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bring them to trial before an impartial, unintimidated Hungarian tribunal?

CRITICIZING AUSTRALIA

HENRY STEAD, who edits the old Australian Review of Reviews under the new title, Stead's, discusses in the two June issues of this magazine the white Australia policy and the administration of Australia's South Sea mandates. His argument is that the white race will not live in Australia's tropical Northern Territory, but that the Commonwealth cannot permit colored races to take possession of that region. In other words, it must lie fallow, or scantily occupied, as at present. He argues that Australia should devote its efforts and resources to increasing the white population of its temperate states, and cease wasting millions of dollars every year in a fruitless effort to make white people grow in a hopeless environment.

He criticizes, with abundant citation of text and figures, the Commonwealth's administration of former German New Guinea - all to the advantage of the Germans. He says the higher German officials were better educated, and better prepared for their work than the men whom the Commonwealth has put in charge. Especially was the German medical service superior. Rather contrary to our idea of German bureaucracy, the number of officials has multiplied since the Teutons were evicted. Consequently, all the expenses of government have risen. This is reflected in taxation, and thereby in the cost of production of colonial produce, especially copra. The Australian administration is charged with driving out experienced German settlers, whom the Dutch government is eagerly inviting to start life again in Dutch New Guinea, where the authorities extend them every inducement to erect new homes and make new fortunes. He reports that

the Australian whites do not benefit by driving out the Germans, as the place. of the latter is immediately taken by the Chinese. 'If a German must surrender his schooner, not very much later it is being sailed by a Chinaman. ... The more well-to-do Germans owned motor-cars. Their cars were seized (at the time of the war), but have now passed into Chinese hands.'

IRELAND'S TAXES

APROPOS of the financial side of any political settlement between Great Britain and Ireland, the London Statist quotes from the report of the British government's Financial Relations Commission of 1894-96, as follows: 'Whilst the actual tax-revenue of Ireland is about one eleventh of that of Great Britain, the relative taxable capacity of Ireland is very much smaller, and is not estimated by any of us as exceeding one twentieth.' Since this report was rendered, the revenues collected in Ireland have risen from less than twelve million pounds sterling per annum, to more than forty-two million. However, this does not, according to the Statist, include all the taxes paid by that country. Many articles consumed there, such as sugar, tea, tobacco, and wine, are taxed when they are imported into Great Britain, and this tax is ultimately paid by the Irish consumer. A share of the income taxes, super-taxes and excessprofits duties collected in Great Britain is levied upon incomes and profits received from Ireland. Excise taxes upon beer and spirits manufactured in Great Britain are also in part paid by Irish consumers. After allowing for certain set-offs, due to taxes collected on goods produced in Ireland and consumed in Great Britain, the balance against Ireland remains large, and it is estimated that the total revenue collected from that country in 1919-20, by the British

government, was considerably more than fifty million pounds.

Only a portion of this revenue is expended in Ireland itself, the amount in 1919-20 falling considerably under thirty million pounds. The balance, equivalent to about one hundred million dollars in American currency, is a net contribution to the Imperial treas

ury.

MINOR NOTES

JAPAN has encouraged many of the Germans who fought against her troops at Tsingtao to settle in that country and Korea, where their technical skill makes them valuable aids in the transition from Oriental to Occidental industrial methods. Some half-dozen of these Germans are now farming three thousand acres of hitherto untilled land in Korea. Japanese capitalists have advanced steam-ploughs and other up-todate agricultural machinery, and the first crop of soya beans and peanuts has already been harvested. All profits above five per cent are to be shared equally between the farmers and the Japanese capitalists who finance them.

Japan has a 'Society for the Improvement of the Ways of Living' which, at a recent convention, discussed a proposed campaign for improving the native hotel-service in that country. Among the reforms advocated are: making separate charges for rooms and meals; abolishing tips to the managers, but not to the servants; requiring that meals be served at regular hours; tight partitions between guest-rooms; better sanitation; abolition of the custom of the sexes bathing together; and that 'arrangements in hotels shall be gradually shifted in the direction of using chairs.'

L'Industria, an important technical journal printed in Milan, estimates that, if the 200,000 railway-workers in Italy were each employed in driving ten-ton trucks for eight hours a day, for three hundred working days a year, they would transport nearly five times as much freight a mile per annum as the Italian railways now carry.

