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Under the Cloak of
Patriotism

sinister interests are taking advantage of the war to crush the movements for larger liberty among the workers and the people.

The menace of these attacks to the future of liberty in America is not generally recognized, because the truth is not known.

The National Civil Liberties Bureau is publishing the facts in a series of pamphlets. A full set „rill be sent on receipt of 30c, single copies 3C.

Civil Liberties

The Issues

Why Freedom li afters, by Nor-man Angell.

Liberty in Wartime (The .situa-

tion in the U. S. in view of

English experience). by Alice

Edgerton.

Who Are the Traitors? (leaf-let).

Constitutional Rights in War-time (legal),

Free Speech and Free Press (extracts from the writings of statesmen and scholars).

Cases

The Outrage on Rev. Herbert S. Bigelow of Cincinnati (Oct-

ober 2k', 1917).

The `'Knights of Liberty" Mob. and the I. W. W. Prisoners at Tulsa. Okla. (Nov. 9. 1917).

The Case of the Christian Pacifists at Los Angeles, by Nor-man M. Thomas.

The Truth About the I. W. W. (Facts in relation to the present trial).

The Conviction of Kate Richards O'Hare,-and North Dakota Politics.

Liberty of Conscience

War's Heretics ((I plea for the conscientious objector), by Norman M. Thomas.

The Conscientious Objector in the United States (all facts to date).

Note:-These pamphlets deal solely with the protection of American liberties In war-time. They are not colored by any "ism" or propaganda.

Cut this out and mail to

National Civil Liberties Bureau 70 Fifth Ave., New York City

full set

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Name

Address

'1'11E DRAMATIC WORKS OF
GERHART HAUPTMANN

[AUTHORIZED EDITION]

The life-labor of the greatest living dramatist is now available in a translation of which the London Times

says:

"The English reader will suffer little or no disadvantage from his inability to read Hauptmann in the original. . . The translations . -are quite masterly, and handle the complicated difficulties of Silesian and Berlin dialects, with all their gradations, in a manner showing excellent judgment and a tine sense of what is just and fitting in the use of language:.,.

ruder the editorship of Ludwig Lewisohu this
Incomparable contribution to stage literature is
presented in seven volumes, comprising 24 plays
and seven biographical and critical introduc-
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postpaid $1.6s.

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225 F1FTI-I AVENUE NEW YORK

TiHIS MARK ON GOOD BOOKS

An interpretation, at once scientific and eloquent, of poetry in life, and its relation to the poetry in literature.

ENJOYMENT Of POETRY

By MAX EASTMAN Editor of The Liberator

Formerly Associate in Philosophy
at Columbia ytii'rrsity, Author of
"Child of the k1 rnaetons" and Other
Poctms, etc.

$1.25 Postpaid

Offered by Charles Scribner's
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In the

Heart of Russia

Alone!

S HE was a charming America. girl-and the love of adventure ran strong in her veins. So she left the land of moonflowe.rs and cherry blossoms, and traveled alone across the dreary, trackless Siberian steppes-into the grim and war-torn heart of Russia. And there she found-

But the remarkable things she found-the amazing experiences she had-you can read about in a tale that is like the incense burning in a great Russian cathedral.

Miss Amerikanka

By Olive Gilbreath

But you would never have had this story except for a fortunate circumstance. Olive Gilbreath herself \vent to China to he a bridesmaid-and then-on a strange impulse-through Siberia and Russia. And out of that trip grew this romance that started when the Chinese Express whirled through the desolate wilds of Siberia. It tells of Russian aristocracy from the inside-of a German intrigue and the tragedy that followed-of the strange, passionate love of an American girl and a simple-soiled Russian nobleman.

Get your copy at your bookseller's to-day, and lose yourself in the spell of this fascinating story. $1.4o.

HARPER & BROTHERS, Established 1817

CONTRIBUTING EDITORS

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Ellen La Motte Robert Minor

John Reed Boardman Robinson Louis Untermeyer Charles W. Wood Art Young

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THE LIBERATOR

EDITOR, Max Eastman
MANAGING EDITOR, Crystal Eastman
ASSOCIATE EDITOR, Floyd Dell'

Published Monthly by the

L1BERATOR PUBLISHING CO., INC.

