THERE is a passage in the letters of Fontane the prophetic insight of which will strike the German who reads it now, after two years of successive disaster have taught us instinctively to dread the comings of the morrow. It was written in the autumn of 1893, at a time when Wilhelm II was filling the land with the noisy indiscretions of his early reign, to the sullen accompaniment of fallen Bismarck's angry speeches. Fontane referred to Germany's still precarious situation and the deep misgivings prevailing among our people. Sympathizing with the latter, the poet wrote to a friend:

The possible loss of all we have so gloriously won between 1864 and 1870 is openly discussed, and though we keep on adding men to our army by the hundred thousand, and voting additional hundreds of millions for the budget, no one feels that the country is safe; nor will he feel so no matter how much of this sort of thing we do. What we have won may be lost. Bavaria may again go its own way. The Rhine country may desert us. East and West Prussia may do the same. The kingdom of Poland I think very probably sooner or later may be restored. These are not merely bilious fancies. They are things which can happen within a few months if 'Europe once breaks loose,' and which every serious-minded German sees are possible.

This was written only twenty years before the outbreak of the World War. How appallingly public opinion was corrupted during those two decades! Wilhelm II with his boastful ostentation, his love of show, his blindness to reality, his incapacity for sane government, won a complete victory. Most of our ruling classes gladly joined his

following. Those who resisted at first were swept off their feet by the flood of gold which business prosperity brought us. As our trade balances enlarged, our civic conscience and moral courage lessened. Our political vigor, intellectual independence, idealism, and cosmopolitan sympathies were atrophied. What more could we ask? Had we not grown great, rich, and powerful? We were indeed all these things so long as we dealt wisely with our neighbors and were alive to the perils of our artificial prosperity, founded on a narrow, encircled continental territory and uninterrupted intercourse with the rest of the world so long as we did not forget what twenty years before every serious-minded German said was possible. However, we did forget these things, and the war came. We continued to forget them, and the war was prolonged for more than five years, until the wells of our strength ran dry, until the victory of our opponents was absolute, until our collapse was hopeless and complete. But when defeat overwhelmed us, the men who had led us to the verge of the precipice reviled us and declared: 'It was the German people who stabbed our army in the back; it was the revolution which caused our disaster!'

That is a lie. We know to-day, better than we did two years ago, that what happened in November, 1918, was no true revolution. Conditions both at home and abroad made that impossible. And every later effort to

convert that incident into a revolution proved futile.

Kropotkin, the great Russian revolutionist, whom the present Moscow government seems willing should starve, wrote that two things are necessary for a revolution; revolutionary ideas among the educated, and revolutionary acts by the commons. Both were present in France in 1789.

Two great currents prepared the nation for the revolution, brought on that event, and saw it through. One was a current of ideas, a flood of new thoughts, a vision of political regeneration, among the middle classes. The other, the current of action, came from the peasants and the city proletariat who sought an immediate and radical betterment in their condition. When these two currents met and joined forces, a revolution came.

The mind of the middle classes was long prepared for a revolution; the philosophers, school teachers, and political economists of the eighteenth century had blazed the way. Its objects were well defined; political freedom, constitutional government, and Parliamentary representation, instead of absolute monarchy; middle-class equality instead of a privileged nobility and clergy; free competition instead of government fettered trade. Simultaneously, the masses saw the social aims of revolution as vividly as the educated saw its politicals aims; liberation of the peasantry, who were then the real proletariat, for the city industrial proletariat was comparatively unimportant; abolition of feudal burdens, tithes, and servile obligations; and free farms for all. The objects of the revolution were therefore definite. Above all, these objects could be gained by revolution, and in no other way. Political rights could be won for disenfranchised classes only by a new constitution set up by force. The peasants could get their freedom only by a general rising, demanding their rights, and forcing the feudal lords to renounce their titles

and to abolish feudal dues. That was real revolution. So far as it was truly revolutionary and not merely a dramatic blare of trumpets, so far as it conformed with the thought and the social needs of the period, it succeeded in spite of temporary defeats, and of the reaction which inevitably follows every great historical overturn.

