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through a law to grant the Philippines gradual autonomy and eventual complete independence. Their peace programme, and advocacy of a reduction of naval armament, seemed to promise neutrality in the World War. Since Wilson, however, had promised his fellow citizens prosperity as well as peace, and the country was drifting toward a serious industrial crisis, he had to permit them to manufacture and deliver vast quantities of munitions and war-supplies to the Allies at high prices. The immense profits from this business, plus the ties of blood and speech between America and England, and the skillful but misleading propaganda of Lord Northcliffe, swung sentiment toward the Entente. In spite of that, the Americans were overwhelmingly in favor of peace all through 1915 and 1916; and it took Wilson's explicit promise to keep out of war to win him the election the latter year. He owed his victory to the votes of the Irish and of the Germans in the West and Middle West.

It has always been a psychological riddle, what made Wilson abandon his consistent and strict neutrality immediately after the election and join the Allied procession; and why, when it was too late to accomplish anything, he offered hesitatingly to mediate in favor of peace-only to be defeated, of course, by Germany's ill-advised declaration of a relentless submarine campaign. By entering the war and bringing about a speedy victory, Wilson won a brief period of unexampled popularity, which reached its climax with his reception at Paris. We are not bound to assume that Wilson's Fourteen Points were endorsed without reserve by most of the practical business men, trust captains, and banking leaders of his country. Nevertheless, thousands of enthusiastic Americans went to war honestly believing

that the whole world, and even the United States, was threatened by German militarism, and that they were fighting for freedom, civilization, the oppressed nations, and enduring peace. After the burst of enthusiasm which followed their victory, the people quickly cooled off. During the tedious delays of the Armistice and the Peace Conference, they came to realize what a frost to their high hopes and ideals the actual treaty was. The nation had sacrificed one hundred and twenty thousand of its best young men, and many billions of dollars, to win vast colonies in Africa and Asia for the British Empire, to guarantee Great Britain control of the sea, and to help France quench her thirst for revenge and set herself up as dictator of Europe.

After falling out with Wilson, Lansing testified angrily, before the Senate Committee for Foreign Affairs, that he could not recall that the famous Fourteen Points were ever mentioned during the discussions at Versailles. Wilson himself had to admit that he arrived in Paris utterly ignorant of the various secret treaties with Italy, the Yugoslavs, and the Czechs, which later were to decide the terms of the Versailles Treaty and the Treaty of Saint-Germain. The senators, whom the President had constantly disregarded and refused to consult, and with whom he maintained scarcely any personal relations, were indignant at his utter failure, at his obstinacy, and at his weakness in surrendering everything else at Paris in order to get his pet idea, the League of Nations, incorporated in the treaty. This feeling explains the violent reaction against Wilson's policy and the peace treaty in the United States, and the refusal of the Senate to ratify the latter. The whole electoral campaign was fought on the anti-Wilson and anti-League issue. The League was represented as

a foreign super-state, whose supremacy was incompatible with the sovereignty and freedom of the Union. The outcome was Wilson's crushing defeat, and the election of Harding, a traditionalist Republican.

Therefore it was to be expected that the new President would come out definitely in his inaugural address against America joining the League. Non-intervention in the affairs of the old world was the text of this message. Without quoting Washington directly, he condemned entanglement in European controversies. He declared himself emphatically opposed to permanent military alliances. The United The United States could not incur political or economic obligations, to be interpreted and enforced by an authority outside the country. His repudiation of the Geneva League of Nations in its present form was strengthened by his statement that the freedom and sovereignty of the United States were incompatible with any super-government.

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On the other hand, the message warmly advocated international cooperation to prevent war. The United States is ready to coöperate with all nations, both large and small, in devising means to promote disarmament on land and sea. Harding seeks to prevent and discourage aggressive war. desires closer ties and understanding with other nations. He promises to make proposals for conciliation, mediation, and arbitration. He hopes that international relations may be improved by codifying international law, and recommends the appointment of an international tribunal to settle controversies in accordance with recognized principles of law and justice, when such controversies have been voluntarily submitted to it by the disputants. But though the United States may not join the League for an indefinite time to come, there is nothing to

prevent the members of the League joining the United States in organizing an international tribunal of the kind suggested by the President. Such an arrangement would have the great advantage that the decisions of a court thus voluntarily appealed to by governments would gradually form a code of international customary law common to all civilized states.