34 Union Square East,
New York City

Copyright, 1918, by the Liberator Publishing Co., Inc.
34 Union Square, New York.
Application for entry as second class matter at the post office
at New York City pending.

Editorial Announcements :

IT After two months of suspense, we have through the courtesy of the State Department succeeded in locating John Reed. This assures the continuation of his vivid first-hand accounts of Russian developments. His next article will contain a character-portrait of Leon Trotzky.

Morris Hillquit has asked us to give him another month for his article on The International Situation.

The article by James Weldon Johnson on What the Negro Is Doing for Himself has unavoidably been postponed to the June number.


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To day

THE LIBERATOR

Vol. 1, No. 3 May, 1918

Editorials

CARL SANDBURG sends me this quotation from

the letters of Thomas Jefferson. It voices an ideal-ism that is the brightest thing in our political history, and that shone hard through times of trial for those who put their faith in revolutionary liberty.

"The liberty of the whole earth was depending on the issue of the contest (the French Revolution) and was ever such a prize won with so little innocent blood? My own affections have been deeply wounded by some of the martyrs to this cause, but rather than it should have failed I would have seen half the earth desolated; were there but an Adam and an Eve left in every country, and left free, it would be better than as it now is."

The thing we have most to be thankful for is that a reflection of this ardent spirit shines today in Washington. A great revolution looks to us again across the seas for sympathy. We have given it. And for recognition. Shall we not give that?

The Labor and Socialist Conference

• IN the "Memorandum on War-Aims" of the inter-

allied labor and Socialist conference at London* there is not only more wisdom than in any document yet issued on the war, but there is also a practicality and a tone of confidence that are the expression of active strength. Two astonishing reflections came to me after I read that memorandum. First that the war has almost completely identified organized labor in the allied countries of Europe with the Socialist movement. And second that the war has compelled the Socialists to think. In this meeting at London the distinction between "Labor Men" and Socialists was lost and for-gotten entirely; and in the wisdom of its "memo-

"Published in full by The New Republic.

randum," although the theoretic principles of Social-ism contributed the intellectual frame-work, the language is practical, active, and of immediate application. It shows that judgment is being used about concrete problems, and not merely deductions made from abstract ideas. Combined with the Program of the British Labor Party, upon which we commented last month, this memorandum outlines a future for the world to which every man and woman of revolutionary hope must give hand and voice and effort.

The New Solidarity

NOT only did socialists and labor men unite in the

Inter-Allied Conference at London, but socialists who have been anti-war united with those who have been pro-war, in this final fight for international and industrial democracy.

The basis of this renewed solidarity is clear enough. The hypothesis of international working-class revolution against war was tried out by Lenine and Trot-sky, and it failed. Whether it failed entirely because of the backwardness of German and Austrian working classes, or partly also because of the attitude of Allied governments, has become an historic question. It failed. As a result of this example, however, the British Labor Party gathered strength of revolutionary conviction, and now promises a new drive in the same direction modified by the Iesson of that experiment. And moreover Woodrow Wilson, with messages to Congress that have shocked the Allied imperialists and astonished the world, has practically taken the leadership in international diplomacy of the British Labor Party. It was inevitable that these developments should draw together those socialists who were sincere in believing that the revolutionaries of Germany would act if given an opportunity, and those socialists who were sincere in not believing it.

In America, as well as in Europe, there is evidence

6 THE LIBERATOR

of such a drawing together of socialists. Indeed I can see no important -obstacle to it except the attitude of John Spargo, who unfortunately occupies a strategic position at the present juncture, having gotten astride of a newly and hastily created political party. Spargo is evidently afraid that he will lose his seat if he does not perpetuate the division and stir up all the personal rancor out of it that he can. I impute such ignoble motives to him, only because I can think of no other human motive adequate to explain the willful slander and falsification of fact in the interviews which he is feeding to capitalist papers.

"Of course," he says, "the socialists who are now recanting their position have to find some excuse, and they are saying that the change is justified by the changed conditions in Russia, by the President's insistence on democratic principles and by the action of the British Labor party in supporting the war. This is the veriest camouflage. It is a form of intellectual cowardice of the most craven kind. The Russian revolution was a fact when the St. Louis convention met. Russia's needs were discussed at the convention and by the committee which formulated the policy that was adopted."

