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dozen lessons, as there were holidays the rest of the time. She reported the discipline among the scholars as very poor.

They attended lessons as they chose, and

there was no means of compelling regularity.

'You wait till we meet at the Tcherezve

chaika,' was the remark made by one boy after being punished by his teacher. Private lessons were far more profitable than government teaching, as many of the richer peasants were anxious to give their children education and moreover paid in Imperial or Kerensky currency, which was illegal; but, even so, one hour's English teaching would serve only to pay for two pails of water. Sawing wood was far more remunerative, but had the disadvantage of giving the worker a larger appetite than he could afford.

She reports that the Communists in the Ukraine are in a constant state of panic, their bogies being the Poles and Petljura. This year they forced the peasants to cut the harvest before it was ripe, for fear the Poles would come and take it from them.

Odette Kuen, an occasional unofficial correspondent of L'Europe Nouvelle, writing from Tiflis upon the situation in Georgia since the Bolshevist occupation, gives a rather sympathetic account of the new régime. The Red soldiers are described as inveterate readers. Every regiment has a 'social instructor.' One of those met by this correspondent was formerly a foreman in the Ford automobile works at Detroit. However, Tiflis already presents the aspect of a deserted city. The shops are boarded up and their proprietors have fled. 'It takes time to become accustomed to seeing in the bakeries, which used to be so well filled, only a few little black loaves.' The whole town is rationed. The American Near East Relief, 'whose generosity is beyond praise,' has been permitted to open soup-kitchens. A general amnesty has

been proclaimed, and the former officers of the Georgian army are taking services with the Bolsheviki, as are likewise most of the old government officials. Perfect order is maintained.

Many foreigners - Germans, Italians,

Greeks, and Levantines-are negotiating for concessions and trade-privileges with the new government. The consuls of Germany, Italy, Holland, and Spain remain at Tiflis, and are vigorously pushing the business interests of their countrymen. Germany, Holland, and Norway have already advanced money to the Soviet authorities, in return for mine and forest concessions. This correspondent thinks that Georgia will remain Bolshevist.

THE AFGHAN PRESS

AMONG other evidences of westernization, Afghanistan now has two newspapers. Both are published in Persian, and claim to be unofficial, though obviously inspired and controlled by the government and the Bolsheviki. It is obligatory for higher officials to subscribe for one of these journals, the Aman-i-Afghan, published at the capital. The price of subscription is deducted by the government from their salaries.

Most of the news comes via Moscow, or at least has a Moscow interpretation. Bolshevist propaganda, and Sanford and Merton moral maxims are curiously intermingled. The editor enjoins his readers to 'Be firm in adopting good habits, and shun bad ones,' and informs them that 'knowledge is the most precious of jewels'; adding the up-to-date simile that 'knowledge without unity is like a motor without gasolene.' Both journals are strictly conservative and feudal in tone; but there are many kindly references to 'our civilized and candid friends,' the Russians. The Bolsheviki are represented as anti-imperi

alists. Germany is regarded as by no means dead. Hatred of the Allies is constantly preached. Much of the geographical information is delightfully vague. The 'Golden Horn' is an important fortification on the Sea of Marmora. Egypt is one of Britain's Asiatic possessions. Scotland is a subject country.

SWEDEN'S PUBLIC HEALTH INSTITUTE

SWEDEN'S Parliament has, by a practically unanimous vote, recently appropriated sixty thousand crowns to found a 'Research Laboratory for Race-Biology,' to be connected with Upsala University. This is reported to be the first government institution of the kind in Europe. Investigations of a practical nature relating to public health will principally engage the attention of the staff.

The institution will be under the direction of Professor Lundborg, an eminent Swedish authority upon heredity; and, presumably, one of its first tasks will be to investigate the heredity of insanity and nervous diseases, and of a predisposition to tuberculosis, cancer, and deformity. There will also be a section of criminal anthropology, which will study particularly criminal heredity. A third section will deal with experimental biology and pathology. Attached to the institution will be an exhibit of charts and tables illustrating the laws of heredity.

with one of the greatest armament firms in the country, and Rear-Admiral Sueter, who is credited with important services in the submarine and air branches of the navy during the war, and who invented tanks, opposed these appropriations. The Spectator asserts that the demand for government economies beyond any hitherto attempted is practically unanimous among all classes. "The depth of popular feeling' does not belong merely to merchants and employers.

