acter.

The internal condition of Socialism just now is a case of the great fleas and little fleas and so on ad infinitum. They agree in denouncing capitalism, but on nothing else. The Communists we know, and that to them the 'gradual' method is anathema. The Guild Socialists scout the old Marxian scheme of nationalized direction. As vigorously as Sir Alfred Mond, they refuse to imagine miles and miles of new Government offices, with new armies of officials and inspectors to wield control over the whole industrial and commercial life of the country.

On their scheme of decentralization, every separate distinctive trade would be self-governed by the rank and file of its members. The miners would run the mines, the cotton-workers the cotton-mills, and so forth. The natural impulse of each trade would be to charge other trades the highest price it could. To avoid chaos and civil war as a result of this process, a complicated series of committees would represent the general mass of consumers and endeavor to make a fair general adjustment of price-lists.

Little was said about Guild Socialism in the debate, but it is the real thing that opponents of the Labor Party have to grapple with. Particularly, the miners now want the mines for the miners, not for the nation. This general scheme is in reality more revolutionary than original Socialism. It not only implies the break-up and total reconstruction of society as we know it, but it involves the dangers and probabilities of new antisocial divisions

The fact is that the more any section of Socialists- except the Communists consider the problem, the more they shrink from putting down any plan in detail. In spite of Mr. Snowden's long and resonant motion, Socialism for the wider purposes it professes has no intelligible policy of any kind. Emotionally it is cohesive and strong. Intellectually it is a less united party than any other.

Practically it all comes to Mr. Snowden's question of 'steps.' If Labor got a sufficient majority it would try to introduce nationalization of the mines, the railways, and the land. The question of the mines for the miners, not for the nation - the railways for the railwaymen the land for the tillers and graziers would at once arise. The capital levy, on the whole, would probably be thought the safest measure for a Socialist Government to risk.

These are the concrete issues to be reckoned with well and strongly by the non-Socialist parties now, at the next election, and afterward. It means the big fight. Unless the adjourned debate turns more upon these concrete issues it will be another Pickwickian discussion. After the war and under the Coalition the Labor Party had easy going and swelled its ranks, but it is only at the beginning of its own difficulties.

Compare with other countries. Russia was ruined by an anticapitalist movement strictly derived from Karl Marx. That is the only great practical consequence which up to the present has followed from Marx. The German Socialists could have triumphed after the war if they had had any great constructive scheme, but after fifty years of general oratory they had none. The piecemeal attempts of the Italian Socialists to apply their doctrines only

produced Mussolini. Switzerland has turned down the capital levy.

Nowhere in the world has State ownership of anything equaled countless successes of private enterprise. The creative impulses of free energy, initiative, and invention are lacking: these personal qualities are as essential in industry and commerce as in literature and art. Official management, sooner or later, comes to settled routine, and mere routine is the death of business, as continual new resource is its very breath of life. No substitute for the creative or organizing vigor of the individual has yet been discovered.

The United States has the most powerful capitalistic system in the world, the result being full employment and the highest level of human comfort and well-being yet known. How can an able man like Mr. Snowden bring himself to attribute unemployment and other evils on this side to capitalism and nothing else? In several countries under Protection, agriculture and industrial employment alike flourish more than in our own.

He and the whole Labor Party must search further. When they have searched they will find that this is the very last community in the world which could afford to initiate any kind of Socialist system. Socialism would not begin to be possible here until it had been very widely adopted elsewhere. Mr. Snowden urges us to organize 'natural resources.' Good as far as it goes. But we, above all other communities, do not, and cannot, live on our own 'natural resources,' but on those of many nations over which we have no control. We do not and cannot live on the soil of the island. We live on the soil of the world.

The vital, unescapable question for British Labor is the reopening and improvement of markets all over the world, and it cannot be done without

an utmost efficiency of our own capitalist system in a capitalist world-provided that the parallel political action of our Government is wise and steady in ways that have no more to do with Marx than with the moon.

By making the best use of home resources and the home market we can do much far more than now - but we can never do enough for our present population. By developing, in concert with the Dominions, the vast 'natural resources' of the British Empire, we could do much indeed, but that is a matter where the Labor Party has given little attention and less help.

