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leave the country and defray all our war expenses. Your creditors wouldn't accept a bushel of them in settlement of a tenmark account. And, in the third place, if a German did have money to buy land, he would know that his countrymen would ruin whatever acres he might take over from you. If it were farm land, they would salt it. If it were timber land, they would burn it. If it were mining land, they would flood it.

"The case is pretty much the same with buildings and machinery-only much worse for you, because they are more easily damaged by our workers and are less tempting to possible foreign buyers. And how, now, will you wring your billions from the people? Will you drive them to work in the factories at the bayonet-point? Bad business, son! Your overhead charges would eat up all your profits. But maybe you would sell our men into slavery? Alas, my poor, witless Eitel! The slave market is very, very dull these days!

"So, you see-" the old man touched his son's arm gently-"you have made a very bad blunder, Eitel. And if you do not crawl out of it at once, the whole world will be laughing at you, even as ninety-four million Germans are now doing." He glanced at a wall clock. "It's midnight. Better go to bed, get up at five, and start your fleet back to South America

"I'll burn Berlin first!" the discomfited Emperor snarled. "I'll"

"You

"Oh, no," his father frowned. might have done such a monstrous thing in the Dark Ages of the nineteenth century, or even the twentieth. But to-day all the civilized world would unite against you, were you to indulge in such atrocities. In a year Bismarckia would be stripped of money and prestige. Englishmen, Frenchmen, and Americans would lend you nothing. They would fear lest you might pay your debts with violence. Your people couldn't ship a bag of coffee, a pound of rubber, a bunch of bananas to any northern country until you had paid for all the damage your torches had done to Berlin. Really, my poor Eitel, you sully the reputation of the Hohenzollerns. Whatever else we have been, we have always been shrewd

Two college students from Bonn were strolling down the highway to Cologne, early on the following morning. They were commenting on the strangeness of walking

after one has formed the habit of aeroplaning. The upper-air strata were charged with heavy, eddying vapors; but the lower were clean and still. As the young men reached the crest of a hill, they heard a terrific drone and whirring. And, looking up, they beheld a host of aeroplanes and dirigibles, all racing into the southwest. Two hours the great procession passed, like wild ducks, ranged in enormous V's. There were hundreds of them, they were making a full hundred and fifty miles an hour-and always southwest.

The last leviathan flew only a few hundred feet over the observers, and at its stern they saw, stiff in the vessel's self-made cyclone, the sullen black and red banner of Bismarckia.

Of the many comments by the press of the world on this remarkable forty-eighthour war, the most significant was that made in the editorial columns of the Samarcand Sentinel. This splendid newspaper, which is still the best of the many excellent sheets of Central Asia, said:

"When all is said, the stubborn fact remains that the highly ingenious stratagems of the German Republic depended upon conditions which have existed ever since the dawn of the twentieth century. The transfer of government and private business administration to many foreign cities was the supremely important step in the stratagem. And this step might have been taken by any highly developed country three hundred years ago. For it was made possible by three things: high-speed communication, high-speed transportation, and international banking. All these might have been similarly employed as early as 1900, for the same purpose. Even then, the railways of Prussia might have been quite efficiently supervised by ten directors sitting in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, while the Bavarian roads might have been looked after by six men in Peru. We do not say that such long-distance management could have been as efficient as the more natural sort. But it would not have to be, in order to score heavily against the invader.

"For the long-distance manager would have to look after plants that were running on half-time or not at all. He would not be expected to extend the business, but only to protect it against looters and needless deterioration, to sell finished

goods, to collect and pay bills, and to solicit future business.

"As for Germany's trick of giving her own citizens iron tokens and paying her foreign creditors in gold through banks in foreign cities, we can not here find evidence of diabolical ingenuity. The use of tokens during war time is very old; and often they have been issued with no tangible security whatever, but simply against the credit and good name of the Government. Instead of being radical and unprecedented, the German tokens were exceedingly cautious and conservative; for they were secured by the Government's foreign deposits.

"More originality was shown in the scheme of carrying on the business of the Government and its private corporations through foreign bankers. And yet even this idea is an old one. As early as 1914 we find England and France understanding its value. During the opening weeks of the pan-European war, it was proposed that the American bankers place a huge sum at the disposal of the French government to pay the debts of French firms in America. In the same manner, $10,000,000 in gold was

sent by London banks to Ottawa, Canada, and there distributed to the Canadian creditors of British corporations.

"Certainly, from this it is only a short step to renting an office building for the ambassador and installing representatives of the home corporations to assist him, and increasing the sums deposited in foreign

trust.

"We say, then, with complete assurance, that for the past three centuries it has been possible for any nation to elude any conqueror merely by using the methods and instruments of modern business with a little ingenuity and boldness.