The Americans have also suggested, with a view to utilizing the Monroe Doctrine, that the Pan-American Union as a whole might enter into an arrangement with the League of Nations, as a predominantly European institution, by which the Pan-American Union would take over all the executive functions of the League of Nations in the Western Hemisphere. This would practically exclude European governments from intervening in American controversies. Canada, which does not belong to the Pan-American Union, would remain in the League of Nations. What would the Spanish-American republics do? Would they have to resign from the League? If not, they would be playing a double rôle, which might cause trouble. To divide the nations up by continents would be a great step backward, and would lessen the prestige of the World League. Unless very skillfully managed, it would merely substitute a new division among the countries of the earth for the older one.

In any case, the League is already a going organization. I personally convinced myself at Geneva that it is able and anxious to do useful service. The International Labor Bureau, especially, is proving most valuable in preparing the way for better social-welfare laws and in gathering facts about emigration. It would be a great misfortune to discontinue this work so auspiciously begun, merely to try some new experiment. I believe that we ought to wait

until we see how the present scheme works out. Everything is shifting and unsettled. New organisms cannot be made offhand. They are the fruit of slow evolution.

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One thing is sure. The danger of tremendous war between the two Anglo-Saxon nations and Japan already clouds the horizon. Lord Parmoor, President of the 'Fight-theFamine Council,' mentioned in a very characteristic way, during his recent visit here, six grievances which every American carries around in his notebook; Ireland, the Japanese race-problem, the Mesopotamia oil question, Yap, the merchant marine, and the navy. Forty million Yankees sympathize with Ireland. Canada and Australia side with the United States on the race-question. These dangerous, inflammable materials may at any moment flash into spontaneous combustion, starting a new world-conflagration. I see only one safeguard against that fearful peril - a peril that threat

ens the very existence of civilization. It is some agreement looking toward disarmament. If human folly has its way, and some great soul is not given us who will lead the world to. peace, society is headed, beyond saving, straight toward anarchy and ruin.

The only ray of hope is that Americans may see that their own stake in the business solidarity of the world - their imperative need of a restored world-trade compels them to help Europe regain its feet. That kind of coöperation may lead to still other things. Anything is better than an armed peace-a peace based on alliances and counter-alliances and artificial balances of power. For such devices automatically convert every local conflict into a world war. Whether we have the League of Nations or some looser union, we must have some worldembracing institution, which will make impossible, or at least extremely difficult, a repetition of such a catastrophe as we have just experienced.

A RED GUARDIST'S NARRATIVE. I

BY C. S.

[The author is a former Austrian officer who was about to take his doctorate in chemistry at the University of Zurich when the war broke out. He was captured in the first campaign and spent six years in Siberia and Russia.]

From Neue Zürcher Zeitung, April 1, 3, 24
(SWISS LIBERAL REPUBLICAN Daily)

I EXPERIENCED many privations and adventures and went through much mental struggle before I decided to join the Red Army. I had been a student at Zurich for five years before the war and had almost completed my course when its storm broke. Sum

moned back to Austria in August 1914, to take my position as reserve lieutenant in the First Imperial Regiment of Tyrol Jägers, I departed with my troops for the Galician front. I had been in service scarcely three weeks when I was seriously wounded during

the Austrian retreat from Lemberg and left on the field of battle. The advancing Russians picked me up, sent me to a hospital at Kieff and, after my recovery, forwarded me by a twentyone days' railway journey to Atschink in Siberia.

Years passed in dreary imprisonment - imprisonment in the literal sense of the word. Three small buildings in a narrow enclosure surrounded by a high plank fence housed two hundred officers. We did not leave that enclosure for two years and a half. We did not catch a glimpse of the world outside, we had no mental distraction, and although we were well fed and provided for, ennui made this the hardest period of my imprisonment. When the first revolution occurred, things became better. We were taken to an immense prison camp at Krasnojarsk which at times held 10,000 men. Life was more varied. We had an abundance of change. For a year and a half I was employed in this camp as manager of a soap factory. Following that, I worked on my own account for nine months as superintendent of an industrial-chemistry laboratory. Subsequently, when all such industries went to wreck, I worked for nine months as a wood chopper in the primeval Siberian forest, leading a real Wild West life. When I returned to the prison camp, an epidemic of spotted typhus was raging, and I was put in charge of one of the hospitals. That was my last service before I joined the Red Army.

