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that I visited. Although more abstract than the first factor, it is a circumstance that has made a lasting impression on all classes. Even workmen repeated it, in the simple words, "We think we can trust America. She isn't trying to trip us up."

HE second human factor that impresses itself upon the visitor in Germany to-day-one that does not augur so well for the future of Europeis the overwhelming, stubborn hatred for France.

This hatred has been the most unchangeable feature of post-war Germany as I have observed it during my four visits since the Armistice (in 1919, 1921, 1922, and finally 1926). It has survived all varying shifts of fortune and all internal political upheavals. The feeling toward England is still present to an extent, but it has begun to go. Italy comes in for an occasional outburst from Wilhelmstrasse, but the people as a whole are not greatly moved. But the yearning for revenge upon France burns on in the hearts of the people, irrespective of any effort from the Government, and seemingly heedless of the recent change in France's policy toward Germany. The only international parallel of recent years is the similar phenomenon in France following the FrancoPrussian War.

A mild German school-teacher who happened to share my room with me in Oberammergau during the crowded summer of 1922 gave me my first insight into the depth and intensity of this feeling in the hearts of the people. He was a typical Gymnasium Lehrer-goldrimmed glasses, an expression of kindly studiousness on his face, gentle, rather tired eyes. He came from Dresden, one of Germany's intellectual centers. were talking of peace and war.

We

"We Germans are tired of war. We are sick at heart. We would never go to another." He paused, as if he had stopped short of saying all.

"Will there be a war with France?" I ventured,

"France, ach! That is another thing. If there were a war with France, every mother's son would flock to the colors to-morrow. No call to arms would be necessary. I myself would go, who know and abhor war. My sons would go. The day will come some time, and how glad we shall be! It will not be a day for glory, as we thought of 'the day' in the old times, but of revenge. France cannot escape!"

His eyes glowed. He was a transformed man. He had seen red. And

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It was something of a shock to find four years later that time had brought no change. The name of France causes Germans to see red to-day, as it did in 1919, or 1921, or 1922. Whatever the German Foreign Office may occasionally say about European reconciliation, the German people are yearning for revenge -not on England, nor even on Italyupon France alone. Underneath the surface, in North Germany, Prussia, and South Germany, the spirit of revenge burns to-day, I found, as fiercely, if not more fiercely, than ever. It constitutes a great human force that must be taken very seriously into account in any calculation of the future.

In certain uninfluential circles there are, it is true, some signs of a slight softening. Communists and some of the Socialists speak a little more openly than they did about "reconciliation" with

France, although "French proletariat" is the usual phrase. Once in a while you meet a German liberal who will admit that the interests of the world at large would be served by an understanding. But these groups do not, as yet, represent any noteworthy body of public opinion,

A network of patriotic societies which reaches over the entire nation is studiously preserving the nation's human military effectiveness. Four of these societies are organized on a national scale. These organizations take care to avoid trespassing on the precincts of the Versailles Treaty. Physically, they are not "militaristic." Their members do not carry rifles when they parade. But their total effect on the nation is much the same as that of a standing army of conscription.

Space exists for only two typical personal incidents,

In the largest café in Hanover I took advantage of the lull in the music to quizz my waiter. His face brightened, his eyes flashed, when I asked if he thought Germany would strike back at France.

"Of course! I and all my friends are only waiting for the day. You will see it come, too." He leaned over, confidentially. "We are drilling, and drilling others. You see those two young men at that table in the green uniforms? They are our officers. We have the largest drilling club in Hanover. There are clubs like ours throughout Germany. I have worked in all the large cities, and it is always the same. We will make France wince some day!"

In my compartment on the Berlin train my traveling mate, a traveling salesman, looked gravely through his thick glasses, nodded, and said:

"Yes, Germany is holding her own. She is not forgetting her skill in the art of war. Clubs throughout the country are seeing to it that the youth are almost as well tutored as they used to be in the old days. I myself belong to one. Nearly every one does. The Allies will not allow us to have an army." He smiled. "But they cannot prevent us from having lodges. You have lodges in America, do you not? Well, our lodges are of a very practical sort. When the day comes, you will see that the German nation knows quite as well how to wage war as it did in 1914.”

Will this spirit of revenge again set Europe on fire? Or will it yield to the spirit of Locarno? A good deal depends upon how soon matters come to a head. In that sense, it is a race. The outcome will tell the story of peace or war.

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A battery of rotary kilns in a Portland cement plant. In the foreground are the "hoods" of fire-brick, closing the lower ends of the slightly inclined revolving cylinders. Each hood has a little window, through which can be viewed the roaring tornado of flame inside the kiln. The kilns shown in this picture, which are 8 feet in diameter and 125 feet long, are of quite modest size compared with the largest used in the industry

S

In the Home of the Mighty Kilns

By CHARLES FITZHUGH TALMAN

OME time before you arrive at the Portland cement factory you perceive the reason why, on entering its doors for a tour of inspection, you will be invited to don a linen duster. The country for a mile around looks as if a volcano had recently erupted in the neighborhood. The gray deposit on roofs and foliage is the part of the plant's output that will not be included in the next annual statistics of production. Since, however, more than a million barrels will be duly accounted for if the plant is one of average capacity-Eolus need not be begrudged his modest toll.

