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I have been intimately acquainted with Clemenceau since 1875, when we were both members of the Chamber of Deputies. He is not a star of first magnitude, but a consummate artist. He has more savoir than genius, and more talent than savoir. He has the qualities of a shrewd business man and of a hunter. He pursues and seizes his prey. When he makes a spring, no hedge or obstacle can check him. He is intent only on his prey. He will have it. He will have it all for himself. He does not share with others.

He is a physician. He dismembers and dissects his victim. No minister can operate at ease with Clemenceau against him. He ceases his superior gestures and no longer looks down with Olympian hauteur upon his underlings. If I were an American millionaire, I'd gladly pay a bountiful sum to see Clemenceau take office. It would not interest me so much to observe Jaurès, who is at heart a government official, preside over the Cabinet; but it would be worth one's while to watch Clemenceau handle the reins of office. Jaurès flatters, interests, and persuades. The graces follow him to the tribune. When he speaks on agriculture, for instance, his address is a marvel of delicate dilettantism. Georges Clemenceau is not sufficiently master of himself, or well enough informed on details, to deliver an address like that.

After having destroyed what he opposes, Jaurès is constructive in his way. Clemenceau abhors construction. His delight is in demolishing. Were the edifice of state ever to be built precisely to his taste, he would even change his mind and wish to destroy it. The doors would be too narrow, the win

dows too broad. According to the caprice of the moment, he would find the foundations too high or the roof too low. For him the front would face in the wrong direction, the chimney smoke, the tenants be infected with contagions. He would call for the pick and the mine and dynamite. The whole thing must be blown up.

Clemenceau is absolute and systematic. Jaurès is conciliating and skeptical. The former never agrees; the latter is always ready to discuss a matter. Clemenceau writes better than he speaks; he has many readers, but little popularity. Jaurès is more an orator than a writer. He subdues assemblies. He dazzles the people, and his portrait is in every humble home.

MINOR NOTES

WE quote from L'Europe Nouvelle the following comment apropos of the recent meeting of the Supreme Council at Paris:

It was generally remarked during this week's Conference, that the members of the Allied Commission for Upper Silesia did not seem at all eager for any kind of a settlement. Malicious critics say that the best way to settle the trouble there, would be to lower salaries in Upper Silesia to the level of those in France.

On August 3 the Socialists and Fascisti signed a formal treaty in the office of the Speaker of the Lower House. The text of this treaty consists of an introduction and eleven articles, engaging the two parties to cease all threats, acts of violence, and reprisals against each other, and to respect the emblems and party insignia of their opponents. Provision is made for boards of arbitration in each province, consisting of two representatives of each party and a non-partisan chairman, to deal with such disputes as may arise between the two organizations. However, the English papers report that violence continues in defiance of this agreement.

So far as popular interests of the Japanese are indicated by the books they read, it would appear that their attention is given largely to social questions. According to a recent classification of the books and magazines printed in the Empire, those upon this subject, including labor conditions, economics, political science, sociology, history, and law, are a close second to works of fiction, general literature, and art. The figures, in order of number of new titles, are:

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9225

IN marked contrast with what is reported to be the effect of unemployment in this country, where the movement is from the city to the farms, the dismissed workers of New Zealand are flocking from the country to the cities, because farmers are cutting wages and discharging many of the hands they employed during the recent era of high prices.

A LAW has just been passed by the Lower House of the Japanese Parliament, and will probably go into effect shortly, introducing the metric system 9184 6561 in that country. The change is to 4492 be completed in government offices, 2742 schools, public institutions, and large 1662 factories within five years, and is to be 1243 general throughout the empire at the end of twenty years.

603

BOLIVIA'S Oil-fields are beginning to attract attention, and two British, two American, and one Chilean company are already working there under old concessions. A new American application has recently been refused; and the government that has come into power as a result of the last revolution is re

ported to be unfriendly to proposals for the more extended exploitation of these resources by foreigners.

THE drought that is afflicting southeastern Russia does not extend to many parts of the Ukraine or to Poland. According to the Minister of Agriculture of the latter country, Poland's yield of winter wheat will be double that of a

year ago. The potato and sugar-beet
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alcohol on July 15.

ACCORDING to a recent census, the European population of the South African Union is now a million and a half, an increase of two hundred and forty-five thousand since 1911.