What happened in Germany, in November, 1918, was entirely different. It was merely a spasm of military and economic palsy. It was not the product of serious preparation, of definite aims, of conscious thinking directed toward a specific goal. It merely expressed the fact that the old German government had become hopelessly rotten and had collapsed of its own weight. No new theory of government had captured the minds of the public; we merely returned to the old eternal truths of democratic liberty and selfgovernment. Ideas always latent in the minds of the people were accepted as self-evident. Arbitrary government was judged and found wanting, wrecked by its own supporters. There was no choice but to create a democratic republic. Therefore, the political object of this so-called 'revolution' was secured without a struggle. It was the normal outcome of the collapse of the old system. All the nation was called upon to do was to develop and protect democracy. Since the political issue thus settled itself, the social problem present in every revolution at once assumed primary importance.

Hereupon appeared the real, the true tragedy of this German 'revolution': the failure of Marxian socialism. For decades the theories of Marx had held undisputed sway over the minds. of millions of German workingmen, giving the latter an exclusively materialist conception of history and converting them to the dogma of the class struggle. But the moment when thes

German workingmen were ready to take control of the government, the learned exponents of Marx began to dispute violently over how they should employ their power. Marxism as a political doctrine is nothing but negation of the existing system. It was now called upon to state positively what it would set up in place of that system. The French revolution of 1789 had a clearly thought-out constructive programme. The German 'revolution' of November, 1918, started out by confessing that it had no positive programme. The whole theory was false, because it did not know what it wanted. It was doubly false, for even its negative objects could not be attained by revolution. This emphasizes a second radical difference between 1789 and 1918. It is not our economic ruin, the inevitable consequence of years of warfare, which prevents the Marxians from putting their ideas in practice, as they now insist. Economic ruin and chaos ruled in France before and during its revolution. That country experienced famine and wild profiteering, state bankruptcy and insane inflation of the currency. What determined the different outcome in the two instances is something else. It is the difference between feudalism and capitalism, between an agricultural country and an industrial country. In an agricultural country, you can abolish feudalism by law and if necessary by force. If, during a revolution in France or in Russia, peasants expel proprietors, burn their châteaux and mansions, and divide up the land, a new system of production at once succeeds the old one. Cattle multiply and the fields bear crops. But in an industrial state, while you can destroy capitalism, you simultaneously destroy production and the subsistence of the people. Workingmen may indeed coerce the superintendents of factories and shops. They

can levy great contributions upon them. But they cannot change the system itself. If the employees, as they recently did in Italy, seize factories by force, they may be able to keep the proprietors out of possession; but the chimneys no longer smoke and machinery soon stops. We must recognize this truth. In a feudal, agrarian land the existing system can be overthrown by a single revolutionary act; in a capitalist, industrial state, the existing system can be changed only by gradual reforms dealing individually with a multitude of particular problems. The outcome may be very revolutionary, in the same sense that the rise of modern capitalism itself was a revolutionary event, as the war was a revolutionary influence, as the present chaos in international exchange is producing a revolution, as a radical transformation of mental attitudes on the part of peoples and classes may produce a revolution. But the method is not revolutionary in the true sense of the word. It is evolutionary. Only gradual reforms steadily pushed forward by the common people, and aiming at specific distant goals, can produce the change.

Since what we call the November 'revolution' had finished its real task when it swept away the débris of the old arbitrary government, we ought to have been ready very shortly to start on this path of evolutionary progress. That called for the union of all who were determined to abolish hereditary rulers, who honestly desired social reform, and who sought to reconstruct. Germany on a democratic foundation of liberty and equal rights; a union of wage earners and employers, of peasants and scholars, to abolish rank and privilege, and to restore the conscious, mental and moral community of the nation. But we could not thus unite. Consequently, we do not yet know whether we are on the road to new re

action or to more radical revolution, either of which will utterly ruin us, or whether we are at last on the path toward recovery. Our people are for the time being mentally at sea. They wander hopelessly in the dark. It is the second tragic feature of what we call the German revolution'; that the madness of the conqueror does not leave us in peace to perfect our democracy at leisure, that the indifference and wrong-headedness of the world continue to push our people toward despair.

