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great as we might think. If the principles of Bolshevism are consistently applied a new workable social organization is created. If they prove impracticable the people will spontaneously return to their old methods of social organization.' Professor Eltzbacher thus plays completely into the hands of the communist enthusiasts and demagogues. They are now able to shout: 'See! Even a Conservative scholar and political economist believes it possible that Bolshevism will regenerate the world. You proletarians can take the risk then surely. A Conservative says the danger is not great. If the thing does n't succeed, only the great estates are destroyed, and we simply go back to the old system.'

The communist enthusiasts and

demagogues are not open to argument. When they are told of the disaster that has befallen Russia they simply refuse to believe it on the ground that the man who tries to instruct them is 'a bribed agent of capitalism.' And even if they do credit a man they shake their heads carelessly and say to themselves, 'We'll do it better than they did in Russia.' You may demonstrate to them that Russian communism is as ably led as it possibly could be, and that its failure is due to the system itself. You may demonstrate that the system is shown, by Russian experience, to lead necessarily and inevitably to the complete collapse of production and to privation and death for the proletariat. They will say, "That was in Russia. It will be different with us.' The Berliner Tageblatt, May 9

You may prove to them that communism could survive as long as it has, only in an agrarian, industrially backward country like Russia, where capitalism was not highly developed, and that in our country the internal resistance would be much stronger, the collapse of industry more sudden, and the consequences more disastrous for the proletarian masses. Do arguments become stronger by repeating them? No, because the communist enthusiasts and demagogues simply do not listen.

How is it possible for a learned political economist to endorse such irresponsible fancies? The Russians never took the Brest-Litovsk treaty seriously. We likewise may regard a treaty forced upon us by brute power with defiance, because we know confidently that it will be short lived and that it will be impossible to crush us unless we help to crush ourselves. This Conservative professor advises us actually to crush ourselves, but does he actually believe in the new vigorous world of Bolshevism? Does he not really in the bottom of his heart anticipate that we eventually will return to the old system? Workingmen, note well the cloven hoof. "If the Bolshevist plan proves impracticable then the people of their own accord' (he means worn out, crushed, spurred on by their own misery) 'will return to the old social forms.' That is the negro in the wood pile. Let Bolshevism come, for then inevitable reaction will follow. Thereupon the German Nationalists will reap their harvest.

AT THE MOVIES' IN LONDON

WHEN Mr. Clarkson, of the Education Office, was invited to the cinema widely advertised as Adventures Among the Cannibals,' he was glad. 'Cannibals,' he thought, 'will be a pleasing relief from the Peace Terms.' Besides, his friend, Mr. Macrae, was a member of the Anthropological Society.

They dined at a literary club amid the customary lamentations over inflated currency, deflated menu, and other regrettable incidents of war. At the cinema they found themselves mixed up in a friendly party consisting of Liz and Nellie, Charlie and Bob, and a torpid lady whom all addressed as 'Mother.'

The lights were turned down, and after little cries of 'That's enough, Bob,' and 'Oh, stow it, Charlie,' the film began to move. It showed Mr. and Mrs. Martin Johnson, who gallantly took the film, and incidents of their voyage from San Francisco to Sydney, and onward to the Solomon Islands. The admirable photographs reproduced the gentle rolling of the ship.

'All mine happened white, thank Gord,' replied the torpid woman.

The screen proclaimed that this island had reached a certain measure of civilization, and at once showed a body of native police, drilled and armed. "The Barracks Are Near,' said the 'Sure evidence of progress,"

screen.

sighed Mr. Clarkson.

But the sight of a white officer and a word about 'Missions' had such a depressing effect upon the anthropologist that he was preparing to leave when the picture of a 'Confessed Cannibal' gave him hope. The account of the islanders' subsidiary food-cocoanuts and dried whitebait—was also encouraging. And, indeed, really enchanting scenes of island life quickly followed

villages with naked children and pigs running about (all greeted with endearing exclamations by Nellie and Liz); an isolated clubhouse which no woman might approach. (The female taboo is very marked throughout humanity,' observed Mr. Macrae, 'its origin is probably physical'), wild dances with spears and bows (which Liz and Nellie called jazzing), beautiful long canoes gliding over calm water (camouflaged,' Bob and Charlie

'Catch me,' cried Liz, ‘I'm going to agreed, 'like transports'), tropical forbe sick!'

'I was sick once at Southend,' said Mother.

""That heaves but with the heaving deep," Mr. Clarkson quoted, and instantly apologized for his literary profanity to Mr. Macrae, who, however, had not perceived the purport of the remark. His mind was fixed upon the approaching islands, where primitive man still afforded full scope for anthropological investigations.

