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receive the approval of the President before it becomes law. As all sorts of little, petty, private-advantage matters may be and constantly are put into this round, it is more than likely that the meritorious, important proposition, not receiving "lobbying" attention, not pushed by private interest, will be sidetracked and lost. Notoriously, many bills are voted upon and passed of which those who vote for them know nothing.

Consider the con.mittee methods as one predominating factor of delay. At a recent hearing upon an important measure earnestly recommended by one of the greater Federal departments more than eighty per cent of the two days' time of the Congressmen was spent in discussing trifling details not at all related to the larger question of the bill under consideration. Irritated at first, I soon surrendered to the sheer enjoyment of watching the excellent men of this important committee play with the public business. It was exactly as if, when the question of building the great Pennsylvania terminal in New York was up for decision, the directors of that railway system had spent much time discussing the pattern of the grille work in front of the ticket windows, and some more time in haggling over how much should be paid the janitors! Fourteen Congressmen were in action, and there were in attendance a half

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dozen department men, to say nothing of the interested citizens. Officially, the cost was over $600 per day, and yet the question to be decided, if treated upon business principles, could not have required for discussion more than two hours at the most.

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Then the last hurdle to be surmounted is that of an appropriation, if the enactment needs public money. Here business has no place; there is no "budget" system; the chairman of the Appropriations Committee is all-powerful, and he kills or makes alive." He means well, of course, but the method of consideration is not that which would be used in deciding upon an expenditure in the business office of The Outlook, to speak moderately!

Congress is slow, because the business it undertakes to do is not done by men trained in that business; because the methods in use are not modern or efficient; because there is the ever-present idea that compromise is an inevitable attribute of legislation; because it is easier to listen to self-interest than to the public interest. All this is so because it is our accepted habit; and we are all as guilty as any Congressmen in continuing an absurd, antiquated, frightfully expensive, and inefficient method of conducting the public busiJ. HORACE MCFARLAND.

ness.

Washington, D. C.

M

KNOLL PAPERS

BY LYMAN ABBOTT WHAT IS COMING?

R. H. G. WELLS is always interesting, often entertaining, rarely convincing. One does not read him for the accuracy of his facts or the soundness of his thoughts, but because he stimulates one's own thinking. I do not accept his European Forecast," though I find much of value in it, but it has quickened in me an endeavor to forin a forecast of my

own.

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He believes that Germany will be beaten, but not crushed, and with her allies will be left militarist; that "the war has become a war of exhaustion;" that the end will come, not by a decisive victory on either side, but

What Is Coming? A European Forecast. By H. G. Wells. The Macmillan Company, New York. $1.50.

by the exhaustion o. one or all of the Powers engaged in the conflict; that, though "nearly everybody wants peace, . . . it is really quite idle to dream of a warless world" in present world conditions; that, nevertheless, the war "will make for world peace" and "a quickened general interest in its possibility;" that the first step toward such a world peace will be the creation of three groups of powers-the Entente Powers constituting one group, the German or Central Powers another group, and the United States and the South American republics a third group; that with the reduction of the number of real Powers to these three, instead of scores, the chances of war will be greatly reduced; and that these chances will be sti..

further diminished by the awful lesson against the warlike spirit which this war has, not wholly in vain, taught mankind.

Mars will sit like a giant above all human affairs for the next two decades, and the speech of Mars is blunt and plain. He will say to us all: "Get your houses in order. If you squabble among yourselves, waste time, litigate, muddle, snatch profits and shirk obligations, I will certainly come down upon you again. I have taken all your men between eighteen and fifty, and killed and maimed such as I pleased; millions of them. I have wasted your substance-contemptuously. Now, mark you, you have multitudes of male children between the ages of nine and nineteen running about among you. Delightful and beloved boys. And behind them. come millions of delightful babies. Of these I have scarcely smashed and starved a paltry hundred thousand perhaps by the way. But go on muddling, each for himself and his parish and his family and none for all the world, go on in the old way, stick to your rights,' stick to your 'claims,' each one of you, make no concessions and no sacrifices, obstruct, waste, squabble, and presently I will come back again and take all that fresh harvest of life I have spared, all those millions that are now sweet children and dear little boys and youths, and I will squeeze it into red pulp between my hands, I will mix it with the mud of trenches and feast on it before your eyes, even more damnably than I have done with your grown-up sons and young men. And I have taken most of your superfluities already; next time I will take your barest necessities."

I have said that this book is to me chiefly valuable as a stimulant to thinking, and, without writing further either in description or criticism of Mr. Wells's forecast, I venture tentatively on one of my own. It should, however, be described rather as a hope than as a forecast, but it is a hope based on present currents in the world's history.