Simply observe the billboards in a German city to-day. If an unknown lecturer advertises a talk on some indifferent subject, let us say the relations of the sexes, the crowd throngs to hear him as if the whole weal and woe of the nation hung on this single point. He has to repeat his lecture a half dozen or a dozen times. People will pack Christian Science meetings to-day, and Spiritualist lectures tomorrow. And so it goes. To be sure, there are quieter and deeper currents moving among us. Numbers have

freed themselves from the materialistic obsessions of pre-war times, and are trying seriously to cultivate the higher values of life. But this does not help the government in the present emergency. The worthiest of our people are turning away from public service and political affairs, leaving them in the hands of reactionary or radical extremists. These extremists capitalize the despair of the masses, and misuse it for their selfish ends.

A Russian poet, Victor Panin, has written a novel upon present Russia, entitled The Hour of Trial. In this book, the first truly literary production which has reached us from the blockaded realm of the Bolsheviki, occur these sentences; sentences which Germany might well use to proclaim its own condition to the world:

We need help not so much to save our lives as to preserve the faith of a hundred million people in the existence of truth and goodness. Otherwise, our hearts will die of their burden of bitterness, and we shall perish cursing life and our fellow men. That is the most frightful thing of all to perish thus despairing.

VOL. 21-NO. 1047

WHILE reading the London Times one morning, I discovered a lawsuit and a letter. I am printing this letter because I have seldom seen a bit of writing in whose wording the author's nationality is more clearly stamped, and because it will offer food for thought to those who insist that English and American speech are identical. How many of our readers, we wonder, have read Mr. Rupert Hughes's eloquent and soundly reasoned plea for preserving a genuinely national flavor in American speech, or perused Mr. Henry Mencken's revealing book The American Language. Yet the question which these gentlemen have raised day by day becomes a genuine issue. And this issue, as I understand it, is shall we hold fast to the strictest British standard of speech or shall we admit American-born words and turns of speech into the book of good usage? Shall we be shadows or ourselves?

The writer confesses to a genuine sympathy with Mr. Hughes's attitude. He would have us hold fast to the traditional grammatic usage, yet eager and alert to give our vocabulary and our general speech any richness and color of American origin. It is time for a revolt against the apologetic, the colonial attitude, just as it is time for a certain class of Americans to cease pretending to be imitation Londoners.

But now for the letter. Observe how familiar the words, yet how British the feel of it. A certain Mr. D—— is writing to his landlord, Mrs. Gill, complaining that her agent and rent collector is not keeping certain

other tenants in order. The agent, aggrieved at the letter, sues the writer and is awarded damages.

DEAR MADAM: I trust that you will pardon me for sending direct the April rent for this flat. The present representative at Hornsey of your agents, Messrs. Stoate and Stanley, is not up to his work, and, if I may say so, it is a pity to pay commission when no services are rendered in return.

For a year and a half we have endured torture owing to the unnecessary tumult overhead. Mr. Sinclair tramps about the greater part of the morning in heavy boots doing housework. At night Mr. and Mrs. Sinclair go to the 'Pictures,' and a relation comes in tramping about and doing ironing and so forth, or Mr. Sinclair goes to one of his clubs, comes home late, and talks loudly into the small hours of the morning.

The children are provided with unsuitable toys for those who are not taken out - a doll's pram and a large toy motor-car which are incessantly wheeled about over our heads. There is a constant succession of banging and shouting relations. Even when the Sinclairs go away their place is taken by Mrs. Sinclair's sister (a virago who delights in annoying people), her husband. and child. This woman's husband is in the printing trade, has to get up at six o'clock in the morning, and apparently thinks it necessary to wake us up as well. These creatures are in possession now.

At times Mr. Sinclair uses the premises as a warehouse, huge packing cases being dumped into the narrow hall here. A small select flat like this is not suitable for Mr. Sinclair and his kidney. What he needs is a Rowton House. The ceiling in our kitchen is coming down owing to the banging overhead, and a gas mantle only lasts an evening or two. They don't do their duty by the drains. All this has been repeatedly told to your agent's representative.

But, as indicated above, he is hopelessly incompetent. A warning from him to the Sinclairs stating that, in spite of the housing problem, people can still be ejected for habitually making

their neighbors' lives unbearable would probably have resulted in a mitigation of the nuisance. But he won't do anything.