'A face that only a mother could love!' So the printed description upon the screen announced a hideous and apelike savage. 'Like to try, mother?' said Charlie.

ests almost impenetrable, and the heads of men and women variously adorned

'I wish as I had that female's 'ead for a cedar mop!' Mother suddenly exclaimed, roused by domestic interest.

'Why does that bloke drag his ears down to his shoulders like bell-pulls, and run a white stick through his nose?' asked Nellie.

"That's to attract the girls, I suppose,' said Bob, 'same as my Charlie Chaplin moustache.'

'I reckon his wife drives that stick through his nose so as to run him about kind of tame like a bull,' Charlie suggested.

'Oh, go hon!' said Liz.

'Pardon me,' Mr. Macrae interposed, 'it is now more generally assumed that these physical mutilations are neither sexual nor strictly decorative in design, but originate rather in magic employed to avert the evil influences of spirits with which primitive man imagines himself perpetually surrounded. I am even now engaged upon a theory to prove that the mutilation of the lobe of the ear by the insertion of rings, such as we still see hanging from the ears of women even in our educated classes, is due to the endeavor to exclude the temptations of evil spirits.'

'Look 'ere, gov'nor, don't you be sayin' nothing nasty against my girl,' cried Charlie, turning on the anthropologist, "cos it'll be the worse for you!'

'Never you mind for him,' said Nellie, 'I like a pair of ear-rings myself, but I ain't got no temptations.'

"Then you can resist everything,' said Mr. Clarkson, solicitous to please. 'You ain't no temptation anyways, Mr. Longface,' cried Liz.

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'Alas, it is true, too true,' Mr. Clarkson answered, pleasantly; "" they flee from me that sometime did me seek" — you remember Sir Thomas Wyatt's beautiful lines?'

Meanwhile the strange scenes were passing rapidly, each explained in a language that reminded Mr. Clarkson shudderingly of the Daily Mirror complicated by Americanisms.

'What do you suppose "giving us the once-over" signifies?' he asked.

"The American language is passing through a stage of degeneracy and disintegration which will gradually render it incomprehensible to the inhabitants of our country,' Mr. Macrae replied.

'Crimes! Lor' lumme! There's a nut!' cried Liz, as the screen showed a vast and naked savage, who was said to have devoured a Prussian officer and never been the same man since.

"The essential characteristic, or rather the main intention of cannibalism,' observed the anthropologist, 'is that the eater should not be the same man after he has partaken of another's flesh. The spiritual and even moral qualities of the departed are mystically absorbed by digestion into the personality of a new habitat in a manner somewhat approximating to reincarnation. See Frazer, passim.'

'Passim is the word,' said Mr. Clarkson; 'highly as I value the Golden Bough, I should find a Prussian officer equally digestible as the later volumes. But we must not omit hunger as an incitement to cannibalism, if it is true that in New Guinea the victim is led round alive, and each household selects a portion to be reserved for it, as one might chalk on the body of an ox, "Liver for Mrs. Jones."

'Look here, gov'nor,' cried Bob, leaning over to Mr. Clarkson, 'if you're passin' remarks on Mrs. Jones, you'd best drop it!'

'Never you mind for me,' said Mother, humbly; 'I'm one for jointsalways was.'

'I assure you, madam, I intended no personal reference or imputation,' said Mr. Clarkson; 'none whatever.'

'Oh, don't you worry about them old buffers!' cried Liz; 'they're goin' balmy. Look, Bob, here's somethink more in your style!'

The pictures showed a row of married women, lightly clad, some holding infants in their arms. My word!' cried Mrs. Jones, 'if there is n't a baby sucking!' Then came a scene of girls led past some kind of priest, who was to judge whether they were marriageable. 'Seems to me rude,' said Mrs. Jones, gathering her beaded shawl about her.

'Now don't you be talkin', mother,' said Liz; 'did n't you read what the

screen said as there ain't no vulgarity side of their mouths now. It is the about your bein' naked?'

'No more there ain't,' said Charlie, 'especially so long as you're black.'

'Well, all I say is as I was born white and mean to keep summut on me,' retorted Mrs. Jones, with some defiance.

'Not bad lookin', if you took their 'eads off,' observed Charlie, with a critical air.

'And what does Mr. Longface say?' asked Nellie, anxious to be friendly.

'I?' said Mr. Clarkson; 'well, I'm tempted to cry with the poet, "I will take some savage woman, she shall rear my dusky race."

'Don't you be too cocksure,' said Liz. 'How if she would n't have you?' 'Mine not to reason why,' Mr. Clarkson modestly answered.

They passed the 'Artificial Islands,' which Bob declared would be just made for the Huns, now they have no land to call their own. 'Let 'em go and build up coral reefs,' he said, 'and once a year we'll burst shrapnel over 'em just to teach 'em what's what.'