I do not expect, and certainly do not hope, that Germany will be crushed. Her value as a civilized and civilizing Power is far too great to make such an issue conceivably possible. But I see reason to hope that the spirit of militarism will as a result of this conflict be practically destroyed in all western Europe. By militarism I mean the spirit interpreted by Bernhardi in his famous exposition of the duty of Germany-the spirit which believes that the law of the forest is the law for civilized man, that the supreme civilizing force is the ruthless law, "struggle for existence, survival of the fittest, and destruction of the unfit;" that physical force is the only

force which makes fit for survival; that war is therefore a biological, social, and moral necessity; and that it is the duty of every nation to equip itself with instruments of warfare and be ready to engage in war whenever the opportunity for struggle with and victory over surrounding nations offers itself. This spirit of militarism was destroyed in England by the great democratic revolution which characterized the beginning of the nineteenth century; in France by the overthrow of Napoleon III in 1870; in Italy by the destruction of Bourbonism by Garibaldi and Cavour; it has no place in the policies or the ambitions of the United States. Inherited from Frederick the Great and imposed by Prussia on an essentially peaceful German people, it will not in Germany survive the issues of this war. I agree with Mr. Wells: "Never were a people so disillusioned as the Germans must already be, never has a nation been called upon for so complete a mental readjustment." The grounds for that disillusion are abundant ; the signs of that disillusion are evident; when it is completed, then, and not till then, will there come the end of the war.

I. With the death of militarism I hope to see the foundation of a better brotherhood. English, French, and Russians cannot fight together in the same trenches without leaving some of their prejudices dead upon the battlefield. Each nation has done something to care for the wounded and the prisoners of the other nations; and there is no surer way to beget friendship for another than by rendering service. Greek, Roman Catholic, and Protestant have worshiped together under the same roof in the Young Men's Christian Association tents, and can no longer look upon each other with the old ecclesiastical hatred. Christian and pagan working together for a common cause have learned that there is a spirit of humanity deeper than all differences of creed and ritual. The war has done much to diminish and something to destroy those national race and religious prejudices which have prevented the brotherhood of man from practical realization.

II. The war is making very thin the walls which separate a nation into alien castes. After a butler has been made chief of staff and given a title of nobility it will be impossible for philosophy to maintain the doctrines that capacity and character depend upon aristocratic breeding. Prejudices survive the philosophy which was created to defend

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them but they do not permanently survive. The notion that the Negro is not a man but an animal could not outlive Booker T. Washington and the intellectual and material progress of his race. The daughters of the aristocracy of England are working on Sundays in the munition factories to give the daughters of the working classes one day in seven for rest and recreation. They can never look down upon their working girl sisters with quite the same pity akin to contempt, nor can their fellow-workers look up to their aristocratic sisters with quite the same envy akin to hate, as before.

III. The effect of the war on the relation between employer and employed it is not so easy to forecast. Temporarily it has apparently intensified rather than lessened the strain between the two. The capitalists are making money out of the war. No wonder that the workingmen are eager to get their share. Yet there seems to me to be a real value in the pregnant suggestions of Mr. Wells:

We are beginning to agree that reasonably any man may be asked to die for his country; what we have to recognize is that any man's proprietorship, interest, claims, or rights may just as properly be called upon to die. . . .

For every one there are two diametrically different ways of thinking about life; there is individualism, the way that comes as naturally as the grunt from a pig, of thinking outwardly from oneself as the center of the universe, and there is the way that every religion is trying in some form to teach, of thinking back to oneself from greater standards and realities.

It is at least reasonable to hope that this larger view, taught in the trenches and by machine guns, will continue after the war to subordinate individual interests to the common welfare. This tendency will be aided by the increased distribution of wealth which the aftermath of this war is certain to bring. Political economists have long been telling us that the economic problem of our time is rot the acquisition but the right distribution of wealth. There are already abundant signs, in the land tax, the progressive income tax, the progressive inheritance tax, and the corporation tax, of the growing resolve of democracy to transfer the burden of taxation from the shoulders of the poor to the shoulders of the rich. It will hardly be possible to retransfer it after the war.

IV. Mr. Wells lays great stress on the lesson of co-operation which Great Britain is learning from the war. A considerable por

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tion of his book is devoted to a vigorous and always entertaining indictment of individualism and to an interpretation of the tendency to substitute therefor a quasi-Socialism. "The Allies," he says, "will become state firms, as Germany was, indeed, already becoming before the war; setting private profit aside in the common interest, handling agriculture, transport, shipping, coal, the supply of metals, the manufacture of a thousand staple articles, as national concerns."