It is instinctively affecting the minds of the manual workers. They realize as fully as the former that our bloated taxes are going to destroy them. The nation is a great crowd standing with its back to the Dark River of Want. The sound of the turbid and menacing waters is always in its ears. The last ranks in the crowd, the ranks on the very edge of the river, are the ranks of the manual workers. They know that, if there is disturbance or panic, or anything that pushes the men in front back, they will be the first to go into the water, there to perish miserably. Therefore, they are the first instinctively to feel that the tax-collector, who is causing so much disturbance in the crowd and making it sway backwards and forwards so dangerously, is their mortal enemy. And they are right. Panic in the crowd is the worst peril. It may cause a disaster long before it is actually due, or, rather, a disaster which might have been quite easily avoided by care, discipline, and organization. Therefore, the country at large is longing for a politician who will lead it on the way to thrift.

ENGLAND'S CALL FOR ECONOMY

THE Admiralty proposal to construct four new capital ships, and to embark upon a programme which will call for twelve others, has intensified the agitation in Great Britain for a reduction of government expenses. It is rather significant that two naval officers, RearAdmiral Adair, who is closely connected

AUTOMOBILES IN THE ORIENT

THE first Japan-made automobile is now on the market. It is called the 'Midget,' and is designed to meet the peculiarities of Japanese roads and local conditions. Its wheel base is only 84 inches, and its total weight 850 pounds. It is driven by an air-cooled motor of 12 horsepower, and this part of the car is made in Indianapolis. Many bridges

in Japan will not bear the weight of a heavy American car, and, as all tourists know, the roads are in many places too narrow for ordinary vehicle traffic. However, these obstacles to the use of automobiles, are rapidly being removed, not only in Japan but likewise near the treaty ports of China.

In the latter country, according to a recent letter to the London Times, motor-cars and motor-trucks are revolutionizing communication even faster than the railways. Ten years ago there were no automobiles in Peking. Since then the mileage of streets suitable for automobile traffic has increased more than tenfold, and there are some fifteen hundred motor-cars in use in the city. Regular motor-bus service has been established in certain parts of China. More than three hundred miles of passable highway have recently been constructed in the provinces of Chihli and Shantung. About ninety-five per cent of the cars in North China are of American make. Of 1320 imported into Shanghai last year, 987 came from this country.

HELGOLAND

GERMAN papers print special articles on the alleged efforts of Great Britain to annex Helgoland, which, it will be recalled, was a British possession until

ceded to Germany by the Salisbury Cabinet in 1890, as compensation for territorial concessions in Africa. The residents of this tiny island were removed to the German mainland during the war. They claim that they should be compensated by the government for the losses and distress which they suffered by this measure. They also protest against the extension of the incometax law to the island, on the ground that this violates their ancient laws and privileges. The old residents object the more seriously to this measure because the fisheries and the summer-tourist trade, which were their former main source of revenue, have practically ceased during the destruction of the fortifications, which has not yet been completed.

Although ninety per cent of the people of the island are Germans, they have never been reconciled to Prussian rule, and in 1919 they appealed to the League of Nations to protect them against the Prussian government. Whatever the causes of their political discontent in the past, it is now due in no small measure to Germany's Socialist programme. In fact, the prominent residents of the island secured a special exception in the new franchise law, to prevent the Socialist laborers employed in dismantling the fortresses from overwhelming the old settlers with their votes.

[European publicists foresaw early international action upon the problems of the Pacific before President Harding called the Washington Conference. Two articles illustrating this opinion follow. The first is by Alexander Kerensky, the first revolutionary head of the Russian government, and appeared in the Prague Volya Rossii, a Russian Socialist revolutionary organ, of June 26. The second, by André Sigfried, appeared in L'Europe Nouvelle, of June 25.]

THE great war has definitely concluded that period of history which was characterized by Europe's hegemony in international affairs. Belying the irresponsible predictions of Bolshevist prophets, the war has produced, not a crisis of capitalism, not a social revolution, but a profound regrouping of forces within capitalist society itself. This regrouping has shifted the centre of the world's economic and political control to countries dominated by the young capitalism of the New World, which grows and develops with colossal speed.