The impalpable powder that the breezes thus spread over the landscape is the result of titanic operations. No other industry goes about its business in quite so strenuous a style as cement-making. In the common "dry" process of manufacture (which we are here describing) the work begins at a quarry-often next door to the factory-where it is an ordinary procedure to set off five tons of dynamite and bring down 50,000 tons of rock. The mountain-moving feat proverbially ascribed to faith has, on occasions, been performed at these quarries by exploding forty tons of dynamite at one blast. The holes for the great

charges of explosives are made with the kind of drills used for sinking artesian wells and are frequently more than 150 feet deep.

The recipe for Portland cement is quite simple, though a staff of laboratory experts is required at every plant to make sure that it is strictly adhered to. The ingredients are not always the same, but they must contain definite proportions of lime, silica, and alumina. They

Tying a cloth cement sack with a piece

of wire before the sack is filled

are dried, ground to extreme fineness, heated almost to the melting-point (to bring about important chemical changes), cooled, and ground again. A little gypsum is added at the last grinding. This substance prevents a too rapid "setting" or hardening of the cement when the latter is used in making concrete.

Within the factory walls enough power is harnessed to the machinery to supply all the electrical needs of a city of a hundred thousand people. The electrical energy that goes to the making of a bag of cement would cost, at household rates, more than the average price of the cement at the mill. Prodigal of power, the industry is no less prodigal of its machines. So rapid is the wear upon them that a million-dollar cement plant will keep from $75,000 to $100,000 worth of repair parts constantly on hand, and it is reckoned that every bag of cement represents the consumption of from a pound to a pound and a half of steel: One-fifth of the plant's employees are always engaged in repair work.

Men not yet old can remember when all the grinding operations of the cement plant were performed with crude millstones. To-day's giant industry demands

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a remarkable array of powerful machines for crushing rocks of boulder dimensions, grinding them to powder, pulverizing coal for the kilns, and finally grinding and regrinding the glass-hard lumps of "clinker"-the product of the kilns which, at its last grinding, becomes the finished Portland cement. Part of the testing outfit of a cement plant is a sieve that has 200 hair-like wires to the linear inch; which means 40,000 tiny holes to the square inch. It is so closely woven that it will hold water, but at least seventy-eight per cent of the finished cement particles must sift through it to conform to the standard specifications established by the United States Government and the American Society for Testing Materials. In a cubic inch of Portland cement there are approximately 14,000,000,000 particles. Even finer grinding is required in the preparation of the raw materials for the kilns. From eighty to eighty-five per cent of the pulverized rock must sift through the 200mesh screen.

The rotary kilns are the mighty monarchs of the factory, to whom crushers and grinders, driers, coolers, and conveyors, bagging machinery, and men are mere entourage, while the huge power plant is prime minister-the power behind the throne. In their lolling atti

[graphic]

A Mill that
"Grinds Exceeding

Small "

The major part of the equipment of a cement mill consists of powerful crushing and grinding machinery for reducing to fine powder the rocky raw materials of cement, the glass-hard "clinker" that comes from the kilns, and the coal with which (at most plants) the kilns are fired. Rocks as big as pianos can be fed into the huge crushers with which the process begins. The mill here shown, used for the final grinding, has a compartment containing large steel balls and another small steel slugs. As the cylinder revolves the material is ground between these rolling pebbles of steel until it is much finer than flour

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Filling bags after they are tied is a paradox that interests every visitor to a cement factory. The cotton cement sack has a so-called "valve" in the bottom, consisting of a hole and a flap made by turning over a corner of the cloth before it is sewed. The empty sack is tied with steel wire by means of a small hand-operated device and is then attached upside down under the hopper of the filling machine. The cemert Hows through the hole in the bottom until the sack has been filled to the weight of exactly 94 pounds, when the flow is automatically cut off and the sack drops to a belt conveyor, by which it is carried to the shipping platform. The valve is tightly closed by the pressure of

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The temperature inside a cement kiln is one of the highest used in any industry, ranging from 2,700° to 3,000° Fahrenheit. It would melt the steel shell but for the fire-brick lining. Many kiln operators have been trained by years of experience to recognize the proper temperature by the color and appearance of the burning materials, but it is often considered desirable to take the temperature instrumentally. This can be done at a comfortable distance from the glowing inferno by sighting with a radiation pyrometer through the little window in the hood

[graphic]

A Colossal Kiln
at Close Range

Probably no other
piece of moving ma-
chinery used in indus-
try equals in size the
largest rotary kilns
of a cement plant.
One of them is blg
enough to let a tour-
ing car run through
it, and, set on end,
would be as tall as
a 20-story building.
The kiln rests at a
slight angle from the
horizontal on heavy
rollers and is turned
by an electric motor
at a speed of about
half a revolution a
minute. A medium-
sized kiln, with its
fire-brick lining,
weighs 600,000 pounds
and has foundations
as heavy as for a
ten-story building. In
a big plant there will
be a dozen or more
of these monsters,
roaring and revolving
side by side in one
great room

tudes, as they turn sluggishly on their massive piers, they remind you of King Log of the fable. You would never suspect, to look at them, that these simple cylinders of steel and a few hundred more like them at other plants are refashioning the world in which you live.

