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a reservation is necessary except to allay the fear that has been raised by some of the less wise among the Court's advocates. Since this fear can be removed, it should not be allowed to form an obstacle to American membership.

About Ancient Debts

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OT very long ago in the House of Commons in the question hour, when members of the Opposition delight to heckle the Government, an honorable member asked the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Mr. Chamberlain, whether he were aware that certain American States had defaulted in the payment of their debts, and whether his Majesty's Government had made any representations to the Government of the United States at Washington with a view to obtaining repayment of the money thus lost by British citizens.

This sounds as if it related to something that happened last month or last year. In point of fact, these lamentable offenses against English and American. creditors took place at various dates, but none, we believe, less than fifty-five years ago.

Of course this attempt to hurt America's feelings is only a repetition of what takes place whenever some foreign press or government feels a little disagreeable toward America and Americans. A notable instance was the excited and vociferous clamor of certain Paris newspapers on this same point a few months ago when France and the United States were amicably trying to settle the question of the French debt-an honorable financial discussion which was about a million miles away from having any relation to the ancient repudiation of State debts.

It seems impossible to get it permanently into the heads of our foreign neighbors that the United States has no more power or right to interfere in matters of State indebtedness than it has in the matter of town indebtedness or than the English Government has in the finances of the London County Council. Many of us remember when English papers clamored for payment from the United States Treasury of war bonds issued by the Confederate States, thus insisting that the United States should pay for the arms and ammunition which were used in a vain effort to tear it to pieces. Imagine Great Britain paying off Fenian bonds! As a matter of fact,

many optimistic Englishmen purchased Confederate bonds in the hope of ultimately making their fortunes!

Further than this-if we are to be put upon our defense as to the distant pastthere are certain circumstances which might well be remembered. Repudiation is wrongful, injurious, reprehensible, and not to be excused. Yet it is a historic fact that the word "repudiation" as, related to public debts came into use about 1840, when the then Governor of Mississippi suggested to the Legislature the plan of "repudiating the sale of the State bonds on account of fraud and illegality." His State and other Southern States had plunged into what we call now boom finance and had supported bond loans made by banks, which found a ready sale abroad without any apparent intelligent choice as between good loans and bad loans and without any apparent knowledge that when you loan money to a State you must look into the nature of the transaction exactly as you would in lending money to a corporation. The boom burst; Mississippi refused to follow its Governor's advice; but more than ten years later the people of the State, at a referendum vote, refused to furnish money to meet principal or interest. Other Southern States followed this example. Again, after the Civil War the so-called period of Reconstruction loaded some of the Southern States with debts which, as they held, were not incurred by the people of the States, but by Legislatures controlled by carpetbaggers and Negroes. The States, apart from this, were terribly poor and could not pay running expenses. Again the financial

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obligations were either annulled or scaled. We do not know of any other such action taken by States, although one Northern State, Minnesota, scaled the payment of certain railroad bonds on the ground that the railways had not carried out their contract. There are also cases of municipalities which during or after panic seasons have gone into bankruptcy or something that was equivalent to bankruptcy.

Mr. Chamberlain, in reply to his heckler's question, said, "The Government of the United States have no control over these States." trol over these States." He modestly added that Americans were as much interested as anybody in the matter and that if the American Government cannot secure redress, "I am afraid no representations from me would be of any avail." It is not surprising that people on the Continent should not know much about America's form of Government, but most educated Englishmen are supposed to have read James Bryce's "The American Commonwealth," and should remember that our dual form of Government entails some disadvantages as regards that which in a nation like Great Britain is indivisible, namely, the functions of sovereignty. In some matters the Federal Government is sovereign; in others the States retain sovereignty.

Repudiation is not an American habit; the cases that exist are now historic rather than modern; yet the lender of money, whether to town, State, or nation, and whether the borrower is American or European, should be businesslike enough to learn where the responsibility lies.

New England and Old England

By LAWRENCE F. ABBOTT

Contributing Editor of The Outlook

T the one hundred and twentieth annual dinner of the New England Society in the city of New York, held on Forefathers' Day, December 22, General James G. Harbord, responding to the toast of "New England and Old England,” said that, in his judgment, a friendly understanding and co-operation between the Englishspeaking peoples-whom he specifically named as Great Britain, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States

constituted a surer guaranty of world peace than a League of Nations, or even

than a World Court. This was a notable utterance, for General Harbord is very far from being an Anglomaniac. Having been born in what may be called the heart of modern America, the Mississippi Valley, he received first a thorough civilian education, taking the degree of Bachelor of Science and later a Master's degree at the Kansas State Agricultural College; then, choosing a career in the Army, he sought and obtained a thorough military training, and has become. one of the most distinguished army officers of his time. He has filled all grades

from that of private, corporal, and sergeant to that of major-general and Deputy Chief of Staff. His services in the World War and in the establishment of European peace have been recognized by the highest decorations both at home and abroad. General Pershing has publicly said that he relied more upon General Harbord than upon any other one man during his operations on the western front. Thus the association of the names of New England and Old England by General Harbord means something.