"Why did not France or Germany or Austria or England think of all this in the twentieth century? The thought would have saved many billion dollars and measureless poverty and suffering. For it would have made the disarming of the great investing nations both possible and profitable.

"We can explain this only in terms of the unexplained. We must conjecture that all statesmen for three hundred years were smitten with a kind of blindness. In saying this, we really say nothing. The mystery stands, impenetrable and abhorrent.'

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C

of California?

by

GEORGE CREEL

ALIFORNIA, more boldly than any other state, has offered itself as an experiment-station for the working out of those laws which are being urged as corrective of the evils and inequalities that poison the wells of democracy. On its statute-books is nearly all of the political, social, economic, moral, and industrial legislation that comprises the program of "reform."

Governor Hiram W. Johnson not only insists upon complete success, but claims entire credit. During his effort for the vice-presidency he declared repeatedly that

he had "made the fight single-handed and alone," while in a campaign book just issued the recital of achievement is capped by this paragraph:

What has been accomplished stands as a tribute to the constructive statesmanship of Hiram W. Johnson, and as a monument to his steadfastness of purpose in the interest of the people of California.

Upon this showing he bases a very definite and aggressive presidential ambition.

These are things that go to make up a situation well worth inquiry and consideration. A bloodless revolution is fast destroying

outworn institutions, old lies, and moldy superstitions, and everywhere, in amazing openness of mind, there is eager search for the men and materials that best lend themselves to the construction of a new establishment.

This sweep of popular scrutiny is from coast to coast. The test of change is not attractiveness of presentation but the manner in which it works. Where once the hucksters of privilege fattened men for office like Strassburg geese, master builders are now being sought without regard to the political and geographical specifications that formerly prevailed. Reformation has accomplished its task and the need of the day is information.

If it is true that California's mass of recent legislation has perceptibly equalized justice and opportunity or taken any of the savagery out of the competitive struggle, then the news should be printed large, so that hesitant commonwealths may avail themselves of the rich benefits that lie in imitation. If Hiram W. Johnson, as he asserts, dreamed a Utopia and made it come true, it is to the interest of the country that his presidential aspirations be fostered and encouraged.

At the very outset of a California survey there comes a great wonder. Here were a people of American pioneer strain, schooled in courage and resolution by grapple with sand and granite, and thinking always in terms of democracy, yet for years they endured conditions that epitomized waste, extravagance, and corruption. Until 1910, the big corporations largely owned the public service executive, legislative, and judicial—and the privilege of general looting was the perquisite of their office-holding tools. In twenty years over two hundred millions were expended without an audit, and no one will ever know how much of this vast sum stuck to thievish fingers.

It was nothing for the pay-roll of the legislature to run ten thousand dollars a week. There were eighty-three doorkeepers to guard one small portal that led into a blind corridor. Stenographers were named who could not read nor write, prize-fighters and plug-uglies burlesqued as clerks, prostitutes were given positions, and it was quite a usual thing for the bulk of this horde of appointees to discount their salaries in the first days of the session and scatter to their homes.

The pay-rolls of institutions were padded; inmates of asylums farmed out as day-laborers; superintendents sold the state's goods back to the state; officials made fat contracts with themselves; the usual "rings" furnished all supplies at profits running from one hundred per cent. to one thousand per cent., and embezzlement was a favorite indoor pastime.

Freight charges, based upon an "all the traffic will bear" policy, kept the noses of producer and consumer hard against the grindstone, and the extortionate rates of all other public utilities contributed to an effect of poverty in one of the world's richest

sections.

Capitalizations ran water like so many Niagaras, the natural resources of the state were wasted and plundered, and the vice, liquor, and gambling interests, open and unashamed, lorded it over the captive cities.

About it all there was no greater secrecy than attaches to the operations of a locust swarm. The governor of the state, a congressman, two members of the supreme court, and other public men were actually proud to be photographed in company with "Abe" Ruef as late as 1905, scarcely two years before his imprisonment.

THE SEARCH-LIGHT, PLEASE!

These conditions have admittedly disappeared. The corporations are now painfully ostentatious in devotion to their own business; judges and officials beg the searchlight as a privilege; and the slogans of discontent have lost entirely the damnatory virulence of former days. Where once public servants were attacked as thieves and traitors, the cry is now against "freak legislation," "wild-eyed demagogues," "cranks,” and "impractical radicals."

Strangely enough, it is not the Initiative, Referendum, and Recall that center this attack. A progressivist legislature, eager to oblige, has left little room or reason for the people to make extended use of the Initiative; and as for the Referendum, it has come to be the cherished and peculiar possession of those who fought it most bitterly. In November, for instance, the principal referred measures were a "red-light" abatement law, a water-conservation amendment, an act forbidding the sale of wild game, and a "blue-sky" bill, all passed by the legislature of 1912. One finds no quarrel with this in

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