ONE LOVER

BY DAVID MORTON

T

HE Cruelty and Subtlety of the
Soviet.

I did not enter Russia, but heard much about it from near by. The impression one gets from many witnesses is that the de facto Soviet Government has reached a condition of reasonable stability and cleverness. It is in a position to make a personally conducted tour with temperamental United States Senators and come through with a good showing. There is no authority in sight to compete with it. The vast body of peasants are content with their ancient village or communal privileges and have little national organizing ability and vision. And the Soviet system has relentlessly exiled and destroyed all the old middleclass business mentality and every vestige of the professional intelligentsia of former days. In all the countries bordering on Russia there live in misery to-day millions of refugees, safe from Soviet revenges, but in hunger and cold because there is so little that is profitable towards which they can turn their hands and brains. Such employment as there is in these economically devastated countries is obtained more easily by the native citizens. I heard of one large house near the Russian cemetery in Berlin in which sixty Russian families were living crowded together, barely able to keep soul and body together, so poor

that no one of them was able to get even into the city of Berlin itself. I talked with an American whose wife was the daughter of a former Russian banker in Moscow. He and his wife had traveled to Berlin to be at the bedside of the dying Russian mother and to alleviate somewhat the abject poverty of parents who in the former days in Moscow, before they were driven out and their property confiscated, had been possessed of every comfort. And there are not simply a few of these cases. There are very great numbers of them. At such a price has soviet stability been purchased. I know there has been cruelty in connection with every revolution, but is that any reason for being in a hurry to strengthen the hands of the present leadership of Russia?

Subtly the Soviet modifies its early programme of immediate social reconstruction. For the time it is content to be partly capitalist and partly socialist. It is not for lack of stability or absence of worldly wisdom that America withholds her sanction to Soviet sovereignty in Russia. It is the lack of human integrity which gives us pause. There can be no pact with a government which reverts to the primitive, which cruelly crushes the best with the worst, which will not keep its word, which has no regard for rights other than those it conceives to

be its own. All witnesses agree that Russia will probably never see another monarchy, but that fateful country seems to have far to go before it is safely on the path of modern democ racy.

The Meaning of Mussolini

Italy has never had an adequate background of self-government. Always the imperialist overlord. The Roman Empire, the Pope, Austria; or small city tyrants, imperialists in miniature. Some sixty years only of primary school practice in self-governing freedom, moving rapidly toward a one-sided democracy, either socialist or communist. Signs of disintegration on every hand, ineptitude, disunity bordering on anarchy. And along comes Mussolini. He makes the impression of great ability upon Americans who meet him. He has practical wisdom in governing. His new electoral law lacks something of pure majority democracy, but it does give an opportunity for the most numerous group in the country to assume and face the responsibility of governing. Mussolini is warlike he is connected with an alleged peace-loving and peace-making League, but he bombards Corfu. By this means he makes Italy completely homogeneous overnight behind him. He is a political Rough Rider with primitive traits.

But luggage is far more likely to reach its destination in Italy, and far less likely to be rifled without recourse, than in other years. In other words, Italy seems to have been headed towards an abyss of unbalanced democracy, and Mussolini may be providentially accredited to give her a breathingspace while she gets new and safer bearings.

Some Earlier Impressions which Do
Not Change.

When you get a nearer view of Europe, of course many previous impressions are altered or entirely obliterated, but some are not. After you have been over the remnants of the supposedly invincible Hindenburg Line, with its barbed wire and dugouts and mines and trenches and underground tunnels and machine gun nests, and have traced in Belgium the evidence of its occupation during the war by military system which had made German soldiers over into efficient, docile, robot brutes who would rape women as a part of the day's work, and lay utterly waste great communities of homes, and shoot national patriots by the wholesale, and murder a devoted nurse like Edith Cavell (the bronze plate which marks the spot where she was executed. has worked into it the imprint of the legs of the chair on which Miss Cavell sat; she had been judicially nagged into a condition in which she was too weak to stand, and the Belgians maintain that the firing squad did not actually kill her at the first volley, and so, as she fell over the side of the chair, the chief of the robots advanced and blew her brains out with his pistol!), your impressions are not altered with respect to the low-water mark of savagery attained on sea or land by the German military system which for a halfcentury had been at work modifying the native qualities of the people of Germany, and which during the Great War spread frightful suffering and economic devastation over the world.

What Military Propagandism Can Do. When I was in Germany I heard at first hand from observers how the young men of Germany went off to the

last war. As they marched through the streets of Berlin by the scores of thousands, with flowers in their bayonets, they shouted back at their women in the windows and along the Bidewalks: "We'll keep them out! They will never reach you!" They had been propagandized by the miliItary system in control of the organs of opinion to the effect that the Russian barbarian hordes were about to swarm over the barriers of the Fatherland and that the offensive was an enemy's offensive, utterly evil and

malignant, directed at their homes and their possessions.