The key to the lines of communication of these countries - the two Americas, the British Dominions, Japan, and South Africa - lies in the Pacific Ocean, just as once upon a time the central point of all the vital interests of the ancient world lay in the Mediterranean. The Pacific Ocean is the new axis around which, for decades to come, the most important events of worldhistory will rotate.

During the war, the few 'European patriots' who had not lost their heads in the strife warned their fellows that, irrespective of which side won, Europe as a whole would pay a terrific price for having completely and light-mindedly forgotten her 'supernational, interEuropean interests.' We now see that this warning was more than justified.

It is clear that the new, post-war rearrangement of international forces has dethroned the old system, which had for its centre Europe and European in

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terests. That system is doomed to find its place usurped by a new grouping of international forces, in which the whole of Western Europe will become merely a subordinate factor in a new worldequilibrium.

The contemporary international relations of Europe are intelligible only when studied in the light of the Pacific problem. And the three most characteristic features of the new course of foreign policy, all result from the pressure exerted upon Europe by events outside her boundaries. These characteristic features are the return of the United States to Europe, the liberation of French foreign policy from British guardianship, and the reappearance of Germany as an independent factor in international politics.

It is scarcely necessary to explain why President Harding's administration continues essentially the Wilsonian system of interference in European affairs, only in a more thoughtful, careful, and especially a more practical form. The United States, which is one of the three chief actors in the Pacific drama, cannot win the game it is now playing, unless it assures itself a powerful rear-guard in Europe, and creates international combinations in Asia, which will, to a large extent, tie the hands of its most active rivals. Of course, the reappearance of America in the affairs of the Old World is due also to her struggle for foreign oil-fields; but in this article I deliberately avoid a discussion of economic competition.

The other two characteristic features of the European situation - the unfettering of French diplomacy, and the reappearance of Germany - are, to a large extent, the result of the breakdown of the whole 'traditional' policy of Great Britain. This breakdown has only begun, and its principal cause is the change that has occurred in the relations between Great Britain as the mother-country and her transoceanic

strictly transpacific - Dominions, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa.

Up to the war, these Dominions took no part in directing the foreign policy of Great Britain. This policy was dictated exclusively by the interests and the traditions of old England, as a European state, or, to be more exact, as a state whose principal enemies and most active rivals were in Europe.

During several centuries past all else changed in the world except Britain's power. Ruling the seas, possessed of one fifth of the earth's surface, girdling the terrestrial globe with her possessions, counting in the ranks of her citizens or subjects one quarter of the total population of the earth, Great Britain was the true hegemon of the Old World, and London was the centre and the guiding master of world-politics.

None ever questioned that the policies dictated by the London Cabinet of Ministers were the policies of the British Empire. Europe's diplomats would have shuddered with horror only a short time ago, if told that the day was to come when proud Albion would bow her head before the will of her far-off colonies.

And yet that day is breaking. The dawn of that day shed its first rays at the last Imperial Conference at London, and was watched intently by the whole world.

Here the real results of the war revealed themselves for the first time.

While Europe, in surpassing blindness and obstinacy, was busily engaged in self-destruction, a whole group of new states was growing upon the waterways of the Pacific, blossoming out of the formerly modest British colonies, hitherto blindly obedient to the will of their mother-country. Some of these new states are in themselves almost empires, with colonies of their own. And during the war, when the ties with the mother-land grew slack, they not only began to reorganize their institutions at home according to their own ideas, but each created for itself a circle of international interests — an independent foreign policy.

There is one thing which all of these new states born of the war have in common: the centre of their attention is the Pacific Ocean. And here their aims and purposes coincide with the interests and policies of the United States.

So far as the British Dominions are concerned, any foreign policy of the British Empire going counter to the interests of America is utterly impossible. More than that, for them, this unity of interest with the Great Republic, this 'solidarity of all English-speaking peoples,' makes imperative their active coöperation with the United States.

The government of Canada already has its own diplomatic representative in Washington, and his presence there is sanctioned, though with a somewhat wry smile, by the Cabinet of the Court of St. James. Canada is very seriously considering the need of closer economic relations with the United States. And this is a development which London 'City' receives without any smile, wry or otherwise.

Finally, the Australian Premier Hughes, dotted his i's effectively, if undiplomatically, when he said: 'Australia shouts with joy at the sight of each new battleship built in the shipyards of the United States.'

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