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those reasons was the special status which Belgium acquired by common consent in the Treaty of Peace. But it does not necessarily follow that because Belgium was entitled to special treatment she should have any advantage over France. On the contrary, the fact that the Belgium arrangement should not be taken as a precedent leaves America free to give France even greater consideration. One fact at least applies to the case of France as to no other countryand that is the fact of deliberate devastation. It is true that practically all of Belgium was occupied by the Germans, but only a part of France. Nevertheless Belgium did not begin to suffer from the German occupation as France suffered. The destruction wrought by Germany in northern France over an enormous area was complete and a great part of it was done with malice aforethought. Germans had no such reason for crippling Belgium as they had for crippling France. They intended to put France. out of competition for a long time to come. In proportion as France suffers from the consequence of the Germans' rapine, in just that proportion will the Germans have succeeded in their objective and have defeated not only France but America. That is something which must be taken into account in the negotiations with France to a degree that does not pertain to the negotiations with any other nation.

The

As our arrangement with Belgium should be disregarded in our negotiations with France, so should England's negotiations with France be equally disregarded. England has promised France a settlement under certain terms provided France gets equally good terms from America. Certain American politicians and many American newspapers have seen in this arrangement a conspiracy between England and France to get advantage of America. They say that if France does not get as good terms from America as from England America will be subject to the reproach of the rest of the world, but that if, on the other hand, France gets equally good terms, then England will have a basis for asking a revision of America's settlement with her to put her on an equality with France. This expresses the very sort of suspicion which causes international friction and which some self-righteous Americans have ascribed as a trait peculiar to other countries but not to our own. We should

be unmoved equally by the example of France and England and by fear of it. England had a right to offer a debtor terms on the condition that the other large creditor would do as well. There is nothing unbusinesslike in what England did, and there is nothing unbusinesslike in France's acceptance of the arrangement. Perhaps we can afford to do better than England did, perhaps we cannot afford to do as well. That is our business. If France can profit in other negotiations by her negotiations with us, no generous people will begrudge her the opportunity to do so.

In addition to these considerations, there are four principles which hold in negotiations with France as well as with all the other countries with which we were associated in the war.

First, international debts, for whatever purpose contracted, should be paid. This is in the interest not only of the creditors but of the debtors themselves. The ability of nations to obtain future

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loans depends upon the payment of loans already contracted. To change a loan to a gift places a question mark upon every loan in the future.

Second, arrangements of terms for the payment of loans should be based not or emotion but on common sense and a rational understanding of what constitutes the highest national interests. In brief, it should be business, but intelligent and broad-minded business.

Third, the United States is not bound to pay Germany's obligations. Any arrangement which would let off other countries easily in order that they in turn may let off Germany easily is simply an arrangement to put Germany's burden on America's back. That is not just either to America or to Germany. A country that calls the dance that Germany called should pay the piper.

Fourth, in all these settlements America should remember that she is dealing, not with business competitors, but with former partners.

The Green Mountain State

By LAWRENCE F. ABBOTT
Contributing Editor of The Outlook

HE State of Vermont is just now a good deal in the public eye because it contains the birthplace of President Coolidge, who has been spending some of his vacation at his father's home, in the little village of Plymouth, within sight of one of the highest peaks of the Green Mountains. I have just come back from a visit to Vermont by automobile, confirmed in my opinion, formed three years ago on a similar trip, that Vermont is one of the most picturesque and romantic States in the Union.

Vermont is the political product not only of the Revolutionary War but of a revolution within that Revolution. Its farms, its landscapes, its thrifty villages and small cities, are the very personification of peace and tranquillity. But the labor pains of its birth gave little promise of the even tenor of its later life.

No State in the Atlantic section has more beautiful natural boundaries. On the west, especially at Burlington, the beautiful seat of the flourishing University of Vermont, its citizens overlook Lake Champlain with the towering Adirondacks forming a background for such

sunsets as I have never seen surpassed in any part of the world I have visited. On the east many pleasant towns and villages, for a distance of more than two hundred miles, look down upon the gently flowing Connecticut with here and there rapids or a foaming waterfall, and in many places with the White Mountains of New Hampshire in the distance, which must afford a background for sunrises, although I have never been up early enough to see one, comparable with the sunsets on Lake Champlain.

