French papers revert at once to the part the Conference may play in the settlement of European controversies, and are frankly hopeful that it may result in such a formal alliance of France, Great Britain, and the United States as was proposed at the time of the Paris Conference. However, France has interests in the Pacific. which harmonize with those of the United States. Le Temps says that that country is predestined to agree with us in respect to the independence of China and equality of economic privileges in that country. "The object of this deliberation is naval disarmament, but we must not forget the ulterior and essential object in view: that will be the fate of China, with its immense reservoir of men and wealth and unlimited possibilities as a market.'

Journal des Débats, after observing that the 'American proposal has delivered the British Empire from serious embarrassment,' - the Anglo-Japanese alliance, points out that the wide scope of the discussion will make it easier for Tokyo to accommodate itself to the new diplomatic situation thus created. It believes the United States is sincerely anxious to avoid an armament race, although the best able of any of the powers to engage in one. Coming to the real kernel of the question, however, this journal remarks: "The moment we begin to limit our navies, France, which is to-day the greatest military power, must agree to reduce its army; otherwise there would be a change of equilibrium.' This naturally raises grave questions with regard to Germany. But we must not forget that in the world which has issued from the war, there is a greater degree of practical solidarity in political affairs than ever before. The field of action has broadened and the great powers are to some extent united. That is why it would be a great blunder to

envisage any single question as if it were isolated from its neighbors.'

La Democratie Nouvelle a clamorous paper, with a small but energetic following - improves the opportunity to belabor both England and America, which are described as the 'great profiteers' of the war. 'Possessing monster factories, gigantic fleets, unequaled superiority in production, they seek first of all to restore normal relations between governments. Is this idealism? By no means. They want peace in order to sell their goods. . . . The situation of our country is entirely different. It cannot accept a status quo which ensures its ruin. Three years after its victory, after sacrificing everything to save the liberty of the world, it is abandoned by its Allies.' In other words, France will not receive its dues from Germany. 'By an apparent paradox, just when France is preoccupied with the disarmament of Germany, the main object of our Allies is to disarm France.'

However, such outbursts apparently do not represent the solid opinion of the country. Le Temps says in another issue that, during the period from now until the conference is held, it will act 'like a magnet upon all the political problems of the universe.'

Some of the Italian papers are distrustful and even hostile, recalling the disappointments of the Paris conference. However, even here the burden of comment is favorable, and the Vatican is reported to be enthusiastically in favor of President Harding's proposal. In fact, a rumor is current at Rome that the Pope will shortly issue an encyclical letter on the subject. Corriere della Sera says: "The religious traditions of the American people make them a nation occasionally warlike, but normally pacifist,' and concludes a sympathetic leader upon the subject as follows: 'While useful for the other continents, the Washington conference will be no less

useful for Europe, assuming of course that no obstacle arises here. . . . If it was an error to believe that we could get along without America, it is an error which surpasses comprehension to fancy that the allied and associated powers can set the world in order while continuing to disregard utterly Germany and Russia and postponing to the Greek kalends the question of inter-Allied indebtedness."

Jules Sauerwein - French chauvinism often goes with German names demands in Le Matin, that the Conference shall provide ample guaranties for the protection of France against Germany; but does not, as might be expected from his previous articles, oppose disarmament.

The Berlin Vossische Zeitung believes that Germany should do everything in its power to favor the Conference. Germany should be quite ready to give international guaranties for its own disarmament and its future military conduct, providing the sanctions are withdrawn and it is allowed economic freedom. Germany must qualify this, however, by demanding that Poland also disarm. Just now that country is making a right dangerous toy of its weapons.'

Journal de Genève, after reviewing the moral and material advantages Japan derived from the war, observes:

The President of the United States is certainly an excellent man, and he is reported to be a most intelligent one. Nevertheless, his attitude is surprising. He has condemned unsparingly the labors of his predecessor. He has even carefully demolished them. However, he is now pursuing the same path. Does he imagine that it is possible to limit or abolish armaments without lessening the independence of governments, and impairing their sovereignty? . . . If the Washington Conference, instead of confining itself to an adjustment of the controversies of the Pacific, endeavors to disarm the Great Powers, without preparing the ground in

advance, it will come to grief upon the same obstacles as its predecessors. . . . However, the press of every country is profuse in its praise of Mr. Harding's action, and their governments will undoubtedly accept his invitation with enthusiastic cordiality. . . That is because the President of the United States is a very powerful man. They might show less regard for the Prince of Monaco.

Coming to the more immediate object of the Conference, Arthur Pollen, commenting in the new Saturday Review on Bywater's Sea-Power in the Pacific, is more critical of that author's conclusions than was Mr. Balderston in the article we published on July 23. Yet he by no means condemns the book. In fact, he finds it 'exceedingly interesting, despite a conviction that the whole pother is about nothing at all.