Always the military machine system is a great propagandist. One of the foremost generals of the last war was sitting next to a friend of mine at a state dinner in Europe, and my friend said to him, "How does it happen that the great body of the population, clerks, professional men, all sorts of simple, natural people who do not normally look for trouble and who are afraid of burglars, under certain definite impulses become imbued with a courage that surpasses imagination or with a brutality that is shocking?" And the General replied: "Those people are mainly transformed by propaganda. That is the business of the military system, the propaganda. You must make those people believe that their gods are imperiled, that their homes and their families are in danger, that their moral and spiritual ideals are menaced by an enemy wholly evil and malignant." "But how," said my friend, "about the enemy?" "Oh," said the General, "his military system must propagandize him, too, in the same way. Thus first-class fighting machines are made from simple, natural people in all populations."

Evidently if a country gets into a war under the impulse of facts and motives approximately sound, as we did, it should feel itself fortunate!

Walter Rathenau, the Foreign Minister of Germany, the night before he was assassinated told a friend of mine in Berlin that not over three hundred men in Germany were in reality responsible for the outbreak of the war or knew anything about the motives which really prompted it.

Disaster Falls upon Internal Germany.

During the war German territory was not seriously invaded, and for some time after the war, even through the year 1922, the factories, farms, and railways seemed prosperous; but five years afterward the penetration of economic, political, and social disaster to the heart of Germany is obvious on every hand. The burden of suffering and loss is not universal. The country districts have food and plenty of hard work on the land. The grain crops in Germany are exceedingly abundant at this harvest, and there are many communities which are neither hungry nor otherwise reduced to want. In the great cities, however, there are multitudes of people of the middle class, and recently great numbers of the indus trial laborers, who are suffering to a greater or less degree from a variety of economic causes. The chief cause is the fall of the mark, due to enormous and unheard-of currency inflation. In August I got five millions of marks for an American dollar, and of course later one could get more than

one hundred millions.' Before the war four marks were worth as much as a dollar of our money. We have been afflicted with inflation ourselves in America-in fact, the most depressing chapter in American history up to the latter part of the nineteenth century was the financial chapter; but we never got in so deep that we could not get out. The volume of French assignats at the Revolution reached vast proportions, but nothing like the present German inflation. In early August Governmental authority had already printed some thirty trillions of marks, far surpassing in figures the aggregate wealth of the world, I suppose; and how much has been added since, I do not know.

The Effect of Inflation upon the Middle Class.

I heard a good deal about the causes of this enormous inflation, which I may note later, but first I note the effects upon the middle and wageearning classes of the German population. The professional people, teachers, clergymen, doctors, lawyers, as well as Governmental employees, depending upon traditional salaries and fees, have been badly hit. In August I observed that eighty-three evangelical clergymen in Leipzig were receiving for their livelihood less than two millions of marks for the month. During the most of that period this was equivalent to about forty or fifty cents of American money. And the price of food supplies and other commodities was well-nigh prohibitive, for reasons which I will mention soon. Physicians and surgeons have been driven to selling their instruments to keep their families in food. Widows and orphans, members of the middle class of any sort who were dependent upon income from investments or fixed incomes of any kind, were left with practically nothing, and have been slowly driven down economically into the proletariat stratum.

I noticed that university prizes for research of five or ten thousand marks were being bestowed, once worth twelve hundred and fifty to twenty-five hundred dollars; now they would hardly purchase a few peanuts.

The Industrial Workers are Hit.

Immediately after the war the industrial workers in Germany did very well, but in the last year, in the face of the swiftly falling mark, great numbers of them and their families have been brought to the precipice of worry and suffering. One of the grievances widely held in Germany against the industrialists is that they have negotiated for the sale of their products outside of Germany on a gold

1 The latest quotation is a thousand million marks for a dollar.-The Editors.

basis, but have paid their workers on a paper mark basis. If the worker received even five hundred thousand or a million marks a week, as he has at some recent periods, he would have to spend it at once to get any value out of it because of its rapid depreciation. All the time the prices of foodstuffs in the cities have risen much faster than wages. The reason for this is that the farmers in the country were holding foodstuffs back from the cities, because, if they sold to-day, the price they received might mean little or nothing to-morrow. And a weak government has had difficulty in forcing out the foodstuffs from the farmers' hoards into the markets of the cities. Besides this, it must be remembered that Germany has always purchased from twenty to twenty-five per cent of her food supplies from outside countries, especially Holland. And Holland, of course, cannot now furnish commodities to Germany because of the distracted exchanges.

Low Wages and High Prices.

On a certain day a few months ago the average industrial worker in Berlin was getting one million three hundred thousand marks a week. After payments for income tax and compulsory insurance of one sort and another, he had about a million marks left.

