THE workers of the International are confronted by a world situation of unparalleled complexity and difficulty. There are ominous signs of a coming great social upheaval, and the duty of the International is to warn the governments of the magnitude of the crisis and of its menacing possibilities. The masses of the producers have been profoundly stirred by the thought of what they might achieve by revolutionary methods, and the political and economic conditions have conspired to tempt the workers to seek more effective and expeditious results from a policy of direct action. The foundations of social structure have been shaken by the terrible pressure of the last five years, and every nation is staggering under a colossal burden of debt. Behind the disorganization of trade and industry stands the spectre of unemployment, and over many countries hangs the shadow of famine. Before the winter ends a dreadful convulsion of anger and despair may seize the peoples. The capitalist governments, bankrupt of expedients, merely reiterate the cry of 'increased production,' but the workers ask: 'Production for what purposes? That the profiteers and the exploiters may continue to feed on the substance of working-class life and that industry may still yield profits to non-producers, or to enable the exhausted, impoverished peoples to reestablish and improve their standard of life and thus to elevate the general level of existence?' Industrial revival is possible only when society gives the producers by hand and brain the full

fruits of their labor, and assures the social and economic emancipation of the people.

The International must pronounce on the outstanding questions which have arisen since the peace affecting the interests of democracies, the first of which is the imperative need for a speedy revision of the main treaties of peace. Therefore, we demand the immediate convocation of the League of Nations Council, because it possesses the power under the Covenant to consider the revision of the treaty, to deal with matters affecting the world peace, and also by a two thirds majority to admit any state to membership of the League. The latter question is a cardinal issue for the workers since there is no possibility of fruitful results from the working of the League until Germany, Russia, Hungary, and other states have been included. In our opinion the serious economic injustices in the treaties, the veiled annexations, the indemnities masked as reparations, the denials of the right of self-determination, the frustrations of legitimate colonial claims and also the vicious one-sided military arrangements, fail altogether to meet the demands of organized democracy for deliverance from the curse of militarism and the burden on national resources involved by armaments, standing armies, and conscription.

The International is intimately concerned with the Russian problem because serious differences of opinion exist within the labor movement regarding the theory and practice of Soviet

Government, but there is no difference with respect to the reactionary tendencies of armed intervention in Russia's internal affairs. In the name of the International, socialism must demand a reversal of this policy. The real character of Kolchak's enterprise, supported with material and diplomatic help by the French and British Governments, can no longer be concealed. Supported by all the antidemocratic elements in Russia and the capitalist and land-owning interests, Kolchak has established a military dictatorship by methods as ruthless and as brutal as any charged against those who sought to set up a proletarian dictatorship. Kolchak's aims are not even so worthy. He now knows his methods have antagonized the socialist Russian groups consistently opposed to the Bolsheviki and that it is no longer possible for the Allied Governments to pretend that their intervention was dictated by respect for democratic principles. It is a denial of the elementary principles of democracy

and however much we are opposed to the methods employed to establish a proletarian dictatorship we believe in international socialism and if intervention succeeded it would destroy all the fruits of the revolution. Therefore, we hold strongly to the view that the government should withdraw all support from these reactionary adventures. No troops, munitions, money, or diplomatic aid should be given. Russia needs all the material and moral help that can possibly be given, but so long as she remains an outlaw from the commonwealth of nations such help will not be forthcoming. Steps must be taken to ascertain how far the Russian Soviet Government is prepared to modify its present attitude and to abandon some of its methods, as the report of the American

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Mission indicated they were ready to do. Diplomatic relations with them will then be possible, and the International must renew its efforts to obtain facilities for duly accredited commissions to visit Russia and Hungary and report on the political and economic situation there. Our plain duty as Internationalists is to get in touch with all classes of Russian Socialists and the revolutionary governments, in order to endeavor to promote better relations and maintain labor solidarity.

The problem of world finance demands the attention of the workers, since governments have shirked their immediate responsibilities by borrowing at enormous rates of interest and a large part of the resulting debt, representing a burden upon industry, went in war profits to a comparatively few people. It is necessary, therefore, to institute some method of registrations of fortunes, pre-war and post-war, in order to locate precisely and to tax war profits. A capital levy, steeply graduated, must be imposed as the first step toward sound finance, involving neither violence nor repudiation. Questions of the socialization or democratic control of industry must receive the International's serious attention. The status of the workers must be raised, and full use made of the machinery of the Labor Charter of the League of Nations to improve international labor standards. Serious efforts must be made to bring about a greater measure of common action between the trade union, coöperative, and socialist Internationals. The working-class movement is one and indivisible, and without sacrificing autonomy this threefold organization will be a world alliance of citizens, consumers, and producers, able to dictate policies to governments and to build a new social order.