As long as the typhus outbreak raged, I had enough to do and enough to eat. But the hospital was situated inside the prison camp and provisions were constantly getting scantier. Every day, we were given half-a-pound of bread, and cabbage soup, if times were good. But times were not always good, and our bread rations became more

and more irregular. First we lacked wood for baking, then the flour supply stopped. Eventually the epidemic wore itself out. Thereupon, the hospital was closed and I was left without the means of livelihood. What should I do? Together with a man who had been my best friend for years, I scoured the vicinity for employment without finding anything. There was no way to earn our bread, no opportunity to get back home.

The Red Army was our only recourse to escape starvation. That was the principal recruiting inducement with the Bolsheviki. It was the solid bond which held the army together and made it such a power in powerless Russia. A man who has never been in a country where actual famine prevails, cannot appreciate how this single question of getting something to eat finally becomes more important than anything else in the world, and completely controls the acts and morals of the individual and the community. We struggled long and bitterly against the idea of joining the Red Army. Like all my companions in the prison camp, I had acquired more radical ideas as time went by. That was the general tendency in every belligerent country, so I do not need to justify myself for that. We prisoners, in addition, felt absolutely deserted and neglected by our own governments. We did not hear a word from them or their representatives for six years except, on one occasion, a solemn greeting from the Kaiser and a box of military decorations! Notwithstanding this, it was a hard decision to make. We could not endorse the Bolshevist doctrine. Men of bourgeois birth and education, with academic training and the prejudices and predilections of an officer, cannot consent in their hearts to a dictatorship of the proletariat. We first talked shamefacedly and hesitatingly of the

bare possibility of joining the Red Army, and discussed the matter as a pure question of theory, each trying to find out what the other really thought. We would talk about bread, and the soup, and the kasha, or gruel, which were issued to the Red Guards. When you have not tasted a mouthful for two days, such conversation makes an impression. We would say: "They're getting two pounds of bread a day in the Red Army!' Every job in Russia was valued only by the amount of bread it brought a man. Money had Money had become so worthless that you never mentioned it in talking of wages.

So after the hospital was shut up for good, and the prospect of getting food from any other source proved hopeless, we began to think seriously of this step. We made our decision, however, on the spur of the moment. A car of the 'First International Brigade' drew up in the camp to enlist new soldiers and take them along. When we looked at the well-fed drivers with their contented, self-satisfied faces under their red starred caps, we suddenly made up our minds. Running back to the barracks, we gathered together our little possessions, a mattress, a blanket, a tea-kettle and a few scraps of clothing,

- threw them on the wagon, wrote our names in a register and, five minutes later, were rolling out of the camp with thirteen other comrades on our way over the prairie to the town. Our party of fifteen consisted partly of officers and partly of privates. We were all classed officially as, 'foreign proletarians.'

Our first employment was as teamsters with the wagon train which had just been enlarged by a general requisition of horses. The word 'train' sounded all right, for the principal labor, we assumed, would be done by the horses, and we felt a tender interest in the things the horses would haul.

So we were well content with our assignment. As soon as we reached the town, we were taken to a barracks and, half an hour later, received our first allotment of bread, tobacco, and matches. Yet we had a feeling of humiliation in our hearts. New recruits of the Red Army, previously imperial jäger officers! When we were called to the colors in the summer of 1914, our heads were filled with dreams of decorations, honors, promotions - and here was where we came out! Teamsters in the Red Army! Yet we had supper with soup and kasha. So we laughed at the irony of fate and felt relieved to be free at last from prison life and in the way of sometime going home-our real and only purpose.

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Since we really knew something about military science, it was an interesting experience to study the famous and infamous Red Army. The first thing we noted was that our original idea of this organization was utterly false. In a country where nothing runs properly, where disorganization is normal and universal — and I mean a disorganization which a Swiss is utterly incapable of conceiving - we naturally expected something of the same kind in the army. Strange to say but it is true, nevertheless the Red Army is well organized and works excellently. Could it have accomplished what it has otherwise? Kolchak, Denikin, Wrangel and the others have been conquered and crushed, although they were abundantly supplied with the best of war materials, while the Red Army had little or none of these things. I was still serving in the typhus hospital when Kolchak's army collapsed. The White troops retreated eastward from Omsk with the Red forces on their heels. They were two days passing our prison camp. It was a remarkable sight; thousands of sleds dragging over the steppes with weary, hopeless men.

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