Meanwhile, unless we reduce our population by twelve or fifteen millions, and abandon Free Trade to boot, we can only flourish, or even exist, by competitive selling at a world-price against the capitalist systems of other countries, more solidly based on their own 'natural resources' than ourselves. Never for a moment has British Socialism faced these inexorable facts. If the United States and Germany led the way either in 'centralized' Socialism or the Guild brand, we might follow suit. The adoption of either by Britain first would be the economic suicide of insular democracy.

At the same time, let no one think that speeches like Sir Alfred Mond's, and the whole armament of reason and ridicule which might be launched against Socialism, can win by negatives in this gathering and great struggle. That would be a fatal delusion. The 'Labor' Party draws its strength not from its theories and theorists but from the living, spreading, formidable discontent with social and industrial conditions as they are. By refuting old Marxians and Guildsmen and other intellectual sects, and showing that on the most vital points they have not arrived at the elements of agreement with each other, you have not got rid of

what is powerful and deadly in the Socialist analysis of existing evils, failures, and abuses. They are staring and glaring on every hand.

The quintessence of the Socialist contention is that money, as compared with brains by themselves or handlabor by itself, takes an unfair share of the product of the joint work, and wields over countless aspects of the lives of men an autocracy which is obsolete and intolerable—or at least will not be tolerated in an age of growing education and absolute political liberty.

That is the greatest issue of the age, next to international peace, and it is a matter with regard to which modern capitalism will have to make in the coming years timely and large and even generous concessions, or nothing can save it from the mass-movement. If huge evils like unemployment, the housing dearth, and agricultural misery could not be remedied under capitalism, nothing on earth could restrain the people, aided more and more by the trained ability of the middle classes, from trying at all costs another way.

Again, trusts, rings, syndicates, and amalgamations of all kinds, while largely indispensable to efficiency, also involve serious social disadvantages. Too much capital is still wasted in foolish or petty ways, when after the war we need for the essentials of recovery and development every single shilling that our fierce taxation spares.

Now, as before, reform is the only safeguard against revolution. The evils exist. The real conflict will be fought out between alternative schemes of remedy. The Socratic question for

capitalism no less than Socialism, is 'What would you do?' For Capital everything will be staked upon the constructive ability and vigor which Liberalism and progressive Unionism or both together may be able to display throughout the next decade. The bold, practical lines of such a programme we shall consider in a separate article when the adjourned debate is resumed.

Without more harmony and less suspicion between Capital and Labor, the relative commercial greatness of this country and the general prosperity of its people cannot be maintained. Nothing but a new system of consultation on the Whitley model, coupled with a universal participation of Labor in profits, can hope to do it; and even this must be supplemented by such efforts for the development of Imperial resources as we have never yet made, and by a steady, resolute policy of European reconciliation and resettlement.

All this is sense where, for this island, Socialism of any kind would be suicide. It is seventy years since Marx sounded the trumpets against Jericho, but the walls have not fallen. If Capitalism is well and wisely guided to secure some better association with Labor by counsel and partnership and the increase of opportunity in accordance with the spread of education, the citadel will stand for another seventy years and more. But let us always remember that democracies, just like despotisms, do sometimes commit suicide in strange epochs. The non-Socialist parties of this country, Unionist and Liberal alike, never yet stood in sterner need of great statesmanship and of great awakening.

WE must not entertain the belief that the outbreak of hatred in Germany at the occupation of the Ruhr was in consequence of a spontaneous explosion of patriotism irritated into action by the seizure of German territory. This was only the apparent reason. The real, fundamental cause is quite a different one. The hatred between France and Germany is in great part the result of a fictitious and intentional excitation, of a campaign of hatred started on the morrow of the Armistice. Hundreds of documents have been published on this subject, but no volume has united in one startling indictment as successfully as a book which has been published by the deputy André Fribourg under the title which we have placed at the head of this article-a book which every neutral and every Allied nation should know.

After a period of prostration during which she believed herself really vanquished; after having believed for some time that force was bad because she had not proved the stronger, Germany raised herself upon her elbow and began to observe and to consider her victors. From this time on the whole nation has been subject to a gigantic psychological experiment organized in the most methodical manner. The German opinion, says Mr. Fribourg, has been cultivated exactly as one cultivates bacilli in a laboratory. If one may use another image, the Germany of to-day may be compared to an immense bomb filled with explosives and supplied with a time-fuse.