"THE COLD LAIRS': A MEMORY OF A DEAD CITY

BY MAJOR A. W. HOWLETT

THERE are many dead and dying cities in the world, and they lie scattered in the most unheard-of places, from Siam to Rhodesia, from Mexico to Peru, from India to the hidden solitudes of Central Asia. It should give us pause to think of their number and of our own littleness in the scale of time. It should teach us, though it has never taught any of them yet, how transitory are even the mightiest habitations of men, by how slender threads great empires are held up from ruin. None of the men and women who thronged the streets of these cities could ever have conceived that places so full of the thrust and vigor of life would one day be buried in the strangling jungle or lie, without a sound of wheel or human voice, silent under the desert sand. There are many of these cities in the East, and it is often a puzzle to know what led to their desertion. After the fashion of the East, the traveler will be told all manner of fanciful histories, for, even to-day, the Oriental accounts all material and reasonable explanations secondary

to metaphysical abstractions. So, according to local legend, these cities have been left on account of curses, miraculous events, prophecies, portents, the sudden whimsies of royalty, or the hysterical visions of holy men, but never through the malefactions of the being which was probably really responsible for the evacuation of at least half of them anopheline mosquito and her legacy of malaria.

But the romance of Fatehpur-Sikri needs no embellishment. For one thing, the city can be seen to-day with a man's own eyes, standing just as it

was left three centuries ago, with every stone unworn, every gateway uncrumbling, every cornice and architrave sharp cut as on the day it left the mason's hands. The wonderful Indian climate, severe indeed, but constant, has dealt kindly with it, and the soft red sandstone of which it is built shows no trace of weathering. And, for another thing, the story of its building is like one of those myths of the ancient world which we talk about as facts, because they are (or seem) so improbable that no one would be expected to regard them as the truth. It is bound up with one of the greatest of the world's rulers Akbar. Since the days of Asoka, in the ante-dawn of history, India had known no such emperor, and she has known none of Asiatic blood since. Akbar himself was not, be it noted, an Indian. His line came from those cold and rigorous steppes of Central Asia which have given so many conquerors to the old world which may, I venture to predict, if this self-satisfied western world is not careful, raise them up again.

These peoples have ever been wild and turbulent, their only law the law of blood, their only care their weapons and their fitness for war. It is the more singular that they should have produced a man like Babar, one of the greatest of soldier conquerors, who, from his hard beginnings in Turkestan, wrought an empire that embraced all Hindustan. It was written of him that 'of all his qualities, his generosity and humanity took the lead.' His son Humayun, whose tomb you see in Delhi, proved an incompetent visionary who lost the grasp of the great kingdom. left to him. His easy nature, in a land where sternness and strength have ever been the most merciful attributes of rulers, soon found him a dispossessed monarch fleeing for his life. A hunted fugitive, he fled through the burning

deserts of Sind, and it was there, by a tree on the roadside, according to native tradition, certainly in very lowly circumstances, that his young wife gave birth to the great Akbar. They had to leave Sind, and traveled on into Afghanistan, where the lad passed his early years. His soldier's career began when he was but thirteen years of age, when he had to fight for possession of the throne which his father had partially regained. At the great Battle of Panipat, where two hundred years later a new race of conquerors was to decide its destiny in India, he and his great general, Bairam Khan, secured themselves in the kingdom which had been his grandfather's. At the age of fourteen this lad of Tartar blood had become an emperor. He it was who built the splendid city of FatehpurSikri, now a home for prowling leopards and a Mecca for tourists.

It was shortly after the glorious but terrible siege of the Rajputs in their rock fortress of Chitor that the foundations of the city were laid. There was living at a village called Sikri, twenty-three miles out of Agra, a Mahometan saint to whom the Emperor was in the habit of repairing, for he was a devout man, though great enough to be free from bigotry. The saint promised him a son who should live, the great desire of Akbar's life, for he had had two sons who had died. Undoubting the saint's promise, the Emperor built himself a palace on some high ground near the village, and this was the nucleus of the new city. It was called Fatehpur (City of Victory), in commemoration of the recent conquest of Gujarat. The saint's promise was fulfilled, for the Emperor's wife living at Sikri gave birth to a son who became the famous Emperor Jahangir. His faith being thus crowned, Akbar enlarged the city, and built a great wall round it. Such is the great city

whose empty walls stare out over the swamps toward the distant hills of Bhurt pore.

