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the coalition idea in the English Government remains intact. In the War Council itself three of the five members are UnionistsBonar Law, Lord Milner, and Earl Curzon. But note that Earl Curzon is also to be political leader in the House of Lords, and that Bonar Law is to be political leader in the House of Commons, so that the three men who will really control the War Council are Lloyd George, Arthur Henderson, who is the head of the Labor party, and Lord Milner, who holds no secretarial portfolio. It is in the decisions urged and the action initiated by these three men that the conduct of the war centers. In this fact is the answer to the criticisms on the make-up of the Cabinet.

Why, people ask, is Mr. Balfour in the Ministry when the press, and especially the powerful papers under the control of Lord Northcliffe, have declared that Mr. Balfour is a brilliant intellectual, but that he is too old and too much a philosopher to be placed, as he now is, at the head of the Foreign Office? Why is Earl Curzon in the Ministry and in the Council when he has been criticised in the same quarters as too egotistical and too heavy in action?

The answer to this is simple. Despite possible defects, these men are able and patriotic, and their presence in the Cabinet, like that of the Labor leader, himself once a worker in a colliery, welds together a coalition of party elements for united action, without unduly limiting or hampering the real executive power of the Prime Minister. On the other hand, it is an absurdity to speak of Lloyd George as holding a dictatorship, as some writers have done. English political methods are eminently flexible. If Lloyd George stands at the helm, it is because the people want him there; and if next year, or even next month, they want some other man to lead, the parliamentary method of bringing about such a result will again do the will of the people, just as it has done in replacing Mr. Asquith by Mr. Lloyd George.

Another carping comment is as easily answered. It has been said that Lloyd George refused to agree to a War Council of which Mr. Asquith should be an active member, on the ground that a Prime Minister ought to be concerned with other things. But now, say the carpers, Lloyd George is Prime Minister, and behold him at the head of the War Council. This is only an apparent inconsistency. The new plan provides that Mr. Bonar Law should be political

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leader in the House of Commons, while Mr. Lloyd George, unlike Mr. Asquith, does not act as political leader in Parliament nor does he hold a portfolio.

Every one knows that the British people have risen to war needs splendidly. In the number of volunteers, in the slow but finally complete organization of industry, in the fighting in the field, and in many other ways Great Britain has done her part. But both in England and in France it has come to be feared that the "team work" so praised a year ago is no longer what it should be. Gallipoli and Mesopotamia have been partly forgotten; the defense of Verdun and the joint attack in the Somme sector are recognized as valorous and fine. But when the swift conquest of Rumania by a sudden German thrust is discussed, the man in the street says that, wherever the blame lies, whether with Rumania for entering into a vain and foolish campaign, or with Russia for not bringing support in time, or with General Sarrail for not lending aid, the whole affair showed a lack of common planning for the common good. Whatever else is involved in the conquest of Rumania, certainly it has shown lamentable lack of team work" on the part of the Allies. The Englishman also growls in his truly English way because the Greek question has not yet been settled.

Now, we are not arguing that this dissatisfaction is entirely wise or always well based. But it is one explanation of the new effort towards concentration and united action. An editorial writer in the New York "World" says truly and concisely that there is only one dictator in Great Britain, and that is Parliament. Because England is really democratic the new Government, and any government, is only a committee of Parlia"It can exist only with the consent of Parliament, and may be driven out of office any day that the House of Commons disapproves of its measures and its methods."

ment.

This is true of France also, and the Paris despatches describe the object of the small Ministry of five members (the Ministers of Foreign Affairs, Finance, Interior, War, and Marine) as being to simplify administrative machinery and to subordinate all the services to the exigencies of national defense. With such a fighting Cabinet, so to speak, a war council may prove unnecessary. It is for this that, as a French paper says, the Premier, M. Briand, has decided to throw

the old administrative machine into the melting-pot.

Thus in France and in Great Britain there is to be hereafter, not, as some say, a one-man power, but a one-nation power-compact, manageable, efficient, ready to meet problems of war or proposals of peace alike with wisdom and forcefulness.

WHAT GERMANY TEACHES

The three articles which we have published from Mrs. Gallison showing Germany as she saw it, and the quotations we have given from the articles of Miss Doty published in the New York" Tribune" showing Germany as she saw it, are more than contrasted pictures of social conditions produced by the war. They indicate both the virtues and the vices of the German state-methods to emulate and methods to avoid. For it is one of the merits of Mrs. Gallison's admirable articles that they unconsciously emphasize the difference between the German and the American ideals.

Americans may well admire the spirit of patriotism which unites the common people of Germany in enduring cheerfully untold sacrifices in a war which they believe is " a war of the people in defense of their homes;" but Americans cannot admire a state so organized and governed that the people can be made to believe that the German military party had not carefully prepared for this war and deliberately provoked it at the moment that party thought was opportune. Americans prefer the apparent political strife in England and America, a product of free thought and free speech, to the apparent political unity of a people who seem to be of one mind because one mind thinks for the people.

