G

ETTING Potatoes into the Ruhr.

There are millions of industrial workers in the occupied Ruhr region, most of whom are likely to continue in some form of peaceful resistance, secret or open, no matter what the Government may say, unless they are driven to starvation. And with the increase of hunger no one can prophesy what they may do. There has been danger, as winter draws on, that the tide of revolt and despair may rise in the Ruhr. Of course the intolerable situation of the population is one of the chief causes of the downfall of passive resistance. The fundamental food of the German worker is potatoes. To these he adds rye bread and some fats. Potatoes are a rather poor crop this year. And the question is, how, and under what conditions of helpfulness or opposition on the part of the French, can sufficient potatoes be gotten into the Ruhr between the time of the potato harvests and the time when frosts come and potatoes can no longer be transported? In ordinary times, I am told, it requires quick and effective organization. Just now the means of communication, the automobiles, the railways, the motor lorries, are in such use by the French army of occupation that there is some doubt whether it is going to be possible this year to get to the millions of workers in the Ruhr anything like an adequate potato supply. Hunger breeds revolt, and revolt violence, which may spread to other parts of Germany in spite of the great desire of Germans generally to avoid it. They know that violence is not wise even from a tactical standpoint at the present time.

The Voice of Hunger.

The conflict between French needs and German needs in the occupied regions is indicated by the story told me by an American friend who was passing in August along the street in a certain quarter of Mainz. He saw around a common center a large crowd of haggard-looking women who were wailing and wringing their hands. He asked a passer-by about it and the man said, "Come back here a bit out of sight and I will tell you. Das ist die Stimme des Hungers! (That is the cry of hunger!). Those women have come after the day's ration of potatoes and there are none." My American friend found that the city had printed and emitted a volume of currency,

at

THE GERMAN MARK WORTH MORE AS WASTE PAPER THAN AS CASH The photograph shows junk dealers weighing out marks for the paper-makers. A hundred thousand one-mark notes weigh exactly a hundredweight, which at the time the picture was made was worth a million marks as waste paper for pulping

a time when no national currency was available, to buy potatoes for the destitute families of Mainz, and the French had confiscated the money for payments that they themselves had to make in that region.

The question will have to be raised pretty soon not as to whether Germany should be made to pay, because she ought to pay to the last dollar of her possibility, but whether the practical drift of the present method of trying. to make Germany pay is not resulting in a disintegrated, broken, undernourished, and palsied nation which cannot pay at all.

Who Is to Blame for the Falling Mark?

Of course the money inflation began after the German revolution of 1918, just as it does after every revolution. It is the only way the new Government has of paying its debts-by starting the printing presses. Order and organized taxation are not yet established. And there was a special reason for money inflation in Germany. Four and one-half millions of soldiers came home from the war and had to be put to work to avoid trouble. The country had lost perhaps twenty billions of wealth in trying to fight the world. There was little domestic capital to be obtained to start the factories, and none could be procured

from abroad. It had to be done through the extension of the national credit to industry-and into this went great early installments of marks.

Then, of course, there was no adequate taxation. The German Government had no stomach for reparations, and the people of property behind the Government had no desire whatever to pay taxes to pay reparations. So. while the body of the German people are not escaping taxation by any means, the course of economic events has made it harder and harder for them to pay anything adequate to the crisis, and the class in Germany who could pay and who should pay heavily have in one way or another gotten out from under the burden. Wealth has not only been concealed but has taken flight to other lands.

I heard from a reliable source of a company of men in Germany who owned a controlling interest in a busi ness in the Argentine. They brought together in a room in Berlin all the securities representing their interest in that business. They put the title to the business in the name of a trusted Argentinian, and then burned all the existing securities in the fireplace Then the Argentinian returned to his country and new securities were issued there. I suppose the accumulating dividends await in the Argentine hap pier days for their German owners, 1

the Argentinian stays honest. The dividends would appear at the present moment to be reasonably safe from invasion by the German tax-gatherer.

Stinnes.