THE prohibition movement has reached Japan. Some Buddhist leaders are preaching total abstinence based on the example of the founder of their faith; and it is proposed to make his birthday, April 4, a ‘prohibition day.'

GREAT BRITAIN'S recent Colonial

Office estimates allot more than one hundred and thirty million dollars for the expenses of the government in Mesopotamia and Palestine. The Arabs of Mesopotamia are shortly to have their own popularly elected assembly, and to be offered a king of their own choosing.

Frankfurter Zeitung has published a fourth edition of its Indexzahlen bringing its record of German prices on commodities and security movements down to April, 1921. This pamphlet of sixty-four pages gives actual and percentage quotations, as well as graphic charts regarding the movement of prices in Germany, the United States, and the leading industrial countries in Europe.

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BY ERICH VON SALZMANN

From Vossische Zeitung, July 30 (BERLIN CONSERVATIVE LIBERal Daily)

TSINGTAU presents a most complicated problema problem involved with the Shantung controversy, which originated in the secret treaty between England, France, and Italy on the one side and Japan on the other. From the legal standpoint the Versailles Treaty has strengthened Japan's contentions. America's protest is the last move in the

case.

Under the Versailles Treaty Japan acquires all Germany's rights in Shantung. Tokyo construes those rights, both legally and economically, with a liberality most advantageous to itself. Baron Inouye, chief of the information service at the Tokyo Foreign Office, General Hikida, chief of the Japanese General Staff in Shantung, and Irisawa, head of the civil administration at Tsingtau, all told me that Japan had tried repeatedly to negotiate directly with China, and had offered to evacuate Shantung in order to settle this troublesome question. They said that the Chinese authorities refused to negotiate directly with them, insisting instead that the whole matter be referred to the League of Nations.

I am not in a position to say how far this Japanese official version conforms with the facts. However that may be, no progress is being made toward a settlement. At any moment this dispute may create a crisis that will lead to war. America keeps the pot boiling through the Y.M.C.A., which exerts

powerful influence among the Chinese students. This organization busies itself extensively here with political

propaganda, and mighty little with Christianity.

So America has machinery for setting public opinion in China ablaze whenever she wishes. It is a new Northcliffe system, and we Germans know what that means. America's masters of finance in New York have only to press a button to explode a mine in China. Every young educated Chinaman is completely under the influence of America's teaching. General Hikida, a wise, cool-headed, distinguished gentleman, told me that on the ninth of May, which is observed in China as a day of national humiliation, because the country was forced by Japan to subscribe to the Twenty-one Points on that date six years ago, American missionaries in Macao distributed handbills and organized public processions, calling upon the people to drive every Japanese and every Englishman also --out of the country. Responsibility for the truth of this statement rests with General Hikida; but it is typical of the sort of thing one constantly hears in China.

Tsingtau is now inseparably associated with the rest of Shantung. Japan cannot withdraw her troops and representatives from Shantung proper and confine her occupation solely to Tsingtau protectorate. In that case, the port would speedily be isolated and would sink to the economic unimportance of Weihaiwei or Chefoo, becoming merely a beach resort. What value would Tsingtau have for Japan without its back country? The Japanese do not

need a naval station here, because their own country lies so near the Asiatic continent that it is equally convenient for their fleet to anchor on the Japanese or the Chinese coast.

So Japan is already beginning to harvest the bitter fruits of her arbitrary policy toward China; a policy which it is too late to reverse. The commercial and industrial connections which Japan has established in Shantung will continue only so long as they are supported by her cannon and bayonets. The World War has taught us how fugitive such conquests are. Consequently, the Japanese are more earnestly seeking some better method, which will let them coöperate on a friendly footing with the Chinese. But though every Japanese with whom I have conversed eagerly wishes a wiser policy one thing stands in the way: the Japanese soldateska in Shantung will tolerate no interference with its privileges. In every village of the Protectorate I found Japanese policemen and Japanese letter-boxes. Above the latter were posted placards inviting the Chinese to deposit in them their complaints against Japanese soldiers and officials. This itself is a bad sign. A government that is forced to employ the Lion's Mouth of Venice, must have an evil conscience.

