ing, and many other purposes. A sane economy would welcome plentiful rubber as a great industrial blessing calculated to stimulate industry and to spread comfort. Let us see what our existing economy makes of the matter.

The heavy fall in rubber prices (from about 38. per pound at the end of 1919 to about 1s. 3d. as I write) has been treated as a misfortune-almost as a disaster. The British rubber planters put their heads together and solemnly resolved to reduce output. Their combination for such purposes, known as the Rubber Growers' Association, realized that foreign aid must be called in if their attempt to create dearness was to succeed. Negotiations were accordingly opened with the body known as the International Association for Rubber Growing in the Dutch East Indies. A council of war followed at The Hague (October 9), and 'almost unanimously,' as the newspaper report has it, the British and Dutch resolved to reduce production by 25 per cent in the near future, a fact which happily makes for the peace of nations by disposing of the peculiar sting of the well-known couplet:

In matters of commerce, the fault of the Dutch Is giving too little and asking too much.

The rubber restriction scheme became operative on November 1. The commercial column of the Times observed that this unprecedented display of coöperation among rubbergrowers is a development which contains interesting possibilities for the future,' which was to say a true thing.

As with rubber, so with tea. In 1913 the average price of imported tea was 9d. per pound. In 1914-1916, the British tea trade sent away enormous quantities of tea to neutral traders who, in turn, gleefully sent it on to Germany, with whom we were then at war. (In 1914, 30,650,000 pounds; in

1915, 26,600,000 pounds; in 1916, 19,000,000 pounds were exported from the United Kingdom to European countries other than Russia.) In 1916 there was a consequent tea shortage and the average import price rose rapidly, with an average for the year of 18. 22d. In December, 1919, the average auction price was as high as 18. 10d. Now it is under 1s., which should be cause for much rejoicing, for here is an article whose price directly affects the comfort of the poor. What do the tea planters make of the situation?

Their conduct has been exactly the same as that of the rubber planters. The committee of the Indian Tea Association met at the end of September and passed the following resolution:

That the Committee recommend that the crop for this year be restricted to not more than 90 per cent of the average crops produced in the years 1915 to 1919, or, as an alternative, that proprietors should cease plucking on November 15, 1920. Further, that the crop for 1921 be limited to not more than 80 per cent of the average crops produced in the five years 1915 to 1919 inclusive, provided that the proposed reduction for the year 1921 is supported by at least 85 per cent of the industry.

The Ceylon Tea Association also quickly arrived at the conclusion that it was necessary to create an artificial tea famine to save the weaker members of the trade and to maintain the industry in profit. Producing tea is all very well, but by the tricks of trade it must bow to the making of profit.

It is curious to observe that not a word of criticism of these attempts to fight cheapness by curtailing output has appeared in any of the organs which have for the past two years screamed at the British workman for not producing more. More production has become a parrot cry, but it is directed not to those who condition output but to the humble working units

of production who wield neither capital nor managing power. The only exceptions in the press that I know of have been in the Daily News and in that very interesting weekly Ways and Means. The latter, in an outspoken criticism, points out to 'Capital' (by which, doubtless, is meant Capitalism, not at all the same thing) that if 'Labor must give up the policy of restriction of output. Capital must return to more moderate and more sensible ideas as to an adequate rate of profit.' And it adds with much point, 'How is it possible to lecture labor on limitation and ca' canny when this sort of thing is going on?'

Unfortunately, Capitalistic ca' canny is at work in many more connections than tea and rubber. Timber, so necessary to the vitally important housing industry, is held up by North European combinations, who have us at their mercy because British private enterprise saw in past years no profit in a crop so long a-growing. Paper pulp, and therefore paper also, are consequently affected. Cotton, which has been the subject of an enormous price inflation, accompanied by the ingathering of profits beyond the dreams of avarice, is being worked upon by the American cotton planters, whose methods are more summary and less civilized than those of the tea or rubber growers.

On October 16, the Morning Post published an article from its special correspondent at Washington which opened thus:

Owing to the general fall in prices the South is facing a cotton war. In several of the cotton districts of Georgia, Alabama, and South Carolina organized bands of men known as night-riders are posting notices on cotton gins warning their proprietors to stop ginning cotton, merchants from handling staples, and negroes from picking it until cotton reaches 18. 8d. the pound, the present price being about 10d. Any defiance of the warning is to be punished

by death. The gin-owners fear that their property will be burned, and have placed it under a heavy guard, and negroes are terrified and refuse to work. State officials have been called upon for protection, and steps are being taken to suppress violence.

The economic life of the South is bound up in cotton. Since the beginning of the war the

South has enjoyed unexampled prosperity be

cause of the world's demand for cotton, but with the general fall in price the South has felt the pinch, and now, it is asserted, it faces ruin, as cotton cannot be profitably produced at 10d. per pound.