THE Wholesale Clothing Manufacturers' Association of Great Britain has submitted a scheme, which has been approved by the Board of Trade, for standardizing the manufacture of men's and boys' clothing and regulating prices. It has been arranged to have the woolen mills make a certain quantity of standard fabrics, which will be allocated to the members of the Wholesale Clothing Manufacturers' Association at a fixed price, approved by a sub-committee. The clothiers will make up this cloth in standard sizes, and supply retailers at uniform rates for instance 67s. 6d. for men's suits which are to retail at 90 shillings. Prices will be revised from time to time, as experience dictates.

MR. ALFRED INKPIN, Secretary of the Communist Party in Great Britain, has recently been sentenced to six months' hard labor. The New Witness calls this sentence as 'savage as it is impolitic,' adding that the 'theses' for which Mr. Inkpin has been punished, which are of the dullest description and have been read by a negligible number of people, would have escaped the attention of even this small minority had it not been for their advertisement by the trial. According to this weekly, all the members of the Communist Party of Great Britain some seventy persons are now in jail.

BY SIR PHILIP GIBBS

From The Review of Reviews, July-August (BRITISH LIBERAL CURRENT-AFFAIRS MONTHLY)

I WENT to Germany last month to find out what was happening there. Newspaper accounts were rather confusing. The question 'Will Germany Pay?' argued mostly with passionate and unreliable arithmetic, had been temporarily answered by Dr. Wirth and a new German Cabinet, with a solemn agreement to pay, under the pressure of military menace.

Facts were not forthcoming to convince any impartial mind that Germany could pay, even if she agreed; or what would be the effect upon world-trade if her people succeeded in fulfilling their pledges.

What I desired most to know, what I think is the most important knowledge in Europe to-day, was the method or possibility by which Germany may be able, not only to restore her own economic health after the enormous exhaustion of war and defeat, but to pay the bill of costs presented by the victor nations. I wanted to see with my own eyes how the German people were living and working, and to discover what they thought about the burdens that have been imposed upon them. I wanted to get from different angles of opinion, and from various statements of fact, the evidence upon which one may form a fair judgment as to the present state of Germany and its future place in Europe.

Certainly I was able to collect in Berlin an immense number of facts and figures and opinions. I had long interviews with bankers, business men, and political chiefs, including Stresemann, leader of the Deutsches Volkspartei

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the German People's Party, which is of great and ever-growing importanceand Scheidemann, leader of the Majority Socialists. I also obtained much information from our own experts, by which I was able to check or confirm the German statements.

Yet, looking back on the muster of facts which I accumulated, I find them dull compared with much simpler information that I acquired by walking through the streets, the shops, and the parks of Berlin, and talking to a few German middle-class folk about their way of life and their household accounts. One's own personal impressions count more than statistics, and my first and final and final - impressions of Berlin were the revelation of a great change that had happened to the German people since I had last met them, and of a still greater difference between their spirit. and that of the English people.

When I went first into Germany after the Armistice, the people seemed rather stupefied by what had befallen them. All their faith had been shattered by the downfall of their armies, and they were afraid of Revolution, and hopelessly uncertain of the future. Many of them, especially the women and children, were still suffering from the effects of long under-feeding; prices of food, clothing, and other necessities of life were above the reach of the working-folk; demobilized soldiers were not yet assimilated into civil life; and the spirit of the people was dejected and despairing.

Now, in Berlin, the general appearance of the people is not miserable, but

cheerful; not dejected, but alert and confident. One does not see crowds of listless unemployed men hanging about Labor Exchanges or rattling collecting boxes in the faces of the passers-by. One sees crowds of men stepping out briskly, obviously employed, welldressed, well-fed, keen on their jobs, doing good business. In the hotels little groups of them come for conversation at all hours of the day. They bring little black satchels under their arms, take out bundles of papers, specifications, prices, quotations. They are not there for love-in-idleness, to lounge away an hour or two. They are there for business. They are getting orders.

It is clear that most of the middleclass folk in Berlin are earning not only sufficient to make both ends meet, but also a little margin for the fun of life.

I went one evening to Luna Park, which is a sort of White City on a large scale, of Futurist design and decoration, like a bad dream. Around the arena where the band plays and fireworks go up when darkness falls, there is an open-air restaurant in terraces, with seating capacity for 50,000 people. The night I went there, just an ordinary night without special significance, practically all those seats were filled, by people drinking light beer, eating ices, sipping 'soft' drinks or coffee. Many were clerks, typists, shop-girls, middleclass fathers and mothers with their elder children, and I reckoned by watching the tables nearest to me that each person was spending from five to fifteen marks which roughly, not only in rates of exchange but in German purchasing value, is fivepence to 18. 3d. on this evening's recreation. Others were spending more in side-shows, on 'flip-flaps' and 'wiggly-woggles,' on lotteries for chocolates and cheap prizes. They were all well-behaved, orderly, good-natured, and cheery. There was nothing wrong with that crowd!