This pleasant territory, which in 1609 was claimed by the French Government of Quebec as part of its possessions, was looked upon a century and a half later with envious eyes by the colonies of New York, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts. Indeed, New York and New Hampshire made a secret agreement to divide Vermont between them. The political history revolving about the birth of Vermont is a somewhat complicated one, but it is sufficient to say that the almost piratical greediness of New York and New Hampshire was frustrated by a Revolutionary soldier, Ira Allen, brother of the better-known but not more meritorious Ethan Allen, who commanded the

September 9, 1925

"Green Mountain Boys" in the Revolution. The struggle of Vermont for independence, not merely from the tyranny of Great Britain, but from the more exasperating tyranny of its wealthy and powerful neighbor, New York, which spoke the same language and professed the same sentiments of political freedom, formed a kind of Alsace-Lorraine episode in our colonial history and shows that the land-grabbing propensities of human nature are not confined to the overthrown Hohenzollerns.

Although Vermont was not admitted to the Union as a State until 1791, she played, as a kind of independent sovereignty, an important part in the Revolutionary War. The Battle of Bennington was, in its influence upon the morale of the colonists, second only, perhaps, to the Battle of Bunker Hill. Here the "Green Mountain Boys," under the command of General John Stark, defeated a large detachment of General Burgoyne's army, and the victory is commemorated by one of the highest battle monuments in the world. The legend runs that General Stark, addressing his men before the battle, said, "To-night the American flag floats from yonder hill or Molly Stark sleeps a widow." We drove from Bennington to Brattleboro over a wild but beautiful mountain road, appropriately named the "Molly Stark Trail," which crosses the Green Mountains from sealevel to sea-level over a summit of twenty-two hundred feet.

Vermont is a poor State when measured by dollars and cents, but it is rich in the self-respecting prosperity which comes from thrift, rich in intelligence, rich in self-reliance and in courtesy. That it has at last produced a President of the United States has not disturbed its equanimity. It is true that as we drove through Plymouth, not from curiosity but because it was on the shortest route from Woodstock to the Hudson River (and brevity was an essential element of our journey), we found the little. hamlet full of automobile "rubbernecks." The President's family had been compelled to screen their veranda with sheets in order to insure some privacy from the gazing throngs. But in justice to Vermonters themselves it must be said that the motor cars bore the license plates of other States, for the natives of Vermont take "Cal" as naturally and imperturbably as they take his father, "the Colonel." In justice to ourselves, I may

be permitted to add that we did not get
out of our automobile, but stopped only
a moment to ask directions about our
route from one of the Secret Service offi-
cers who were handling the somewhat
congested traffic.

In proportion to its size and popula-
tion Vermont has produced an exception-
ally large number of men who have in-
fluenced the history and development of
the United States in pioneering, politics,
and prosperity. No two members of the
upper house of Congress ever com-
manded in a greater degree the respect
of their colleagues or exercised a more
intelligent and wholesome influence on
National politics than Justin S. Morrill
and George F. Edmunds. They were
both Vermonters by birth and repre-
sented their State in the United States
Senate, the first for thirty-one years and
the second for twenty-five years. Sena-
tor Edmunds was the author of the act
prohibiting polygamy and Senator Mor-
rill, one of the sanest and most scholarly
protectionists that has ever sat in Con-
gress, was the author of the Land
Grant Act of 1862, which has been a
highly important factor in the develop-
ment of public education in the United
States.

What is there, I wonder, about the
name Justin that gives its bearer the
quality of leadership? Justin Morrill
was a leader of men. Justin Morgan was
a leader of horses. Until the automobile
has succeeded in making the horse as ex-
tinct as the railroad has made the bison,
one of the greatest equine families that
this country has produced will always be
In 1795 a
associated with Vermont.
Vermont school-teacher, Justin Morgan
by name, took a horse, foaled two years
before in Massachusetts, in part payment
of a debt, brought him to the village of
Randolph, and bestowed upon the ani-
mal his own name. Of this horse, the
progenitor of a great family of equines,
progenitor of a great family of equines,
H. C. Merwin, than whom no American
has written more delightfully about the
noblest of domestic animals, has this to
say:

Justin Morgan was no trotter, and
not till the third or fourth generation
did a trotter arise in his family, but he
was distinguished in three ways, as a
draught horse, as a short-distance run-
ner, and as a military charger or pa-
rade horse. In his day there were no
race-courses and no stated races in
Vermont; but when the sporting ele-
ment gathered at a tavern on a spring
or summer evening, they were wont to

amuse themselves by running their horses on the level road in front of the tavern, the prize being a gallon of rum, and in these races Justin Morgan is said never to have been beaten. On the same occasions a contest would often be had in pulling logs; and when the other horses concerned had done their best, it was the custom of Justin Morgan's owner to hitch him to the heaviest log that had been stirred, then to jump on himself, and the little horse never failed to move the load. When ridden at a muster, his proud carriage made him the cynosure of all eyes; and he was so intelligent and tractable that women could ride him. In fine, Justin Morgan was an animal of extraordinary utility and style. To an extraordinary extent, also, he stamped his image and impressed his qualities upon his descendants.