Hugo Stinnes is the type of unpatriotic industrialist-a rather repulsive-looking man of mystery, member of the Reichstag, a capitalist of great enterprise, speculating in the fall of the mark, buying vast new properties and paying for them later in depreciated currency, thus getting them practically for nothing. There is a feeling in Germany, as everywhere else, that he has been more interested in that sort of thing than in the welfare of his country. Is he the chief ruler of Germany, the power behind the throne? It is probably a mistake to think so. He would like to be the chief ruler. He would set up a business man's government, very efficient and well organized, but he himself acknowledges that he has tried to do this and that it simply will not work. The Communists make much of his relation to the Conservative party in power. When Cuno took his place on the Reichstag rostrum to make a defense of his policy-"Superintendent of the Stinnes Republic!" the Communists shouted at him. But this is probably a great exaggeration. The new Chancellor, Stresemann, is himself a business lawyer, the corporation counsel of the German-American Economic Union, an organization to promote trade with the United States. But my information is that Stresemann has been a check on Stinnes within the Conservative party, and is not enamored of the Stinnes programme of unpatriotic exploitation, and understands full well that the widely differing population elements in Germany are not likely to stand unitedly behind a pure business man's government, unless there are other peculiarly human elements of strength in it also.

Is the Fall of the Mark a German Trick?

It could hardly have been a general conspiracy. In times of money inflation there are great classes of people within any country who suffer while others profit. Owners of bonds who would be paid in depreciated currency, multitudes of the middle class who have lost their all, banks stuffed with the Government trillions--there are enough of all these to put up a protest if any general plot were on foot.

Conditions surrounding Germany appear to have made increasing call for marks. Up to August, 1922, there was some attempt made to pay reparations. More recently the costs of the French occupation have been partially paid. This had to be done in foreign

There is one more installment of

Senator Davenport's Note-Book

awaiting publication

From time to time we will publish articles from the pen of our European Editorial Correspondent

Elbert F. Baldwin

which will carry
on the story of

Europe's

Great Transition Period

exchange, on a gold basis. The supply of foreign exchange was small, as Germans had greatly decreased credits abroad. This exchange had to be bought at a very high price in marks. Besides this, a considerable percentage of food and much raw material had to be imported and paid for, and the supply of German credits abroad had greatly lessened, while the demand for such credit was great. Also a relatively weak Government, not overanxious to balance its budget with a reparations retribution staring it in the face, fell behind constantly and had to borrow from the Deutschebank, issuing in return greater quantities of its own promises to pay. Less and less confidence in the value of the mark, greater and greater use for it.

And finally inflation grew by what it fed on, as it always does. By and by the municipalities issued currency for their needs, and great business enterprises were permitted to issue it for their needs, and at last the Stresemann Government announced that a new and sounder basis entirely would be adopted, if possible. And this announcement seems to have increased with great rapidity the tempo of the financial dance of death.

The Likelihood of Communism in Germany.

The danger signals are hung out, very much as they were in Russia. I am told that Communist representatives from Russia who are watching Germany closely in Berlin believe this to be the case. And of course the foundation is clearly being laid for such a movement in the economic facts

were.

which appear to any observer. But, strangely enough, I am told also that the Communist leaders from Russia advise against any such movement-at least at the present time. The Russian leaders are more moderate than they They have learned what can and what cannot be done. They have been obliged to modify their own programme. They want time themselves to establish what success they have achieved. They need commercial convalescence. They have trade agreements with Germany for the favorable exchange of commodities, and revolution would upset these arrangements and injure the recovery of Russia. They believe also, I am reliably informed, that a Communist upheaval in Germany would be the excuse and the signal for the advance of the French farther into Germany and into eastern Europe, would probably set the Polish armed allies of France in motion, and might bring the armies of Russia into a conflict which they are not wishing for now. The time is not ripe, they And their views are said to be listened to seriously by the Communist leaders of Germany. Furthermore, I suppose, the naturally orderly temper of the German people as a whole shrinks from the Communist method of progress.

say.

But it must be confessed that one hears a great deal of talk about it. The man on the street refers to it casually-"If revolution comes-. Many are afraid of it. Many are ready for it. Communism has been growing rapidly as an influence in some parts of Germany, in proportion as the middle class has lost all and multitudes of wage-earners have become hungry and wretched.

If the present system works out, they say, so that the industrialists are to absorb the power and profit of Germany, or even if this power and profit are to be absorbed by agreement between the French and German industrialists, there is nothing left for us but revolution and the dividing up of what remains, so as to give the people of Germany a new start.