'How is it,' I asked a German lady, 'that these people are able to spend so much on an evening's amusement, when from all I hear their wages are so low?' This lady, who had been long in America and looks upon her own folk with a detached judgment, answered me candidly.

'I often wonder how they manage. It is wonderful! But unless you take away a false impression, you must look into the facts of their home-life. In the first place, there is such great overcrowding in Berlin that young folk, and old folk for that matter, must come out to a place like this to breathe and get elbow-room. So they stint and scrape at home, to get the evening's pleasure. Then they pool their resources. If there is an elder brother, with perhaps two sisters, all working together, and living with their parents, they manage pretty well. The hard cases are where a girl, or a young man, has to live alone on a single salary. Then it is utterly impossible.'

Nevertheless, there were 50,000 people at Luna Park, and in other parts of the city other thousands crowding the cafés and concert-halls. Most of the girls were cheaply dressed, in cotton frocks and hand-made things, but neat and dainty. Some of the men I noticed were still wearing their old field-gray uniforms, devoid of shoulder-straps and military buttons; but most of them were in good civil suits, threadbare but well brushed.

A somewhat similar crowd I found in Reinhardt's great theatre, the Gross Schauspielhaus, which was once a market-place, now covered in and made like a rock cavern, with stalactites hanging from the roof. They were playing A Midsummer Night's Dream with rollicking good humor in a Teutonic spirit (Robin Goodfellow was a German elf and Oberon a kind of Lohengrin); but I was as much interested in the audience

and in the prices. The audience, sitting in rapt attention, numbered 5,000, and they were rather superior in social standing to those at Luna Park. They paid less for their evening's recreation. My seat- one of the best in the house-cost me one shilling and twopence. Most of the seats cost no more than sixpence, so that in Berlin the theatres have not shut up shop like those in London, — and in Berlin and all German cities that I know there are far more opportunities for social recreation than in our cities, for people of moderate means.

What I tried next to find was, how much people in Germany were being paid for their work, and how their wages correspond with the cost of life. These are simple figures to obtain, so far as the first part of the inquiry goes. The German workingman in Krupp's factories, and others, is paid 60 marks a day. At the old value of the mark that would be three pounds. At the present value, inside Germany itself, I reckon it as five shillings.

For an eight-hour day it works out at 7}d. [15 cents] an hour, compared with the 1s. 9d. to 2s. 6d. [42-60 cents] an hour of the mechanic in Great Britain.

Walking down the streets of Berlin and looking in at the shop-windows, or visiting a great store like Wertheim, gives one a fair notion of current prices. A pair of boots of good quality is 180 marks, or (reckoning the mark at a penny) 15 shillings. A shirt is anywhere from 60 to 120 marks according to quality, or from five to ten shillings, on this reckoning. In fact, taking many articles of daily use, one finds that the mark does actually correspond in purchasing power to the penny, with some margin in favor of the German, as at that reckoning the cost of life is undoubtedly cheaper in Germany than in England, for many classes of manufactured articles. Books, for instance, are

astonishingly cheap, and immensely better in quality of production than anything published in England. With splendid paper, strong and well-designed bindings, charming illustrations, the world's classics translated into German are published at 84d. a volume and new novels are sold at 1s. 6d. a volume. China, metal goods, embroidered work, household utensils, manufactured articles of all kinds, are amazingly low in price, not only at current rates of exchange between German and English money, but also relative to the internal purchasing value of the mark. The German workingman, on 60 marks a day, gets almost enough to eat (never enough meat), almost enough to support a wife and small family, almost enough to make him satisfied with his job. By strict attention to economy, he can squeeze out a few marks for the simple pleasures of his leisure hours, which consist mostly in light beer and light music in some public garden or beer-hall.

The professional classes, and the clerical classes (city clerks, typists, etc.) are not so well off relatively as the mechanics and laborers. Whereas the cost of living has increased from eight to ten times, the salaries of professors, teachers, civil servants, and others have only risen from four to six times. It is they who are most pinched, and reduced to desperate straits in order to 'keep up appearances.'

Now, upon the great mass of cheap labor German capitalists are building up a new and intensive system of industrial organization, beyond anything the world has previously seen in efficiency and driving power. Hugo Stinnes and his great trust, controlling a vast monopoly in coal, iron, and steel, of whom there has been so much talk, because he represents most powerfully this new phase of German energy, is only one of a score of magnates who practically

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