Unfortunate indeed is the American in whose ears those magic words, "Morgan horse," awake no recollection, or not even a thrill of sympathetic interest. For nearly a century the Morgans have served the farmer, the stable-keeper, the minister, the country doctor, the mounted militiaman, and all other people who desired to travel quickly or to be carried handsomely. Very wonderful (and perhaps at times a little apocryphal) are the stories of Morgan intelligence, of Morgan speed, and of Morgan endurance that are told by the dim light in many a country livery stable in northern New England.

Of Vermont hospitality I have left myself no time to speak. But I shall not soon forget the courtesy of the young garage keeper at a crossroads hamlet whose shop was a weather-beaten barn. He temporarily supported a spring with a broken leaf by sawing a block out of a two-by-four joist, boring two holes in it, and wiring it firmly in place, so that I could, and did, safely get to a machine shop twenty miles farther-one where a new leaf could be put in. For this piece of good-Samaritanism he refused, until I insisted, to take any payment, on the ground that what he performed with a piece of waste lumber and a bit of old wire "didn't amount to anything." As he looked at it, he was simply helping a lame dog over a stile, to use Charles Kingsley's expressive phrase.

Such was my pleasant glimpse into the State of Vermont, which, although the third smallest State of the forty-eight, has produced some of the country's most notable men, women, and horses. For if Mrs. Molly Stark and the stallion Justin Morgan were not Vermont-born, they at least had the spirit of Vermonters.

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This may sound like asking for the moon, but it is not an impossible demand nor an unreasonable one, as you will discover when you read this article

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It is one of the counties farthest west, and should not be confused with the city of Wichita, which is in Sedgwick County, on the banks of the flat and sometimes dusty Arkansas River, which, nevertheless, was labeled "navigable" on the early maps.

Wichita County has only one stream designated as a river. This is the White Woman River, a most remarkable watercourse, which quits right out in the middle of a flat prairie. Some think the water finds a bed of porous sand and becomes an underground river. Others contend that there simply isn't enough water to keep it going. Still others maintain that it evaporates. At any rate, it becomes discouraged and peters out.

The only other putative watercourse is Beaver Creek, a small stream which functions only upon being aggravated by a rain-storm.

A New Yorker in Kansas recently was invited to take an outing at some "lakes" in that State. Not having seen any notations pertaining to lakes on the map, he was puzzled, but accepted. He found the "lakes" to be small ponds, each covering perhaps the area of a city block.

Any one suffering from hydrophobia or the fear of shipwreck or tidal waves ought to go to Kansas. He could not be farther from the perils of the deep.

In view of the extreme paucity of nautical lore in this far inland county, it may be surprising, therefore, to find that Representative C. C. Perry, of Wichita County, in the recent session of the Kansas Legislature, introduced a resolution demanding the prompt completion of the

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The Kansas situation is made more graphic because Kansas is the greatest producer of wheat in the Union, and wheat is one of the principal and most fluid of export trade items.

In round numbers, the United States raises 800,000,000 bushels of wheat annually. It consumes, including seed, a little less than 600,000,000 bushels a year. It must therefore export approximately 200,000,000 bushels each year in order that the price may be maintained at a healthy normal, as indicated by Adam Smith's well-known formula. Kansas annually raises a little more than half this average surplus in the average year. In an exceptional year Kansas raises almost the whole amount of the marginal surplus. The Kansas farmer is therefore keenly anxious for a foreign market. If wheat is worth $1.75 at Buffalo and only $1.40 at Great Bend, Kansas, there is scarcely a farmer in the Sunflower State that is not keenly aware of that fact. It is fundamental. It hits him in the face every day. He doesn't have to depend upon demagogic politicians or propaganda journals or ambitious farm organization leaders for this information and its lessons. The meaning grinds itself in upon him.