What a series of historical memories the juxtaposition of the two names revives! The long series of irritations which gathered and burst into the American Revolution; the continuance of controversy, after the peace obtained at Yorktown, between the pro-British Federalists and the anti-British Jeffersonians; the bursting out again of the conflagration in the War of 1812; our narrow escape from another conflict with England during the Civil War period; the irritations over the Alabama Claims, which happily were assuaged by judicial procedure instead of an appeal to arms; the gradual rapprochement of the two nations during the hurricane at Samoa, the Spanish War, and the building of the , Panama Canal; and, finally, the complete amity and fraternal co-operation of the "Tommies" and the "Yanks" during the World War.

There are no quarrels quite so deepseated and acrimonious as family quarrels; and the wonder is, not that there are still irritations and misunderstandings in the English-speaking family, but that there should exist to-day so great a degree of sympathy, friendliness, and appreciation of each other's good qualities. The bitterness of the Revolutionary struggle has been brought more vividly to my mind than any school history did in my boyhood days by a little book which has just been loaned to me by an old friend, Judge Hiram R. Steele, who still actively practices law in the city of New York, although he was a captain in a Vermont regiment during the Civil War.

This little book, published more than a hundred years ago, bound in old calfskin, its pages yellow with age and its margins gnawed and broken by time, is the narrative of the captivity and suffering of my friend's grandfather, Zadock Steele, who in 1780 was captured by the Indians under British leadership at the burning of Royalton, in what is

now the State of Vermont. The Indians' prisoners, after wanderings and vicissitudes, were taken to Montreal, and there young Zadock was sold to the British "for a half Joe," the Joe being a Portuguese coin worth about sixteen dollars. Here Zadock and some of his fellows were finally imprisoned in a stockade on an island in the St. Lawrence, where they were treated like slaves, being sometimes "handcuffed and chained to the posts of the Barracks." They suffered, of course, from hunger, freezing, and disease. After nearly two years of captivity Zadock and a few of his companions escaped from the stockade by digging a trench or tunnel and plunged into the St. Lawrence on an improvised raft of logs.

There is no space here to detail the adventures of the escaped captives in adventures of the escaped captives in traversing the rapid streams, lakes, and traversing the rapid streams, lakes, and forests of what was then a howling wilderness during their struggle to reach their homes again. An old lady of Vermont has related that she can remember her grandmother's description of the arrival of the fugitives at the first farmhouse which they discovered near their old home. Their clothing was so hardened with grime and filth and so incrusted with vermin that it had to be burned, and when put in the stove "it crackled like blazing hemlock boughs." Of one of his jailers or overseers Zadock Steele had nothing but detestation, which appears to be fully justified by the details of his almost savage brutality related in the narrative. But it must be said that the British Provincial Government finally discharged this jailer from the army with disgrace and put in his place an officer "who manifested a disposition for peace; established good order; appeared to have regard to the order; appeared to have regard to the laws of justice, humanity, and benevolence; restored tranquillity among the prisoners, and reconciliation between. them and the guard." "Could I recollect," continues the narrator, "the name of this person I would present him to the public as a character worthy of imitation; and as 'peace-makers shall be called the children of God,' I think I am authorized by the Holy Scriptures to call him by that dignified and honorable. title." Thus may be said to have begun that spirit of friendliness even in the midst of war which resulted in the famous hundred years of peace along the Canadian border.

Whatever may be said of the uncompromising sternness of the New England

Puritans and their Cromwellian antipathy to what they conceived to be aristocratic tyranny, they did make a noble effort to settle differences by the Scriptural formularies of peaceful procedure. There lies before me as I write an interesting book, privately printed in Vermont a few years ago, which is a transcript of the ancient manuscript record of the "Proceedings of the Church of Baptised Brethrin of Royalton Vermont." This sect was organized in 1790, ten years after the burning of Royalton by the Indians and British and the capture of Zadock Steele. One of the chief organizers was Deacon John Billings, whose family has played an important and useful part in the development of Vermont during the past century. That Vermont rapidly recovered from the throes of the Revolution is indicated by some of the statistics of this church record. Deacon Billings, for example, owned one hundred and thirty acres of farm land, a yoke of oxen, four cows, three yearlings, three hogs, fourteen sheep, one horse, ten calves, one colt, one hundred and sixty bushels of cereals, and contributed four pounds to the establishment of the new church--a munificent donation in view of the scarcity of hard cash in those days. His religious generosity was tempered by stern insistence on religious observances; for when a grandchild professed inability to take part in the singing of the Psalms he replied: "Then you shall be whipped! I will have no grandchild who cannot sing."