Japanese guards are stationed everywhere along the Shantung railway. Chinese guards are posted immediately outside the railway property. Does that look like budding friendship? Japanese contingents are stationed in the former German mining regions of Hungshan and Posham; and the great barracks that the War Department is erecting at Tsinan, the centre of the oldest seat of Chinese civilization, do not suggest plans for an immediate military evacuation. Everywhere one meets evidences of mutual distrust. The Chinese and Japanese have not yet come together for direct negotiations,

nor do they show any indication of doing so. The reassuring reports that are issued from time to time are merely conventional sedatives for public opinion, dosed out in the hope of preventing Shantung from becoming another Alsace-Lorraine.

The Japanese are moving heaven and earth to recover their old prestige in North China. Some people here assert that the Japanese have already won a political victory in Tientsin and Peking, and that there is proof of this in the increasing reserve with which the Chinese government handles the Shantung issue. A more tolerant attitude toward Japan's proposals is also reported along the Yangtze. But China's young intellectuals hate Japan with a bitterness that is relentless and inflexible. This is something that Japan must face.

Shantung's economic development cannot be separated psychologically from its military and political control. All three are inseparably associated. There is no way of escape from the quandary thus created. A man needs to reside in Tsingtau only a day or two to see perfectly well that, whatever the Japanese profess, they intend to remain there. They have already invested so much money in the country, and have committed themselves to so many things there, that holding Tsingtau is no longer a mere question of prestige, but a matter of very concrete material importance. Were the government to withdraw from all the undertakings which it has organized at great expense in the Tsingtau Protectorate and in Shantung for definite propaganda purposes, not a single Japanese subject would be able to make a living in this part of China.

The Chinese common people meanwhile are comparatively apathetic with regard to political questions. They take Japanese money to-day as readily as they took German money for

merly. Coolies and peasants with whom I talked said to me quite naturally, without the slightest show of political feeling: 'The Germans were fine people. We wish they would all come back. But the Japanese are very good people, and spend lots of money.'

And that is the truth. Since the Japanese took over Tsingtau, they have spent money as lavishly as we did when we were making this a naval base. Most of the buildings and public improvements have been constructed by the government; but there are also large private investments. All this has given the Chinese much employment. Land-speculation, which the German government wisely kept in check by a skilful system of land-control, is now running wild. The peasants are making fortunes selling their farms. Speculators are erecting whole new suburbs. Coolies are earning high wages in the brick-yards; masons, carpenters, pipefitters, street laborers, glaziers, in short, mechanics of every kind, have been employed regularly at higher wages than they ever knew before. That has kept the local population in good humor. Money has been plentiful, and one sees the result.

The Japanese government has been very careful to preserve the German appearance of the city. The streets are as faultlessly clean as they were under German rule. I did not see a single dilapidated building. The wharves and harbor works are in excellent condition, and have been extended. There has been such an extraordinary amount of building that not only are all the vacant places in the old city occupied by new structures, but a whole new Japanese manufacturing and residential city has sprung up in the suburbs. This new town is a perfect copy of a modern German town, and is strictly up to our best sanitary standards.

This has been paid for with govern

ment money, and with the money of great war profiteers diverted in this direction by government influence. Consequently the whole thing is artificial. There is no spontaneous purpose in this development. Tsingtau is today a Japanese luxury colony, with a tributary back country under military occupation. Japan will never win the markets and commercial supremacy so eagerly desired by these methods. Economic conquests demand peace, security, and confidence, which do not now exist.

The trade that Germany had established in this region has vanished. Her representatives have withdrawn in anger and disgust. The Japanese are not only illiberal, but relentlessly hostile, toward foreign competitors; they look upon them merely as rivals, and they cannot comprehend that it will take a full generation, perhaps, for their own merchants to gain the confidence of the people, without which an assured trade with China is impossible

I traveled over a railway built by German engineers with German materials, from the capital of Shantung to Tientsin, 'the Gate of Heaven,' the great commercial centre of North China. Immediately after passing Tsinan, where the portion of the line under Chinese control begins, we began to notice the dilapidated condition of the rolling stock. The contrast with the Shantung line, operated by the Japanese, is most marked. There is one express train a day, but it seldom runs on schedule. It is better to say nothing of other trains. Passenger cars and freight cars are dirty, and out of repair. The locomotives, which ten years ago were among the finest in the world, are still in running order, but by no means in fair condition. For seven years, practically no repairs or replacements have been made on this line. The fact that it runs at all seems

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