If

The Kansas farmer is farther from the seaboard than any other wheat-producing farmer in the world. The wheat producers of Argentina and Australia have convenient seaports averaging less than 250 miles from them. Even the Russian peasant in the wheat-producing regions. has a better shot at ship transportation to consuming points.

And here is a side issue which has a very pertinent bearing.

The Kansas farmer has been compelled to compete with the central Canadian wheat raiser on an unequal basis because of the low rail rate in Canada. The

American railroads say they cannot afford to make such a rate. Here are a few examples which show the inequality in comparable hauls:

Distance-425 miles:

Winnipeg, Manitoba, to Port Arthur, Ontario, 14 cents per hundred pounds. Kendall, Kansas, to Kansas City, 20.5 cents per hundred pounds.

Distance-500 miles:

MacGregor, Manitoba, to Port Arthur, Ontario, 16 cents per hundred pounds. Edgerton, Kansas, to Chicago, 27 cents per hundred pounds.

Distance-700 miles:

Grenfell, Saskatchewan, to Port Arthur, Ontario,
19 cents per hundred pounds.
Wichita, Kansas, to Galveston, Texas, 44 cents
per hundred pounds.

The Kansas export wheat rate to Galveston is 230 per cent of the Canadian rate for the same distance to Lake Superior. "Manifestly, the Kansas farmer is at a great disadvantage in this situation," says Clyde M. Reed, former Chairman of the Kansas Public Utilities Commission, who has made and is still making a hard fight in behalf of better freight rates for Kansas farm produce. The Kansas freight rate fight has attracted widespread attention in railroad circles, and the average Kansas farmer is thoroughly educated on this point.

The average rate of shipping wheat from four representative points in the State to Kansas City is 18.2 cents per hundredweight.

The rate from Kansas City to the seaboard is 30.5 cents per hundredweight.

The rate from the seaboard to Liverpool is 18.3 cents per hundredweight.

It costs 3.3 cents per hundredweight to haul the wheat from the farm to the local shipping point. The total cost of transshipping point. The total cost of transportation from the Kansas granary to the unloading docks of Liverpool is therefore 70.3 cents a hundredweight.

And how is the cost distributed? Roughly, the proportion is 1/14th for local wagon haul, 14 for haul to primary shipping point, 14 for ocean haul, and almost 1⁄2 for rail haul from primary point to seaboard. In other words, the land haul of about 900 miles costs three times as much as the ocean ship haul of about 5,000 miles.

A startling instance of the effect of water haul upon the total transportation charge is cited by J. A. Doelle, secretary of the Great Lakes Waterway Association, who says:

“A car-load of lumber can be shipped from Seattle down through the Panama Canal, up through the Gulf and along the Atlantic coast, through the St. Lawrence River to the Great Lakes and to Chicago, thence by rail to Wichita, cheaper than the same car-load can be shipped from Seattle across country direct to Wichita." As stated, the actual farmer is of the

same opinion. E. E. Frizell, of Larned, is one of the most practical and successful farmers in the State. I would call him a real "dirt farmer" if that term had not been already appropriated by many men who farm with their vocal cords. He says:

"The great saving in transportation now being made on the few inland waterways of the United States should be extended to the farmers of Kansas by completion of the Missouri River waterway from St. Louis to Sioux City. The materialization of the St. Lawrence project will revolutionize transportation service, with a great saving to both the producing and consuming public."

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HUS the raw, crude issue confronts the Kansas farmers and shippers. They do not stop to investigate the technical difficulties surrounding the building of a ship canal from the Great Lakes to the ocean. They are not familiar with the problems concerning the utilization of water power or the prevalence of ice or the employment of locks. But they do know very poignantly that the interior States suffer severe economic derangement from being landlocked, and thereby impeded in their race for foreign markets. A number of inequalities in rail transportation can be corrected by the impinging of the element of ocean-vessel transportation as far west as Chicago. The competitive conditions should go far to correct such inequalities as those which exist between the Kansas farmer and the Canadian farmer in the shipping of wheat, it is felt. Although the area most vitally affected lies mostly to the north, the creation of a new outlet to Chicago, in competition with the present outlet to Galveston, with lower export rates, is bound to produce a horizontal reduction in freight rates.