Americans admire the efficiency of a government which in a beleaguered state so adjusts the food supply that apparently there is food enough for all her children at not extravagant prices; but this admiration is abated when they read that there is food enough "if each member is put on regulated rations;" and it is still further chilled when Miss Doty tells them that "official Germany denies its poor and hides them," and that she visited a section in Berlin where "little children swarmed, dirty, ragged, barefooted, and pale." Are there no poor in Germany, or does Germany hide her poor, while England and

America exhibit theirs? Americans prefer to live in a community which makes the misery of its miserable population known than in one which banishes it from sight.

Americans naturally admire a state in which" an idler does not exist" until they read the reason: "The citizen yields his individuality and takes and fills his place in the general scheme." An idler does not exist because each is a cog in the machine." To destroy individualism in order to destroy idleness seems to the American too great a price to pay for universal industry. An idler does not exist in our State prisons; but the Americans prefer the free life of the State outside, where idlers do exist.

Americans can never share Mrs. Gallison's pride in the soup kitchens of Germany. Soup kitchens are sometimes maintained for a little while in our overcrowded cities. But they are never our pride; they are our humiliation. We are ashamed that they should exist. For it is not our ambition to feed the hungry efficiently, but to abolish hunger; not to care generously for the paupers, but to put an end to pauperism.

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The description of Produktion is picturesque : A large block, having many spacious inner courts;"" contains mostly apartments for workingmen's families." Here housekeeping is apparently conducted by wholesale. methods with great efficiency and great economy. By buying at the source and selling without the help of the middleman they reduce the high cost of living.'" This is surely a great improvement on our tenement-house life. From that America might learn a valuable lesson for the benefit of her great cities, and perhaps of her factory towns. Nevertheless America's pride is not in her great apartment-houses, hotels, and tenementhouses; it is in her individual homes, her village and cottage life. Much better than Mrs. Gallison's picture of Produktion we like Mr. Ford's plan of sharing his profits with his workingmen and leaving them to provide. for their individual homes and lives, although the cost may be greater. Economy or efficiency costs too much if for it we sacrifice the individual home.

The one description of Mrs. Gallison which wins our unstinted admiration is her account of what Dr. Biesalski and Director Hans Wuertz are doing to help the lame, the halt, and the blind to help themselves. We wish that every Board of United Charities, every Association for the Relief of the Poor, and

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MEETING LIFE SQUARELY

the superintendent of every asylum and poorhouse in the United States could read this section of Mrs. Gallison's third letter and learn from it a lesson. For the community can render to the handicapped no better service than to enable them, despite their handicap, to care for themselves and their loved ones and contribute their share to the general welfare.

In Germany industry is carried on by an industrial army. The people are privates; the few are officers. The officers organize and direct the industry and give the privates their allotted rations. Economical? Yes! Efficient? Yes! But free? No! We hope that Americans will never sacrifice their freedom for efficiency and economy. For that is to sacrifice manhood for things.

MEETING LIFE SQUARELY

It was recently said of a prominent public man that if he could evade a problem he thought he had solved it. This is the philosophy of many people whose endeavor seems to be, not to meet life squarely, but to evade it; not to see difficult situations clearly nor to deal with them strongly, but to shut the eyes to the most ominous and perplexing aspects and to find the easiest way out. This means, of course, that the real end of living, the education which experiences bring with them, is entirely missed, and the main purpose of life is defeated. The student who becomes expert in the various devices by which the drudgery of learning is evaded imagines that he is outwitting his instructors, but discovers in later life that he has cheated himself. The discipline of education is not the attempt of the school or the college to benefit itself. It has been devised and is imposed for the sole purpose of helping the student.

The cares and burdens and perplexities of life were not devised to amuse an irresponsible power. They are wrought into the very structure of life, and are involved in its most vital experiences, in order that men and women may be taught the great truths which are behind all living, and in learning which the discipline of living finds its splendid justification. A proclamation of emancipation may set slaves and serfs free from legal bondage; but this is only the beginning of freedom. It is only an opportunity to become free, for freedom is not a gift and can

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never be a gift; it must always be an achievement. A man buys his freedom by restraint, self-denial, and work. To the criticism of an artist that he ought to have done his work in another way, La Farge promptly said: "That would have been impossible. An artist, above all other men, must work out his genius under laws." Neither in the substance of his work nor in its technique is he free. He must express his own temperament, and he must, by rigorous discipline and tireless patience, master the method by which at last he can freely express himself. "Grace," said George Macdonald, "is the result of forgotten toil."