And so they journeyed to the New Hebrides, and witnessed the preparations for the burial of a man alive because he was too old to be of use. And, they saw the dancers stamping on the living grave for two days and two nights to make sure he would not rise again.

The anthropologist became pleasurably excited. There you have it again!' he cried to Mr. Clarkson. The principle runs all through Naturethe Priest of Nemi- the sacrifice of the old, the useless, the wornout, the impaired in vitality! Old men about to be killed used to pretend to laugh and look merry in hope of proving they were still young enough to live. That was the "Sardonic smile"!'

'Yes, I know,' Mr. Clarkson replied, 'but the old and young laugh the other

young who are slain and stamped underground. The heirs of all the ages are killed and their fathers remain to inherit a desolated world.'

'Come, cheer up, Mr. Longface,' cried Liz; 'here's Mr. and Mrs. Johnson been showin' you all these lovely pictures, and tellin' how they wangled the King of the Cannibal Islands theirselves and crawled out of the stewpot just in time!'

'And rare plucked ones they was!' cried Bob.

'You're right,' said Charlie, ‘and her nothing only a female!'

'Now, come along, mother,' they all said, and out they went.

'I wish one could be quite sure that fifty years of Europe are better than a cycle of Cathay,' sighed Mr. Clarkson, as he went through Piccadilly Circus with his friend.

'Cathay is, I believe, a synonym for China,' answered the anthropologist hurrying to hurrying to correct an inaccuracy, 'and the the scenes tonight had no connection with that country.'

But in his rooms that night Mr. Clarkson was troubled with waking dreams of savage life which diffused a melancholy over all his following day.

The Nation

GOOD-BYE TO THE ARMY

BY O. C. W.

TO-MORROW I shall be demobilized. My papers are all in order, I have handed my work to another, and tomorrow morning I shall once more be a civilian, with nothing to show that I have been a soldier but a uniform. which I may only wear on certain ceremonial occasions, a rank which I may retain or drop as I please, a medal or two which I shall never be able to wear, and a gratuity which will all too quickly disappear.

Yet military service for more than four years is no mere pastime to be forgotten in a moment, no fleeting episode which in the course of months will become but a fugitive recollection. To have been a soldier in the Great War is to have lived history consciously, to have shared-however obscurely in deeds and crises that will be remembered for centuries. It is a peak that, in the retrospect of one's days, must stand out boldly above. the gentle plain of common occurrences till death shrouds all. The peak towers above me now as I step down into the valley, and I cannot leave it, ready as I am, without a last glance backward. I turn and see it rising, like the height of Anzac from the beach, with all its rugged contour now plain to view but soon to be blended into as smooth an outline as craggy Sari Bair assumed when seen from Imbros. I turn to it and say good-bye; good-bye to this stepping-stone of my dead self, good-bye to the army.

It is no matter for sentimentality, but it is one for reflection. Thousands of other men are now stepping down into their homely valleys from those kindred peaks which will make a mighty range forever in the restrospect of national history. We were all one upon the heights, and now we separate by our innumerable paths-this one to his glen that he will never leave, that one to the town he longs for, that other, still a youth, through unexplored passes to other heights or other vales beyond. We are all saying good-bye to the heights and to one another, unemotionally, led by routine to the last, and this last act of our unity, this farewell, is accompanied by different thoughts in everyone of us. No one in this matter can do more than speak for himself according to the circumstances of his return. Some are returning, slightly nearer middle age, to an al

common

ready settled place; some have lost their occupation, or their taste for it, or their limbs, or their health; some, who left bachelors, are returning married, to an unknown domesticity; some, who went as schoolboys, are coming back to they know not what, with anxious eyes and determined faces. But all of us, whether we are returning to an old life, a changed life, or a new life, have one emotion in we are glad. We have all looked forward to this day for years. and months; we have expressed our longing uncouthly, with brazen emphasis, and with mutual ingratitude. Never can the members of a community who have lived on terms of remarkable good comradeship have parted with one another in a more blatant spirit of satisfaction. In fact, we have forgotten one another altogether; we are glad to say good-bye to an irksome bond and to an abstraction, the army.

But perhaps it is a remnant of military spirit working in me - I cannot turn my back on the army with an unceremonious shake of the shoulders. Many, especially those who are in a hurry to find a livelihood, will rush out of khaki like boys from school; others may strike ecstatic attitudes like the liberated prisoners in Fidelio; but one who, like myself, is nel mezzo del cammin, whose home and old employment are ready to reabsorb him as if nothing had happened, can hardly find it in him to display such indecent haste. Let us play the slow march and marshal our ideas for a trifle of ceremonial, for a respectful mental parade

even if our colors are red, which mine are not before we make our final salute and dismiss forever.

With me it is no case of a lump in the throat and a tear in the eye when it comes to parting. There are craven beings whom force of habit so sentimentalizes that they would cry on

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