These extraordinary efforts have apparently succeeded. Cotton has sharply recovered, and as I write is quoted (for 'fully middling,' as the curious trade term has it) 18. 6d. a pound. This may be compared with the 28. 7d. per pound of last December and the 7d. or so of 1913.

As far as I have been able to discover, the American cotton hold-up has elicited no comment in the press here. And there is no cessation in the 'output' of printed matter which attributes high prices to high wages, or to the printing of Treasury Notes, or to the Excess Profits Duty, or to the inherent folly and wickedness of the British workman, or to the number of British officials, or to a Chancellor of the Exchequer who has ventured to stand up to Capitalistic associations.

Rarely, as in the case of Ways and Means already quoted, the voice of reason asserts itself. I see that Mr. Gary, the president of the great United States Steel Trust, which controls an industry enormously greater than that of the whole of the iron and steel industries of Britain and France put together, has declared that he 'recognizes the necessity for a downward revision of prices.' Indeed, that necessity imperiously exists. The shake-out must come, and the sooner it is over the better. The fight against cheapness is a fight against plenty, against industrial health, against social con

-

tent. The price of iron and steel and its 10,000 ultimate products is a hindrance to all activity. In 1913 pig-iron - at the top of a trade boom was at £2 10s. a ton. It is now £11 17s. 6d., or twice the price reached after the Franco-German war. From steel rails to guttering for a workman's cottage, and from boiler plates to gas stoves, current prices adversely affect every movement, every industry, every social endeavor.

The great American trade journal, the Iron Age, is also among the prophets. It agrees with Mr. Gary that prices must come down. 'For what purpose,' it asks, 'has heavy production been urged as an economic remedy except that prices may be brought down? While that in itself is sufficient rejoinder, the fallacy of the argument may be seen from an entirely different angle. What is one man's finished product is another man's raw material. Suppose the Connellsville coke operator should claim, as he has no thought of claiming, that it is good for the country that coke should be selling at twenty times the price it brought in 1894, because that "tends to stimulate production." The blast furnaceman would rejoin that the high price of coke is retarding production, that is, production of pig-iron. He might add that high prices for pig-iron "stimulate production," whereas the foundryman would remark that high-priced pigiron is discouraging the production of castings.'

But such utterances are exceptional. For the most part the master producers are resisting price revision by every means in their power. Capitalizations have been largely rewritten upon the fancy profits of inflation. A decline in prices is viewed as an intolerable evil. Commercial writers are

tempted to speak of the position as 'improved' when price ceases to fall or when it reacts, and to back the many schemes for withholding commodities from a world whose economic sickness is a matter of under-production at high prices. The policy of 'Price Guaranties' has made its appearance both here and in America. A firm of iron and steel tubing manufacturers publicly offers a guaranty to its customers that if they will buy at suchand-such a price it will not sell similar material cheaper before some date in 1921.

What a sorry muddle it all is! The world of after-the-war, so far from being further advanced in dealing with its material resources than in 1914, is practising the same commercial follies as of old, but under conditions which make their application the more crude and the more fraught with danger and suffering. Commercial science does not exist and cannot exist. There is no possible means of reducing the interaction of opposing greeds to a sweet reasonableness and order. The follies are inherent in the game as played. Higher price is the 'economist's' recognized road to a greater production. In practice it is a blind alley.

The secrets of production have been so far solved that the world may easily have plenty of all desirable commodities if it will concern itself with the organization of production for production's sake. If, however, it is content that the masses of mankind should remain the pawns of production for profit under commercial conditions, it must be content also to witness the frustration of production and the continuous succession of 'booms' and 'slumps' which mark the clumsy adjustment of the profits and losses of the industrial condottieri.

BY ARKADY AVERCHENKO

WE Common folk are so made that dislike extremely all abstract things. We want things to be concrete, so that we can see them, touch them with our hands, and maybe even smell them or lick them with our tongues to feel whether they are sweet or sour. Only then can we understand what they are like.

Take me, for example. No matter how many able accounts and monographs of history I had read about Catherine the Second and her minister, Potemkin, I could never picture to myself what kind of persons they were in flesh and blood. The historic recitals of all their actions and deeds never touched me a bit, never excited my imagination. But I did picture But I did picture both of them before me when I read just a few lines about them written in quite a different vein.

About Potemkin, I read as follows: 'A minute later, a man of majestic stature, dressed in a Hetman's uniform and yellow boots, entered the room, accompanied by a large retinue. His hair was disheveled; one of his eyes was slightly aslant; his face wore a haughty expression; while in all his motions one recognized a man used to giving orders.' And again, 'Potemkin remained silent and, with a carefree air, plied a little brush, polishing the diamonds of his numberless rings.'