There is one thing that it seems to me is settled-there will never be a return to reactionary monarchism. Of course it is conceivable that Germany, like England or Italy, might some day have the form of monarchy without the substance, but there is very little sign at present even of that, outside of Bavaria. If Communism comes, one would expect to see Bavaria separated from the rest of Germany, and perhaps become the center of a counterFascisti movement that might issue into a fierce civil war. Bavaria has the popular temper and the leaders for such a conflict. Adolph Hitler has already battered the heads of all the radicals and driven most of them out of Bavaria.

ID you ever know a man who couldn't drive a nail? There are such, more's the pity. Your boy and my boy are learning these days in the schools, mind you to do such things as sawing, planing, nailing, and the use of sandpaper. Otherwise they might never know how. That kind of lore has vanished out of boydom.

The dentists say that we shall soon be a toothless race, all on account of soft food and other soft snaps that go with advanced civilization. Perhaps the schools will establish courses in dental culture to check the impending dearth of grinders. Johnny and Mabel will sit by the hour and concentrate on the mastication of a double-acting tooth exerciser that some dentist chap will invent. If it has a seductive flavor, we may expect much improvement in the molar equipment of the Class of 1995. Toothful champions who chew as fast 300 bites per minute will found scholarships for those less proficient and dentate. So shall the race be saved.

But when you come down to brass tacks, is this much more grotesque than Johnny's present plight? The schools and the Boy Scouts are working away, doing their best to make up for certain essential things that are disappearing out of our lives. The course in carpentry supplies the knowledge that capable youngsters used to acquire in the back shed, making things the family needed. Johnny's gymnasium gives him carefully rationed exercise, because he no longer breaks horses or calls the neighbors to help him hoist the ridgepole of a barn into place. Does he walk three miles to the little red schoolhouse? Not he. The family flivver gets the exercise. The old swimmin' hole is made of marble now, and the water is warmed if enough Johnnies shiver a bit.

Can he sketch? No; but he can make perfectly dandy snap-shots if he has a camera, and chemicals, and a dark room. Can he whittle out a racing yacht or a wooden chair? No, it's too much work. All his sporting equipment is bought, not made at home. Needless to say, he can neither ride nor shoot, for horses cost too much (they are too slow for Johnny), and not one boy in a dozen now has the chance to learn how to handle a rifle. As for felling trees, it simply isn't done. The park police would object.

And so most of the things in Johnny's cosmos come to him from the outside. He does not originate, plan,

A FAMILY HEARTHSTONE IN THE WOODS

This is about all the heritage that is left for even the most favored of Johnnies. and Jeans. A camping trip to the woods may be a poor substitute

for the school of the woods of which Mr. Reynolds writes, but we ought to sit up nights to think of means for saving and developing the last of Johnny's woodland domain

create the things he plays and works with. Somebody else does it for him. in a distant factory. If he doesn't exercise his teeth or his creative mind, they are going to atrophy, so the book says. And Johnny's Johnnies are going to be a lot worse off than he, unless the signs fail. They may know more about carbureters than Henry Ford and more about wireless than Marconi, but these things alone do not make the kind of men that made America. Perhaps they even help to unmake them.

Those men were two-fisted chaps, each one able to do anything necessary to keep his stomach full and his skin intact. If they wanted to go somewhere, they caught up and rode a horse, regardless of the horse's plans. For a short trip of a few hundred miles perhaps they didn't bother about the horse-just swing up an eightypound pack and away we go down the river trail. And when it came to building things-oh, boy! They could build anything from a house to a batch of biscuit. Moccasins, or a canoe, or snowshoes were merely evening pas

time when the day's work was over. They could chew tough meat or handle tough men if necessary. The thing that made their existence possible was the timber. Their main tools were the ax and the rifle. From the trees and the shrubs and the animal life of the forest they drew everything necessary for human sustenance except bread. and that was soon provided.

The struggle with primitive things was no joke. Weaklings succumbed to it. But those who came through were fit to command themselves and others. As the result they commanded a continent.

Men of this kind are becoming legendary. As the forests retreat farther and farther from the haunts of men we begin to see it. You find the type once in a while on the farms or out on the ranches where men still rely upon themselves to do things with their hands. The nearer to Mother Earth and her ways, the simpler, stronger, more self-reliant the man.

Do you remember when Johnny was born how his little hands hooked themselves around your finger? They