There were Fundamentalists in those days. Modern Tennessee has nothing on ancient Vermont in this respect. The record is filled with controversies between the "Brethrin"—and, let me add regretfully, between the Sisters also-like the following:

The Chh. then Reseved a Complaint from Brother Daniel Leonard against Brother Edward Spears which was as followes that Brother Spears had Charged him with Lying and that he as he thought-Did it in an unbecoming harsh Sperit-and that he had taken the first and second steps with him and Could not Git satisfaction and now Layed it before the Chh:-Brother Spears Exknowledged his fallt and asked the forgiveness of Brother Leonard and all the Bretherin and the Chh for Gave-and Brother Leonard for Gave and Receavid him into there fellowships.

For the benefit of those who are not Fundamentalists let me add that the first.

and second steps referred to in the above quotation from the record are set forth in the fifteenth and sixteenth verses of the eighteenth chapter of St. Matthew, wherein a man who has a complaint to make against his brother is enjoined to

go alone to the transgressor, and if the fault is not admitted to go again with two or three witnesses, and if the offense is still persisted in, to take the complaint to the church.

There was a simplicity about our New

England forefathers which is amusing look back upon, but which, after all, ha considerable merit. They had, for i stance, a sense of justice which must b at the bottom of all durable internation as well as individual peace-making.

What 1925 Brought To Europe

Correspondence by ELBERT FRANCIS BALDWIN

England

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women.

UEEN ALEXANDRA'S

Ideath marked the year 1925 for all English men and The year had seen the passing of notable statesmen-Curzon, Milner, Bourgeois, Branting, Ebert. But no death could signalize the end of an epoch as did that of this august octogenarian, a veritable fairy princess and of unlimited popularity.

The year was important in the history of the British Empire because never before had the London Government shown such respect for the various Dominions; in this regard Article IX of the Locarno Treaty was unprecedented. The Mosul affair was not without influence.

In the United Kingdom, as I prophesied a year ago, two of the political parties underwent some change. Among the Liberals one noticed the increasing assertion of the radicals, perhaps the seed of a new party. Among the Laborites the cleft between moderates and extremists grew steadily wider until, to his credit, Mr. MacDonald had to expel the Communists.

The year also witnessed a new effervescence in Ireland. The limitation of the frontier between North and South has caused much trouble, Catholic and Protestant populations being closely intermingled.

Some months ago an equally menacing shadow came over the economic domain. The Labor crisis in the coal districts resulted in the certain prospect of a cessation of nearly all industrial life. The Court of Enquiry, inaugurated by the Government on July 13, could not ward it off; only the Premier's compromise of the 31st averted the disaster for ten months. In addition there was the shipping strike; had it succeeded, it would have brought the people to the verge of

The Outlook's Editor in Europe

starvation. As to the workless in general, there are now, according to Mr. Churchill, Chancellor of the Exchequer, about 200,000 fewer unemployed than a year ago.

The situation among the poor should be relieved by the time these lines are read because of the new pensions; some 200,000 widowed mothers and 400,000 children will receive their benefits from increased appropriations.

As to land conditions, the year saw the beginning of a new reform. Will it go to the root of the injustices found in the lack of land, in the low wages, and in the low production? As to forestry, 1925 was the first year when England officially was informed that there was enough territory available for forests to provide the country with a third of its annual timber requirement-territory at present practically wasted.

Finally, 1925 was the first year since the war when England maintained the pound at parity.

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France

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IN France the year was one of Cabinet changes. In them, to my mind, the most curious and, I fear, the most significant feature was not the country's sorry financial predicament, but the Socialist attitude.