He does not lay equal emphasis upon, indeed he hardly recognizes, any tendency toward industrial liberty. Like most Socialistic writers, he treats individual liberty and social efficiency as sworn foes. I believe that they are no more inconsistent forces in society than are centrifugal and centripetal forces in nature; that Germany, the Socialized state, and Great Britain and France, the democratic states, will exchange ideas and ideals, and each will be better for the exchange.

V. Similarly the world is learning that the spirit of nationalism and the spirit of internationalism are not incongruous. The war is developing even in this country a new patriotism expressed not by shouting over the present nor by glorifying the past, but by service. The spring of the great National movement in the United States for military preparedness is no spirit of militarism, no liking for military glory, no ambition for military dominion, no sordid desire for military profits, no craven fear of foreign invasion; it is an enkindled desire to render some service and bear some burden in expression of a deeply stirred spirit of American patriotism. So far is this desire from being incongruous with the spirit of international brotherhood, that at the same time and by the same leaders the desire is expressed and plans are formed for an international federation of world powers. As love for the family is the source of neighborliness, so neighborliness is the source of nationalism and nationalism is the source of universal brotherhood.

VI. Growing out of this better brotherhood between individuals of different races, religions, and castes in each nation, I look to see a development of that brotherhood between nations of which the Hague Conference and the Hague Tribunal are a prophecy and a symptom. Dr. Alfred H. Fried's little book, The Restoration of Europe," gives both

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The Restoration of Europe. By Dr. Alfred H. FriedTranslated from the German by Lewis Stiles Gannett The Macmillan Company, New York. $1.

inspiration to the hope and clarity to the vision of such an international brotherhood—a book the more significant because its author is a German, though writing in Switzerland.

Imperialism has attempted to establish a world unity by subjugation. It has made this attempt again and again, and always failed. Egypt, Babylon, Persia, Greece, Rome, Spain, France, have all essayed the task. Germany will not succeed where they have failed. In truth, Germany already begins to realize that she cannot succeed. "Imperial

ism attempts to achieve its aims clumsily, by a policy of force, with the desire to reap for a single state all the benefits of world organization. It would impose order upon the world instead of attaining it by mutual agreement." The Pan-American Union, the voluntary union of states in Great Britain, the voluntary union of states in the United States, point out the way by which a world organization is to be sought and obtained which will take the place of a world anarchy. Not all armaments will disappear, but competitive armaments. Treaties will not become scraps of paper. On the contrary, “when the fever is past, there will surely be a new and higher appreciation of the value of treaties." The Hague vision of a world organization will be reinforced by a public will determined to realize it in a co-operative

Europe. "Militarism has been dealt a blow from which it can never recover."

Mr. Fried's vision of a "co-operative Europe" appears to me much more significant than Mr. Wells's guesses at the map of Europe after the war. These guesses I shall not here report, nor shall I attempt any guesses of my own. Nor shall I lengthen this Paper by describing his suggestive chapter on the effect of the war upon the present consciousness and the future life of the United States. But from that chapter I quote these special sentences, giying them my hearty indorsement and making them my

Own:

"The people of the United States have shed their delusion that there is an Eastern and a Western Hemisphere, and that nothing can ever pass between them but immigrants and tourists and trade. This is one world,

and bayonets are a crop that spreads. There is no real peace but the peace of the whole world, and that is only to be kept by the whole world resisting and suppressing aggression wherever it arises. No longer

a political Thoreau in the woods, a sort of vegetarian recluse among nations, a being of negative virtues and unpremeditated superiorities, she [America] girds herself for a manly part in the toilsome world of men.”

The Knoll, Cornwall-on-Hudson.

MAKING THE ISSUE CLEAR'

STAFF CORRESPONDENCE FROM THE NATIONAL DEMOCRATIC CONVENTION

T

BY FREDERICK

HE Progressive Convention was one of yearning impossibility and frustrated hopes. The times were ot of joint for a third party or for the pressing upon the Republicans of a candidate not regarded by them as "regular" or "available." The sun set in thick clouds, and eager, earnest men forsook the politico-spiritual exaltation of the convention hall in gloom, to face again the stern and ruthless realities of American politics. The Republican Convention began in dull uncertainty and listless unenthusiasm, and grew measurably day by day in patriotic spirit and desire, but never quite got over its timidities, its resentments, its prejudices, its fears, even when it had reached a fixed and unalterable conviction

See the editorial "Democracy in Dreamland.”

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Commander of the Russian forces in the great new offensive against the Austrians

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MEMBERS OF THE RUSSIAN DUMA ON A VISIT TO ENGLAND FOR A CONFERENCE Seated on the extreme right is Professor Milyukov, leader of the Liberal party in the Duma; seated in the center with arms folded is Speaker Lowther, of the British House of Commons; next to him at the right is Baron Rosen, formerly Russian Ambassador at Washington

RUSSIA REDIVIVUS

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