The citizen of the Mississippi Basin is distinctly conscious of a handicap. The importance of transportation as a factor in economics is accentuated more and more as time goes on. It may be that the railroads are doing all they can to remove this handicap, but the fact that water transportation is only a small fraction of the cost of land haul cannot be evaded as the competition of producers becomes keener. And so, to sum up the situation in the rough, without going into the complexities of freight tariffs or engineering problems, Kansas, as a landlocked State in the very center of the United States, would like to be on closer speaking terms with salt water and have a "deep-voiced neighboring ocean" in its front yard, roaring its good news of a better export market.

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The so-called " High Bridge," connecting portions of St. Paul on either side of the Mississippi. The vague idea that Minneapolis is situated on one side of the river and St. Paul on the other needs to be cleared up. Both cities occupy both sides of the river. Minneapolis up-stream, and St. Paul down-stream. The Minnesota Capitol is shown at the right. This High Bridge, beginning almost at river level on one side, runs up to an elevation of nearly 300 feet on the other, possibly unique among big bridges in this respect

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The Twin Cities of Minnesota

St. Paul, Hyphen, Minneapolis

HE big radio noise of the Northwest is owned by the biggest flour-milling company in Minneapolis, and supported by citizens of the Twin Cities. One broadcasting studio is in Union Station, St. Paul, the other in the Nicollet Hotel, in Minneapolis. On a Monday night, for example, the "WCCO" announcer, after chanting the code letters, recites the following formula of "St. Paul-Minneapolis." On Tuesday night he says "Minneapolis-St. Paul." Whatever else may be put on for the nightly entertainment of his listening thousands in Minnesota and other States within earshot, that alternate announcement must preface the show, and it must be strictly alternate. That is the relationship between the two cities expressed to the world every twenty-four hours, static or no static. There is no question of "Brooklyn" about it. Twins is Twins.

Other cities are jealous of one another. Los Angeles and San Francisco, for instance, each passionately inquiring what the other is doing in California, anyway; Seattle reaching right over the dead body of an intervening Tacoma to appropriate Mount Rainier; jazzy Vancouver stepping on the flounces of Mid-Victorian Victoria; Chicago thumbing its nose across a thousand Main Streets at the indifferent back of New York. "Minnie" and "Paul" are not jealous as these other

By GEORGE MARVIN

municipalities are jealous. They are far
more interrelated than separated geo-
graphically, socially, commercially. To-
gether they share the utmost navigable
reaches of the Mississippi River, flowing
most beautifully between the high green
banks of each town's most desirable resi-
dential real estate. Elsewhere in the
near-sighted United States these Twin
Cities are currently believed to face each
other across the boundary river as Rock
Island, Illinois, looks over to Davenport,
Iowa. Conversation sometimes develops
the belief in distant localities that, so
distinct seem their individualities and
their fame, these two cities belong in
separate States. In reality, each is built
on both banks of the same river in the
same formerly wheat, and now dairy,
State of Minnesota. From a wing-
commander's point of view, they make
one great sporadic municipality with a
"W"-shaped ribbon of Mississippi north-
westerly worming through it and many
blobs of blue lakes splashed down upon
it; St. Paul, with its suburbs of Newport
and West, South, and North St. Paul,
down-stream, and Minneapolis up-
and
stream, are arrondissements of the same
metropolis. In the floury language of the
mill city one is tempted to ask "Eventu-
ally, why not now?"

But, though an aviator sees them as
one great city from the air, the two

municipal corporations see themselves with intense distinctness from the ground. Politically they are almost as divergent as Charleston, South Carolina, and Boston, Massachusetts, and for relatively similar causes. It is not so much a matter of jealousy as a "me-too" proposition. Twins will be Twins. Tendencies and a normal gravitation towards amalgamation are resisted steadily by each city government, and each set of locally patriotic interests, although both municipalities, in railroad, tourist, and market terms, are lumped together vis-à-vis Chicago, Winnipeg, or St. Louis in general parlance as "The Twin Cities." And, though it is quite possible to consider either city without reference to the other, the task of definition is materially helped in each instance by cross-reference to the other. Let us, therefore, adopt the method of the "WCCO" an

nouncer.

The city of St. Paul, for example, a predominantly Irish-German community, and preponderatingly Catholic, is governed by a Swede Mayor. Minneapolis, strongly Scandinavian in population and Protestant by faith, has an Irish Mayor. The main structure of Minneapolis is longitudinal; St. Paul goes by degrees of latitude east and west. The main arterial thoroughfares of St. Paul, continued on into the pattern of its twin city,

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