M. Herriot, Prime Minister at the beginning of the year, head of the largest group of the majority in Parliament, the Socialist Radical, a man of amiable and attractive personal qualities, had become the slave of the "pure" Socialists. In April he was overthrown. He was succeeded by the eminent mathematician and statesman, Paul Painlevé, who inand statesman, Paul Painlevé, who invited M. Caillaux to return to power as Minister of Finance. The first Painlevé Cabinet was more independent of the Cabinet was more independent of the Socialists than the Herriot Cabinet had

been. The second Painlevé Cabine veered more in the Socialist direction an fell on November 22. Having tasted th sweets of power without being personally represented in the Cabinet, the Socialist now demanded what they had not be fore, namely, direct representation. They offered (1) to enter a new Cabinet i they were given the Ministries of War Finance, Justice, Public Works, and the Interior (of course, the party controlling these offices controls the state); or (2) to form a purely Socialist Cabinet. And this effrontery was from a party with less than a hundred seats in the Chamber of Deputies, but representing, as it believed, the balance of power there. Ap parently the Socialists did not fear the certainly adverse votes in Parliament, because, with the Bolshevist example before them, they saw that a small minority, once in power, could by force impose its will on a whole people. That this was their aim is revealed by a widely circulated journal, the "Midi Socialiste," as follows:

If our laws do not allow us to get funds where they are and to punish the traitors to their fiscal duty, we will override the law. And if financiers hold up the people, after having placed their own funds in safety, we, unable to reach those funds, will not hesitate to arrest the culprits and say to them, "Pay or you will be hung." And we will hang them.

No wonder, then, that, on the one hand, a Fascist counter-movement arose, and that, on the other, the Communists promised their support to the Socialists. The Kerensky régime led to the Lenine régime, those Communists remembered.

Now there is real reason for discontent in France. But it does not come mainly from financiers; it comes from the great body of the people. They have never been trained, as have the English and ourselves, in the habit of paying all the taxes imposed. The year 1925 revealed, according to a well-known Paris author

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ity, that tax evasion costs France every year a sum large enough to balance the Budget, provide a sinking fund, and stabilize the franc. What was needed was not a Socialist Minister (even a few weeks of Socialist power would ruin France), but a Ministry with the courage to impose necessary new taxes and then to collect them.

Though the Briand Cabinet is not sufficiently a coalition Ministry, it has a chance to save the situation. All friends of France will hope that it may.

If the trying financial crisis seemed completely to dominate French opinion during 1925, the year was notable in revealing a correspondingly cheerful fact on the economic side, namely, an unprecedentedly good trade balance-an apparent paradox. It proved to be of first importance in the attempt to settle the French debt to America.

Italy FOR

OR Italy 1925 was the Fascist high-water mark as well as the culminat

ing point in the popularity of Benito Mussolini, the great Fascist leader. The year steadily developed his eloquence and appeal. For instance, the other day, to call attention to the seventh centenary of the death of St. Francis of Assisi, Signor Mussolini declared:

In Dante Italy showed poetry's highest flight; in Leonardo, the profoundest reach of art and science; in Columbus, the hardiest navigator; and in St. Francis, the holiest saint, whether of Christianity or of humanity. Restorer of the religion of Christ, St. Francis was also one of the first Italian poets. His brother-monks who went to the East were at once missionaries of Christ and of Italy.

This passion for Italy (we have its I proof in the magnificent popular subscription to pay the Italian debt to us) is the base of the Fascist movement. To succeed, however, that movement needed discipline even more than enthusiasm. According to Mussolini, the Italian parliamentary system has never led to that end. "Parliament," he asserts, "cannot function if the party having the largest number of adherents is not assured of a solid majority protecting it from all the plots of the little groups in coalition." He obtained the passage of such a protecting law, favoring the Fascists, and during 1925 followed it by some even more surprising measures. The climax

was reached by a law providing for prac- resulting from that Treaty are maintical parliamentary abdication.

Regarding another measure, prohibiting workmen's syndicates save by Fascist organization, the "Osservatore Romano," the Vatican organ, recalls Leo XIII's pronouncement concerning the natural rights of workmen to form associations. In other words, the new project was a restriction, not only of political liberty, but also of the conception of universal social organization.

There were also Fascist measures against the liberty of the press. Their boldest attack upset the management of the Milan "Corriere della Sera," the most eminent and gratifyingly the most widely read of Italian dailies. During 1925 it often reached 1,000,000 copies a day, and rarely fell to less than 800,000. When it became known that Senator Luigi Albertini and his brother Alberto had been expelled from the management, the sale of the paper, it is said, fell by some 75,000. In 1914 the "Corriere" was the first Italian journal to espouse the Entente Allies' cause. After the war it was equally courageous in affirming that the conquest of Dalmatia was not in Italy's interest. It favored Signor Mussolini's participation in the Government. Taking its stand on the firm principle of the Constitution, however, it opposed the march on Rome and all the revolutionary Fascist tendencies.