You may, if you like, put on a pair of dark spectacles and peer through a little window into the very heart of a kiln. You will see an inferno of flame and the tumbling pebbles of white-hot cement-inthe-making traveling down the slope of the revolving cylinder. With the aid of imagination you may behold more. It is easy to weave prophetic visions in the fire of the cement kiln: vistas of buildings that will one day rise about you, roads you will journey over, dams and quays and bridges of to-morrow.

The most impressive fact about the giant kilns of the cement industry is, not that they are the largest pieces of moving machinery on earth, but that they are contributing a greater sum total of lasting material to civilization than all other mechanical contrivances combined. Food and fuel are quickly consumed; woven fabrics wear out; steel falls a prey to rust and timber to fire and decay; but concrete, whose ingredients owe their indissoluble union to cement, is more durable than the hills from which it came.

TH

Some Reflections Concerning Plutocracy in the Prize Ring

HE rupturing of the peaceful atmosphere of the Quaker City by the howls of prize-fight fans who assembled to observe the contest between Messrs. Jack Dempsey and 'Gene Tunney has been said to mark an epoch in what was once called the "manly art of self-defense." It is, instead, a mere throwback to the Roman Coliseum, where the populace gathered to slake their thirst for gore. The cries from the usual ringside as repeated over the radio are fit to chill the blood. There is something thrilling in the roar of lions; even the long note of the wolf and the barking of the hyena are not so bad. But this concentration of human voices, expressing as it does the lowest and most brutal of human emotions, an exultant echo of primal ferocity and an utter lack of mercy, will long ring in the ears of those who have listened in. Probably those who join in the savage chorus are unconscious of the horrifying sounds produced in their ecstasy. That there was at Philadelphia a smaller manifestation of this sort than common was probably because the rain chilled the vocalism.

In the noble process of raising the standards of American immorality no uplift has been greater than that of the prize ring. Four Governors, Cabinet officers, public functionaries of all degrees of eminence, and not a few clergymen were among those present. Millionaires were there in vast plenty, in just admiration of one of their class, Mr.

By DON C. SEITZ

Dempsey's modest earnings having long passed the million mark, which represents a little less than half of the gate receipts. All this was different from the days of Tom Cribb and like celebrities who lived in Britain in the long ago. Prize-fighting is a British sport. We inherit it from our main stock. Latins have no use for fists; the Dutch and Germans are too lymphatic. It is an English trait to take "punishment" with pleasure.

My own first memory of prize-fighting rests upon a picture in "Harper's Weekly," drawn by Thomas Nast before I was born, depicting a meeting in England between John C. Heenan, of America, known as "the Benicia Boy," as he hailed from that suburb of San Francisco, and one Tom Sayers. Thomas Thomas Nast was sent to England to make the picture by John, James, and Wesley Harper, the worthy Methodist owners of the paper. When it came to hand with the story of the affair, they were a bit staggered, but salvaged both with a staggered, but salvaged both with a headline reading "Brutal and Disgusting Prize Fight." It was all of that. Fighting with bare fists, Heenan was winning when the mob broke through the ring and assailed him. He had a narrow escape and was roughly handled. The "British spirit of fair play" was not very prominent. In my early career as a reporter I came in touch with a number of "heroes" whose names still adorn the panels of fame. I recall seeing together Charles Mitchell, "Jem" Mace, and

Herbert Slade, "the Maori," as he was called from being a half-caste New Zealander. Mace was then a veteran (1883); Slade and Mitchell were in their prime. Both were to go down before the peerless John L. Sullivan, of Boston, pugilist and philosopher. Sullivan was a fast friend of Arthur Brisbane's, and when Brisbane was the New York "Sun's" correspondent in London. once refused to box in private before the Prince of Wales unless his friend, "the grandest young American journalist," could be included in the party. The master of ceremonies was aghast, but Sullivan was obdurate and etiquette had to yield to his insistence.

Sullivan was unique. His profits probably passed the million mark, but vanished in champagne. I recall hiring him to "report" the Fitzsimmons-Corbett fight at Denver, whither he went under escort of the "World's" sporting editor, Joseph J. Eakins, and William O. Inglis, our best sporting writer. His journey West in a private car was one of triumphal progress. Whenever stops

were made, whether by day or night, great crowds gathered at the depots and would not permit the train to depart until he appeared on the platform and made a little speech, always ending with "Yours truly, John L. Sullivan."

I asked Eakins how J. L. S. stood it. "He bore it all in the manner of a Roman emperor, wearied with adulation but willing to endure it at the public

[graphic][subsumed]

The spectators at the Dempsey-Tunney fight outnumbered the vast throngs that gather to watch Harvard and Yale play football. Here's a cross-section of the crowd

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