The discipline of life, which many people resent as an interference with their right to the pursuit of happiness, is really, if one bears it patiently and meets it frankly, the only way to happiness.

This is especially true of such a tragic period as that through which the world is passing. The shadow of the struggle in Flanders and the Balkans covers the landscape of the whole world, and even those who are willing to buy peace at any price cannot purchase it. Try as they may to evade the great and terrible experience by shutting their eyes to it, it faces them at every turn, and the only escape from it is to meet it bravely and to learn what it has to teach.

People are trying to get away from the tragedy by taking refuge in amusements of many kinds. Miss Repplier has pithily said. that the gospel of amusement "is preached by people who lack experience to people who lack vitality," and she adds that there is an impression that the world would be happy if it were amused, and that it would be amused if plenty of artificial recreation were provided for it. Play of all kinds is as necessary and legitimate as work. Healthful amusements and recreation are essential to physical and spiritual well-being; but they must be taken as tonics, not as anodynes. This country is not escaping the war by standing apart and shutting its eyes to the tragedy; on the contrary, the war overshadows every home and lays a tax on every income, large or small. Whether we will or not, we are our brother's keepers, and the shadow of his calamity rests, and ought to rest, on our homes. We cannot stand apart and rejoice in our prosperity; in the long run his calamity must be our calamity, and in some form we are sharing, and must share, it with him.

T

SPECIAL CORRESPONDENCE

HE fourth annual Conference on Markets and Farm Credits, held in Chicago, December 4 to 8 inclusive, was not a conference of practical farmers and stock-raisers--although there were some of that character in the assemblage—so much as it was of college professors of economics. This is not said in criticism, for it is recognized that, as bank cashiers are not usually authorities on finance and ship captains are not skilled in geodetic surveying, so the "heavyfisted tillers of the soil" are not the deepest students of general agricultural economics, but are quite as likely to be lost in the broad general problems as the professor of economics would be in the practical operations of farming. Hence the work of this Conference is none the less significant because its leaders were not "practical farmers" except in a few instances.

The President of the University of North Dakota, Dr. Frank L. McVey, is the perpetual President of the Conference, as Professor Charles W. Holman and Dr. Charles McCarthy, both formerly of the University of Wisconsin, are perpetual secretary and treasurer. For be it known that the Conference is neither a democracy nor a republic, but a hereditary monarchy, by divine. right of its originators and controllers.

Among the college men also present in the self-perpetuating General Committee are Dr. Thomas N. Carver, Professor of Economics of Harvard College, formerly head of the Bureau of Rural Organization and Markets of the Department of Agriculture; Dean John Lee Coulter, of the Agricultural College of West Virginia; and Director Thomas Cooper, of the North Dakota Experiment Station; and among the statesmen on the Committee are the Hon. Gifford Pinchot, and Governor Arthur Capper, of Kansas, not to mention divers farm-paper editors and leaders of farm organizations.

Every State of continental United States, except South Carolina, was represented at the recent Conference by delegates, and a strong delegation from Canada was also welcomed. Nearly 900 men and women were registered, and about 340 paid membership fees. At times the attendance of the three branches of the Conference aggregated 1,500, for it happened that the annual Live

Stock Show at the Union Stock-Yards had brought to the city thousands of stockmen. who gave part of their time to attending meetings of the Conference.

The chief subjects considered were: The Federal Farm Loan Act, passed last July; Land Settlement; and the Marketing of Live Stock, Grain, and Other Crops. As offshoots of the general Conference there were formed two new organizations—a National Milk Producers' Association and a National Co-operative Stores Association, the latter being in the interest of consumers rather than producers, though in full recognition of the fact that farmers are consumers just as truly as are city customers.

At the opening session the Federal Farm Loan Act, passed last July, was explained by James B. Marman, assistant secretary of the Federal Farm Loan Board, and, in the discussion following, it was criticised for its cumbersome machinery, and especially its inadequacy in not providing any means of helping landless farmers with crop-production and live-stock loans. Mr. Marman freely conceded the shortcomings of the law in these respects, and gave assurance that further legislation was looked for, particularly toward providing for personal credits to help the tenant farmers who have no land security to offer, and who therefore are not reached by the present law.

Professor Elwood Mead, of the University of California, declared in favor of State or Federal aid in land settlement as a public policy, not merely in giving free homestead land, but in equipping farms with buildings, machinery, and stock, and providing the farmers with an opportunity to get their supplies economically and earn a living from the start, which is not provided by the mere giving of raw land, even with reclamation and irrigation ditches. He stated that to make an irrigation tract ready and equipped for farming cost $150 an acre, aside from the raw land and the main ditches. The settlers are too poor to finance such improvements even if given the raw land within range of a main ditch; hence the land is not fully developed, and both the settler and the Nation suffer a great economic loss, which would be saved if the Government would (Continued on page following illustrations)

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