And about Catherine the Second, 'At last, Vakula found courage to raise his head, and he beheld before him a woman, short in stature, somewhat stout, with powdered cheeks and blue eyes, her whole countenance wreathed in a majestic smile. "The Prince has promised to show me my people whom I have never seen as yet," the lady with blue eyes was saying, as she gazed at

And further on, "The Empress, who really had most shapely and beautiful feet, could not but smile when she heard such a compliment from the lips of a simple-minded blacksmith.'

There are just a few details, a few apparently unimportant brush strokes in these descriptions, and yet, the two figures rise out of them and stand before me as if they were alive.

At the present time, the two most interesting figures in Russia are, beyond any doubt, Lenin and Trotzky. And next to them in interest are two other figures, Gorky and Lunacharsky. But how can we picture these men to ourselves, concretely, since they are live men who walk, and talk, and eat, and love?

Surely, we cannot imagine them as they are from Trotzky's speeches at the Central Executive Committee, or from Gorky's or Lunacharsky's bloodless and thoroughly uninteresting articles. When we judge of them from that, they really appear to us like the characters of popular tales, who live in some infinitely removed realm, where abstract symbols wander noiseless and fleshless.

As far as I am concerned, I can picture to myself what Trotzky or Lunacharsky is like only if I take the skeleton of one of those abstract symbols, cover it with flesh, bind it with sinews and blood vessels, draw a skin over it, send warm blood coursing through it, make it walk and speak. I can see Lenin better through a sentence like this, addressed to his servant, 'What shall I do with such a fool as you, Comrade Marfusha? You've again served the wine warm,' than through a whole declaration concerning the needs of the passing moment delivered before a hundred party fools. This is why I sometimes try for my own satisfaction to picture to myself how they live there.

A perfectly reliable person recently arriving from soviet Russia, in telling how people live there, casually made the following remark:

"They are quite friendly with Gorky. Lunacharsky often comes to see him in the evenings, and they play cards. Trotzky comes, too, sometimes. They would have a drink, a bite to eat. Just as it used to be before.'

Enough! That's all I need. With two fingers I grasp this little bend of an edge and pull out into the light of day a whole concrete picture.

Maxim Gorky's library on a winter evening. Gorky paces back and forth over a thick carpet with long, noiseless strides. With every step, a long lock of his straight hair dances over his square forehead. His hands are in the pockets of his black coat, buttoned up to the chin. His whole appearance is pensive. On a sofa in the corner sits his wife, the actress Andreyeva who is now in charge of all the state theatres. She is knitting.

'What are you thinking about?' asks Madame Andreyeva.

'Oh, things in general. I saw a dead body to-day on the Mokhovaya; one could n't tell whether the man starved or froze to death. And people walked past with absolute indifference. No doubt many of them thought, "What does it matter? To-morrow it may be I, and other people will walk past with just as much indifference." Horrible, is n't it?'

'Do you expect anybody to-night?' 'Yes, Lunacharsky telephoned that he would come. And Trotzky promised to run in after the conference. By the way, have we anything in the house?'

"There's some cold veal. And I can have some macaroni prepared. Then there's some fish, and, of course, we can open up some canned things. There's a little cheese, too.'

'Any wine?'

'Nothing but the red. Not more than three bottles of port wine, I think. But there's still a big bottle of whiskey, the one you added lemon peels to. . . . Ah, Anatoly Vasilyevich! You ought to be ashamed of yourself for neglecting us like this. You have n't been here for three days now.'

Lunacharsky stood in the doorway, squinting his dark, near-sighted eyes, trying to reach with his tongue an icicle that hung from his reddish moustache, and rubbing his glasses that became moist the moment he entered the warm room from the cold street.

'What a cold,' he mumbled in his slightly hoarse baritone. 'Looks like at least twenty below. Yes, Holy Russia is rather cold to-night, he-he. Well, are we going to have a game to-night? Only if you'll get the better of me the way you did the other night, I'll simply have to refuse to play with you.'

'How is your wife?' asked Madame Andreyeva, folding her work and putting it away.

'Oh, a rather annoying thing happened to her. Last night she decided to walk home from the theatre; wanted to take a walk or something. Think of her wanting to do this, when we have two automobiles! Well, she stumbled over some dead body in the dark and fell down, bruising her whole shoulder. It's blue all over now.'

'Awful! She ought to have a compress.'

'Was it on the Mokhovaya?' asked Gorky pensively.

'What has the Mokhovaya got to do with it? It was way over on the other side. Is Lev Davdych (Trotzky) coming?'

'He promised to stop in after the conference. There is a fine player for you. A clever fellow, he is.'

'It's pretty warm here, though.'