To sum up, despite Mussolini's immense services to his country in a time of her great need, the year 1925 showed beyond a doubt that he had gone much too far. Constitutional government had indeed collapsed.

Germany

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OR Germany, in the first place, really hardly less for France, indeed, for the whole world, the greatest event of 1925 was the Locarno Treaty. As the Paris "Temps" says, "One may now feel that the war is actually at an end."

In February the base of the Treaty, at the suggestion of Lord d'Abernon, British Ambassador in Berlin, was put forth by Herr Stresemann, German Foreign Minister. After being elaborated at Paris and London, the timely suggestion Paris and London, the timely suggestion developed into an event the most striking not only of the year but of our epoch.

What makes it peculiarly striking is the fact that its conclusions were reached entirely within the limits of the Versailles Treaty; hence all the rights of the Allies

tained in all their force.

An equally striking feature is the fact that seven of the principal European nations pledged themselves to submit their differences to arbitration. You may think perhaps that the Locarno Treaty really does not do more than apply the League of Nations' Covenant to a limited area. But it does do more.

(1) It replaces for this area the somewhat vague system of military aid from all the League members by a formal guaranty on the part of England and Italy.

(2) It defines more specifically what are legitimate acts of self-defense and what may be regarded as acts of war.

(3) It erects a Permanent Commission of Conciliation. Conflicts may be submitted to this Commission before being submitted to the League Council.

(4) It defines more exactly the procedure to effect the decisions of the World Court.

(5) It takes away the liberty of going to war if settlement is not reached by this means.

The signature of the Locarno Treaty marked the end of one period of history and the beginning of another. More particularly it registered the welcome fact that a German Parliament and President, both supposed to be strongly and obstinately nationalist, had passed and signed the enabling law.

Coincident with the final signature, the first detachments of the British Army of Occupation left the Cologne zone. Had Germany fulfilled her disarmament promises, the British would have departed on January 10, 1925, agreeably with treaty provision. The evacuation gives enormous satisfaction to all Germans save, perhaps, to the thousands of Fräuleins now the wives of English soldiers and to the Cologne merchants, with whom the "Tommies" and their officers have left tens of thousands of dollars every week.

At the same time the French began to reduce by a third the number of their soldiers in the zone occupied by them. All questions concerning soldiers in the occupied zones are to be centralized in Paris and dealt with by the Ambassadors' Conference.

Though German commerce and industry are still considerably dislocated, Germany is producing more wealth than she consumes. The future, by reason of the advance of 1925, promises more economic and political stability than she has known since the war.

The year 1925 has thus been a significant period for Europe, and consequently for America.

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HE next time any one tells you that people are not interested in the war you can laugh loud and long and send them to see "The Big Parade," by Laurence Stallings. I got to see it half by accident myself. Not because I've lost interest in the war, but merely because the rather too supercilious critics--or some of them had half damned it with rather faint praise.

But there was a kind of familiar sameness about the men I saw piling in to get tickets, and, incidentally, they weren't getting any tickets either. Sold out! Well, you invariably want something you can't get, so in I went and got the worst seat in the house-in a box. Where do theaters get the nerve to charge as much as they do for these abominations of desolation?

In other words, I wasn't the only one there no thanks to the critics; and by

the time the orchestra started up the

entrance, the aisles, the stairs, and the seats were jammed-right up to the roof. With whom? That's the point! With ex-service men, with their wives, their sisters or other fellows' sisters-and numerous friends. It looked like a regimental reunion, from condescending mental reunion, from condescending colonel to formerly abject shavetail, and from bumptious sergeant to happy-golucky private. Most of them were a trifle better upholstered than seven years ago; but, as I said, they were very much there as many as could get in.

That box, when I got to it, already had five other men in it. You could have spotted them as service men at a mile. The word must have been passed around. Pity about those critics! It is a safe bet that the nearest some of them ever got to the war was seeing parades on the avenue.

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HIS is, in brief, a war film. And when I say "war" I do not mean a sham battle in the suburbs of Peekskill either. This means that some folk, and particularly our women folk, won't like it; but it will "get" them, just the same. For they will be thrilled, they will unavoidably laugh, and they will have their hearts torn to shreds for that, mesdames, is war for you! Let us put it right in front of you-with all its horror and its comedy, its agony and its gayety, its ruthlessness and its infinite love and sacrifice. Perhaps you may not like it, madam, but that audience dropped seven years and forgot itself.

Men roared at times and slapped one another on the back. With broad grins they sang along with the orchestra of that highly popular if indiscreet "Mademoiselle of Armenteers." They hummed "You're in the Army Now" when the

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