Akbar seems to have been one of those fine spirits whose genius never stands still, whose horizon goes on broadening from year to year, even into old age. He built in his new city a great hall of learning-a sort of prototype of a university — to be used by all classes of men who reverenced knowledge. Every Friday he would repair thither and converse with the learned, disputing with and rewarding them. He was constantly beset by the fanatics of his own creed, who were furious that he did not recognize their paramountcy, and imagined that they were belittled because they were not supreme. He was proof against their subtleties, and refused to allow his reason to be warped. Within the great hall, where now the ink-black shadows fall through open doorways on to the untrodden pavements, took place one of the greatest trials of strength between warring creeds that history recalls. Akbar had sent for a Jesuit priest, Padre Rodolpho Aquaviva, a missionary of Goa, to visit Agra, for he had heard much about the religion of Christ, a religion which accorded well with his own charity and magnanimity. There were gathered Brahmins and Buddhists, Jains and Parsis, Christians and Mahometans, and each spoke in turn. The native historian pours ridicule on the venomousness of the attacks of these theologians on one another, and describes the verdict of the Emperor, calm and impartial, enjoining them to practise sincerity.

It must have been a hard blow to the disputants, who had probably never questioned that their fanaticism and bigotry were sincerity at its most sincere. Three centuries before the English did it, Akbar did his best to stop the abominable practice of suttee, and

dealt severely with the priests who goaded on the miserable women to perform it.

In those days India knew a peace and order it had never known before. And it all centred in this empty city, where now the tourist rambles, prying into the very arcana of ancient Indian nobles, bringing his noisy motor car to the gateways which once knew nothing but the soft pad of the feet of great elephants hung and bedizened with scarlet and gold. The cobra withdraws furtively into the dark recesses where once the languid women spent the noonday heat, for he has made it one of his special haunts. And in the wild riot of flowering shrubs the peacock struts and spreads his tail. Many an evening I have sat on the old wall while the quiet Indian night fell and the stars came out over the Bhurtpore hills, and listened to the wail of the jackals running among the ruins and the eternal throb of a tom-tom in some distant village mercifully muted across the darkening swamps. In fancy I could hear the murmurous throng within the bare walls behind me, could hear the tinkle of anklets, the calling of the sentries, the twang of zithers, could hear the priest calling for the last prayers of the day from the tower of the great mosque. But it was all a dream, for the city was dead three hundred years ago.

The Manchester Guardian

real horses, yet so far there is no trace of Butler-worship there.

From time to time sightseers stroll in from Fleet Street. They look, in a vague, apologetic way, at the temporary hut of the Army Spectacle Department, the tea rooms round the corner, the shed where the dustbins are kept. Not one of them has ever been seen to take any special interest in No. 15.

It would be remarkable if they did. There is no tablet on it to show that Samuel Butler lived there for the last forty and all the productive years of his life. The very porter has forgotten the fact. The houses of Bloomsbury are sown thick as a graveyard with the names of celebrities of whom one has never heard. After a week in the Lake district strong men have been known to cry like babies at the very name of Wordsworth. The pavement of Cheyne Walk is worn as the pavement of St. Peter's. But the home of Samuel Butler stands unnoticed.

The fact remains that for forty years Clifford's Inn was the home of the man who after Darwin himself did more than anyone else to loosen from our backs the burden which our fathers had borne and bound in their turn on of the man who taught us to pray, 'Lord, I do not believe one word of it; confirm and strengthen my disbelief'; who taught that disease is a crime, and crime a disease - that even the family is not a divine institution;

us

BUTLER

BY D. H.

It took less than twenty years to establish Higgs-worship in Erewhon. By the end of that time it had become the national religion. It is now seventeen years since Samuel Butler left Clifford's Inn in a chariot drawn by

grams of Mr. Bernard Shaw and Mr. H. G. Wells.

Butler was identified with Clifford's Inn as only solitary creatures are identified with places. The home of the family man is where his wife and children are, of the sociable man in society. For the man who lives in his thoughts it is the place where his thoughts have come to him. To this