On that particular day, when this average wage was noted, pork was four hundred thousand marks a pound. One week's pay would buy two and one-half pounds of pork and nothing else. Oleomargarine-they of course had no butter-was five hundred thousand marks a pound, with corresponding prices for eggs and flour.

Compared with the condition of a workingman in America who, we will say, is getting twenty-five dollars a week, this price level would mean that he would pay about eight dollars a pound for oleomargarine, thirty cents apiece for eggs, and one hundred and ninety-six dollars a barrel for flour.

Fleecing the Landlords.

Persons who have real property to rent are in a forlorn state. The Government has intervened to keep rents at a low figure, and the tenants also since the revolution sometimes intervene. A talented professor in biology owned an apartment house in Berlin before the war, from which he derived a good income. After the revolution the tenants in his house held a meeting, elected a rent committee which chose a chairman who appeared before the professor and explained to him that the tenants had agreed upon a certain rental, in keeping with their present financial status, which they would hereafter pay him, at least until he got notice of further change. The professor took one look at the proposal

Is It Too Christian?

As he concludes his Note-Book Senator Davenport will tell what he believes America ought to do to help end Europe's distress. He thinks his is a Christian suggestion-per haps too Christian. Some readers may think differently. We have our opinion, which we may give when Mr. Davenport gives his.

and said to the conferee "Look here, I'll tell you what I'll do; I'll make you the agent for the property. You take care of it, pay all the expenses, keep up the building, and turn the profits over to me." In a little while the professor was waited upon by a new committee chairman. The tenants had gotten rid of the first fellow because he had seen the impossibility of retaining his agency in good faith at the prevailing rate of rent. And the new conferee had another proposal to make. During the five years since the Armistice, the professor has averaged five dollars a year rental in American money. In 1914 in Hamburg in the month of July a certain small apartment rented for twenty-five marks a month. At that date the rental would buy thirty-nine pounds of pork, thirtyone pounds of oleo, three hundred and twelve eggs, and sixteen hundredweight of coal. In January, 1923, the apartment rented for three hundred and forty-five marks a month, which would buy a quarter of a pound of pork, one-third pound of oleo, two eggs, and one hundred and ten pounds of coal. Although the rent went up to twelve thousand marks a month in July of this year, and to eight hundred and eighty-five thousand marks a month in September, the amount of food and other commodities purchasable with the rental continued slightly to diminish.

Most native university students in Germany are now earning their own living, which would not be a bad situation if it were only reasonably hard. But my conversation with a young woman, who is at the head of the work of the English Friends among the university students of Berlin, indicates that the situation is unreasonably hard. She was feeding one thousand students at a midday meal, and they had very little else to eat during the day. They were living in garrets, in garages, in improvised shacks on the university grounds, neither food nor shelter being adequate. They were mainly the sons of middle-class Germans who were destitute. The economic situation evidently makes it practically a capital offense to have brains and to desire to develop them; which is not a happy augury for the future of the country.

I got another glimpse from this

Quaker girl of what war does. A few years ago she had charge of a certain reconstruction section of Poland. She called my attention to the fact that the migration from Poland during the war was the greatest in history. Eight millions were scattered all over Russia, and they came back after the war. The first thing the Quakers had to do was to kill the lice. By the way, no children under six years of age came back. They were all dead. The refugees returned in the same clothes which they wore away two or three years before. They were swarming with lice. They thought the lice were healthy. The first thing that was to be done was to convince them that it was not a good thing to have lice. And those folks came back to the spots where their homes had been and found nothing but holes in the ground and dust and unexploded shells and barbed wire.

The social disintegration of Germany appears, in some of the cities particularly affected by the economic crisis in the form of crowds of little children surrounding foreign automobiles to beg for a little money. I never heard of anything like it in Germany before. In Italy and the East, but not in Germany.

The Penalty Strikes the Wrong People.

.

In some quarters. physical disintegration has set in. In Berlin, in certain of the most densely populated wards large numbers of children are reported by the Government to be developing tubercular bones through undernourishment. And a most pathetic place to visit is one of the great outdoor hospitals where the sunlight cure is being employed upon hundreds of these children.

Some parts of Germany are now Laying part of the penalty for the horror which the military brutality and folly of that country produced in the world.

But the trouble is that the suffering is so largely vicarious. The wrong people are being punished, especially little children who were not even born when the war was on.

Unrest in Religion.

There is what is known as the Youth Movement in Germany, a movement initiated to develop athletics and moral vigor in the young, in the place of the old militaristic training and education. At a convention of the Youth Movement in Dresden the leading speaker said in substance: "Millions have broken with the Church. The Church led us into the war, said it was a holy war and took the side of the Hohenzollern Government. The Church has degraded our ideals, and killed thousands of our best and bravest. We are seeking now our Christianity outside the Church."