The situation is the same as it was in 1870 and as it was at the end of 1914. During these tragic historical moments it was Bismarck and William II who held the match that caused the explosion. To-day it is the great industrial magnates. The danger remains the same, and the processes which are being applied are very similar.

One learns with astonishment that Germany has once again adopted the mentality which obsessed her during the war and which expressed itself in those poems of hate which are still present in our memory. To lead the people up to this point all the forms of propaganda have been used. In the first place came the usual attack by means of journalism. The independence of the press in Germany exists less to-day than ever. Profiting by the precarious financial situation of the press, Hugo Stinnes purchased a number of newspapers. By 1920 he controlled seventy newspapers, either great dailies or provincial journals. He also holds control over all the press agencies, sometimes even those of the Socialist as well as the official press. Taken all in all, by the purchase of printing plants, of newspapers, and of paper mills, the Stinnes trust is sole master of public opinion in Germany. We have lately read the declaration of the President of the Reichstag, the Socialist Loebe, published in the Vossische Zeitung alone.

In the domain of the press German audacity halts at naught. During the last few days there were sent to certain

French professors copies of a newspaper printed at Berlin, Friedrichstrasse, 225, in which, under pretense of propaganda for international communism, a perfidious propaganda against all kinds of French institutions was masked. It goes without saying that this document is printed in French.

In regard to the different manufactories of propaganda, they are legion, and their methods of work are well known. To cite a single example, one of them, Der Volksbund rettet die Ehre, in a dispatch from Bremen published in February 1922, emitted a cry of joyful satisfaction at the results obtained by its methods. It distributed 750,000 copies of a pamphlet entitled Die grosse Lüge (The Great Lie), which of course relates to German culpability during the war.

This pamphlet was translated into nine languages and so widely disseminated that it has been found even in small villages of Mexico. It furnishes to the editors of German newspapers data destined, so they say, for the rehabilitation of the truth. Here are some of the titles and data: 'German prisoners of war executed in France'; 'An impudent falsehood of Poincaré'; 'General Degoutte acknowledges the Black Shame'; "Thirty German soldiers cruelly assassinated at Périgueux.'

Even to-day, really more than ever, and in spite of the British and American investigations, the old legend of what is labeled the 'Black Shame' is still disseminated, and the dispatch that we mentioned above remarks: "The Bund created the term "Black Shame," which is now used by everybody, even those ignorant of its origin. It has pinned on the breast of our old hereditary enemy something more durable than the cross of the Legion of Honor.'

The German Government pretends that much of this activity is not under

its control, but this cannot be the case so far as the propaganda carried on at expositions, by moving pictures, and especially in the schools is concerned. The pictures in the cinemas surpass in horror anything the imagination can conceive. On the very pretext of protecting the modesty of German womanhood, the most disgusting scenes are depicted.

Note what even a German review, Das Tagebuch, says on the subject of these pictures: "The horrors of this film are systematized. The blacks who appear here are directed by the stagemanager. Women have more cause to blush at the shamelessness of the cinema manager than at that of the Senegalese soldiers. The spectators are victims of a degenerate curiosity, half patriotic, half sensual. Let us hope that the emotion is entirely patriotic and moral, so far as the ladies are concerned.' We hardly dare to continue the quotation. But what care the organizers of these spectacles about morality if only the effect of increased hatred is attained, which is undeniable? Remember that there are to-day in the German Empire 3850 movingpicture theatres with some 1,304,600 seats, and an average of two million persons attend the performances daily.

But it is in connection with the instruction given in the public schools that the responsibility of the German Government is plainest. In this field it has openly furnished the clearest directions, an example of which may be seen in the significant words of a speech by Dr. Boelitz, Prussian Minister of Public Instruction: 'We demand that history shall be taught in our schools, and especially that of glorious Prussia and Brandenburg. We are not ashamed either of Prussian militarism or bureaucracy.'

All German schools are furnished with a pamphlet entitled Versailles, a