are in a large measure withheld. The case of Italy, too, is plain. Her expenditure is greater than her revenue, and what she needs is a much smaller army, many fewer officials, and severe rectitude in her administration.

But when we come to Germany, we find that even experts differ. This is doubtless because some of them, like scientific witnesses, are swearing their testimony to a brief. They want Germany to pay her fines to France and they say, therefore, that she is well able to do so, or they want the United States to cancel her loans and therefore they say that Europe is perishing. I hold no brief for any policy. I he heard a

FINANCE

dozen budgets introduced into the British House of Commons. There is not a budget so introduced by Mr. Lloyd George that I did not hear discussed in advance and during its passage. The judgment that I have brought to bear upon the German problem is the judgment which I would apply to the finances of my own country, a judgment based on cold arithmetic, which, after all, is one of those few sciences that, even in a mad world, cannot err.

The collapse of currency in Russia was of course deliberate. During the war it was actually promoted by Germany, where billions of forged rubles were distributed for the purpose along the Russian front. The Bolshevists may now wish to regain a monetary standard. but in the first flush of their Communist