If "warlike" means liking war, then never was there a people less warlike than our trans-Atlantic cousins. But if "warlike" means a dislike of ending war until its purpose is achieved, then their history shows the Americans to be very conspicuously of this breed.

. . Once in, they develop a kind of pigheaded determination to go through with it that must give pause to any power, large or small, rich or poor, near or distant. The Japanese know these truths quite well, and, knowing them, will welcome the counsels of sanity that will make the disarmament that all desire a thing which each country can concede without loss of dignity.'

Meanwhile, Mr. Balderston returns to the subject, apropos of Mr. Harding's invitation to Washington; and after pointing out that battleships are designed for the purpose of fighting, and that a country which builds them can have no other motive than to fight, concludes that a limitation of naval armaments can be accepted only if the three powers feel that the danger of war has been averted; and since war is an

instrument of policy, the risk of war can be disregarded only if the state policies of Britain, America, and Japan are harmonized; or, should this prove impossible, if two of those powers make clear to a weaker third that they are united in opposition to a trouble-making policy to which the weaker member of the trio stands committed. Harmony among the three would be best; failing that harmony, the weakest power among the three might be expected to yield rather than fight, if the other two were aligned against her. He says that both British and American interests in the Orient are opposed to a Japanese Monroe Doctrine or Japanese domination over China and Siberia. "The danger does not lie in Britain siding with Japan against America, but in British efforts to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds.' He concludes with:

One disadvantage of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance that leaps to the alien eye at such a moment as this, is that it prevents free comment in England concerning these mighty problems pregnant with the fate of Humanity; only a foreigner, writing in a paper which stands more than others for candid speech, can set down in print the patent facts that, if Britain supports Japan in the Far East, naval rivalry will be intensified; if Britain stands aloof and tries to keep in with both sides, naval rivalry cannot be suspended. For the Washington conferences to succeed, Britain must act with America, stand by China, and support the Open Door; then and then only will Japan reconsider her policies, and so make naval-building limitation possible.

WHITHER ARE WE GOING?

THE London Morning Post is publishing a series of articles of more than ordinary merit upon Great Britain's relations with the present world-crisis. The Bishop of London, in one of the best numbers of this series, comments upon the serious religious and moral re

action through which the country is passing. He describes the crowded state of the divorce courts, the growing number of divorces by mutual consent, and also the appalling growth of intoxication. Convictions for drunkenness naturally increased somewhat after the relaxation of war-restrictions. However, more recently, between the middle of August, 1919, and the end of January, 1920, they rose 230 per cent, and the convictions of women alone for this offense rose 124 per cent. Between the end of January and the first of August, 1920, the increase over pre-armistice figures was 249 per cent for the whole population, and 154 per cent for women alone. There has been a slight decline, ascribed to hard times, since last January. Few university men are applying for ordination as clergymen, partly because their parents discourage them from joining a 'poor profession,' and partly because they are attracted by intrinsically more interesting careers.

Bishop Henly Hensen, of Durham, is quoted in the Daily Telegraph upon the same subject, as follows:

I am disposed to think that we are living in an age which consciously and unconsciously rejects religion itself. The seed has fallen upon stony ground. It is an age which is not friendly to Christian character. I think we must be quite honest and acknowledge that the tendencies which are at present prevailing are largely anti-Christian. The works of piety and philanthropy which characterized so great a part of the last century are threatened with failure. The resources of religion, personal and material, are dwindling. And the only movements which attract public sympathy are those which aim at mass-betterment.

Materialism has for the moment triumphed, and its triumph can only work out in destruction. It must always be so. When man rejects his spirit, he perishes. As for the Churches, they must deliver their great message. Christianity is the religion of individuality. It teaches the perfection of the

individual through unselfish service, but it ever starts with the individual. Cast out first the beam out of thine own eye, and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye. To ignore the individual beam while attacking the social mote is the world's method, not Christ's. It is the duty of the Churches to deliver this message, and it is no fault of theirs if the nation will not listen. Nothing can be done till England comes to her senses.

The same topic is discussed in the Daily Express, where James Douglas writes:

Over all the land the old gray towers and spires of the churches still bear witness to the faith that has grown cold, but they are empty churches, and their bells no longer summon the good people to tender meditation and to gentle prayer. England has no time for God.

There are, it is true, some churches which are not empty, and some which are full. But the empty church is the rule rather than the exception. So is the empty chapel. Never in my lifetime has religion ebbed so low. Never has the spiritual pulse of the nation beat so feebly. I set no value upon the rite of churchgoing as a sign and symbol of moral vitality. Even if all our churches and chapels were closed, we might save our souls alive. But it is the soul of the nation that is empty. England has no time for God.

among colored workers in the Pacific Islands, that, in spite of the deportation of their leaders, the indentured Indian coolies in Fiji are on strike, and many of the strikers are returning to India. The output of the sugar-plantations will be seriously affected by this trouble.

Indentured labor was employed in Hawaii until 1900, when the 'Provisional Republic' became a territory of the United States. Since free labor has been employed on the plantations, wages have risen from $10 or $12 a month to five or six times that sum and even more, including bonuses. However, the admission of additional Orientals, as now requested, raises again the whole question of unfree labor- in a form akin to peonage.

LETTER FROM A RUSSIAN PRISON

Volia Rossii, a paper published in London in the interest of Russians opposing the present Moscow government, prints the following letter from Madame L. Dekatova, a Socialist Revolutionary:

DEAR COMRADES,As you already know, I started the hunger strike on April 25. If my demand is not satisfied, and there is not much hope that it will be satisfied, I shall certainly continue the strike, and I shall take measures not to submit to the

horrors of artificial feeding. In my declaration to the Che-ka, I pointed out only one reason of my hunger strike, and that is a personal one the detention of my husband in prison, already for six weeks, without any reason whatever, and under severe conditions.

But to you I will give another psychological reason, without which there could be hardly be one without the first reason, no hunger strike, as well as there could which gives a certain basis to such a step.

The second reason is this: I, like other Socialists imprisoned in Butyrki, involuntarily became a tool of the most monstrous hypocrisy of the Communist Government.

We are having here a good time. We are free to move about within the walls of the prison; the authorities interfere with us very little; we are free to speak and to meet each other; we have lectures and concerts. And the various Meshcheriakovs, in enthusiastic articles, tell the world what beautiful prisons there are under the Soviet Government, and how humane and touching is its treatment of their theoretical opponents. And these assertions are believed, because we ourselves also tell the same to the people outside. But here, side by side in the same Moscow, there is the prison of the Che-ka, where prisoners, who are the same Socialists as we, are literally suffocated by the stench of the excrement, by complete absence of air, in cells overcrowded to the utmost kept in the company of criminals and spies, and eaten up by lice and bugs. And when a pregnant, sick woman, in hysterics, shouts, 'My child is getting suffocated,' breaks the window, and faints, she is deceitfully carried away to a punitive cell, where she is laid down on a bare, stony floor, under the jeers and insults of the chief of the prison, who is a perfect type of jailer of the Tsar's régime.

This, and still worse, is taking place in all Soviet prisons, in the name of the Soviets, of Socialism, of the workmen. You won't find any Meshcheriakov visiting these cells. And when Socialists, in despair, start a hunger strike, they are told: "That is your own business. You can die. State interests are to us more important than the lives of individuals.' Then they let the hunger strike go on for a fortnight, and afterwards begin to feed artificially. A few of the Socialists are kept in 'Dzershnsky's Sanatorium' for show. It is hard for our comrades to be kept in the real prisons of the Soviets, but it is also painful to us to be in the show prison, kept as a tool of the Communistic hypocrisy. It was my lot to be kept in the prison of the Che-ka, and then to be taken to the Butyrki, but in spirit I am even at present with those who suffer in the real Communistic prisons.

My hunger strike is, then, not only a means of fighting for a personal cause, but also a protest against the insolent hypocrisy

of the Communist Government. The personal cause is here combined with the general. If I die, it won't be only for a personal cause, and I want it to be known in case of my death.

MINOR NOTES

THE New Zealand Court of Appeals has recently decided in a final judgment that as 'the United States has not assumed any of the obligations of the Treaty of Versailles, it cannot claim for itself or its citizens any of the rights conferred by it.' The court thereby denied the claim of a Boston man for patent protection 'in respect of a new safety razor.' The treaty provides for an extension of the time allowed for patent claims where these were delayed on account of the war. Such an extension would have been granted to a German or a Japanese, but it was denied to an American.

COMMENTING upon the reorganization of the United States Shipping Board and the losses which American tax-payers have incurred in this undertaking, the London Statist says:

Economic conditions in the United Kingdom being what they are, shipping is a necessity with us; but it is a luxury on the other side of the Atlantic. For practical purposes, the United States does not require a mercantile marine at all. It is highly probable that it could get its carrying trade done better and cheaper by foreigners than it could do the work itself. . . . Part of our means of living is by acting as common carriers. We must obtain the bulk both of our food and of our raw materials from places outside these islands. The United States produces at home the bulk of the food and raw material she consumes. She is in the fortunate position, therefore, of having not need to render any services for her food and raw materials except to expend the necessary energy to till her own extensive estate.