"The statements of our war aims by the President in recent addresses are no more definite and direct in their democratic assurances than were the addresses which had already been made before the St. Louis convention met."

"Finally, the British Labor party was backing the war a year ago, just as it is today. There is, therefore, not an atom of justification in fact for the excuses offered by these socialists for their change of heart and mind. The truth is that they have come at length to recognize that the American people repudiate their stupidity. Through their dense ignorance of America and American principles a glimmering ray of under-standing has at last penetrated."

"The repentance is; so far as I can judge, as insincere as it is belated."

These sentences are printed in quotation marks on the editorial page of The New York Tribune. Every statement contained in them is false, and every emotion conveyed by them is petty.

The Russian Revolution that has affected our minds

-the Proletarian Revolution-was not a fact when the St. Louis Convention met.

The President's statements are more definite and direct than they were last spring and summer, and if Spargo doesn't know it, the Allied imperialists do know it to their woeful astonishment. Also Spargo does know it.

The British Labor Party has changed its way of backing the war from that of a confused patriotic re-form body to that of an active internationalistic social revolutionary power, since a year ago. Spargo knows that too.

The anti-war socialists have not "come to recognize that the American people repudiate their stupidity." As Spargo is well aware, the "American people" know nothing about the science of society and history which underlay the hypothesis upon which they decided to act. A shallow heart may crow over the failure of the Bolshevik experiment to succeed; every steadfast mind will give thanks that some man among those who have so long preached it, had the scientific courage to carry it through.

The Socialists are sincere, and there is nothing in the remainder of Spargo's article, which I do not quote, to prove their insincerity. It is a sophistical attempt by speaking of them all as a single individual to make them look false because one does not agree with another.

If anyone can explain this spitefully untruthful attack by John Spargo upon men whose integrity of mind and heart he knows and has trusted for years, in a more understanding way than I have, I hope he will write to me. I have to think Spargo is afraid that the solidarity of social-revolutionary forces, which is bound to come in America as it has come in England, will not yield so much pleasure for his personal egotism as the present situation which plays him up as the puller-in for a new political side-show.

Flavors of Sedition

AT the time when this editorial is read some of my
best friends and I will be on trial for sedition and
disloyalty to the republic. The specific charge against
us is that, in publishing our opinions in a magazine
called The Masses, we did feloniously and maliciously

May, 1918 7

and not respectably conspire to discourage enlistment in the armed forces of the United States. The extreme penalty for this crime under the espionage law is 20 years and $zo,ooo fine. Some of us have 20 years, but none of us has ten thousand dollars, and so we do not expect the extreme penalty even if we are convicted, but it is worth while to note that we stand in jeopardy to this extent, because it demonstrates very lucidly the importance of being respectable.

Indictments are almost always drawn up by people with a limited understanding of the nature of crime, and although they gather together all the words they can think of which mean bad and terrible, they rarely hit upon the combination which exactly expresses that quality in an act which brings it within the condemnation of the courts. Thus I think that in adding the words not respectable to our indictment T have made a discrimination that is really essential to the conduct of the case. I am sure that Mr. Barnes, in pondering the prosecution. is dismayed by . any residual atomic shreds of respectability that may crop up in the personal history of any of the defend-ants. And Mr. I-Ii.llquit on the other hand, if he takes my advice, will diligently collate all the circumstances tending to show that whatever the defendants did, and however feloniously and maliciously and heinously and nefariously, was done in a very bath and atmospheric pressure of respectable associations and connections. Only in this manner can he get the case elevated to that plane where the indictment will seem to have been a mistake-as it would be a mistake, for instance, to indict under the same statute the Editor and certain heady contributors of the Metropolitan Maganrne.

I was sincerely dismayed the other day when our most esteemed and accepted journalist, William Hard, published in the Metropolitan an article showing that America is not honest in her profession of anti-imperial war-aims, that she is in fact imperialistic. and so diabolically imperialistic that the German Kaiser would be moved to envy and admire, and that he might express his admiration, as at least he does in the fancy of this article, by pinning a "double-headed eagle" upon President Wilson's breast I was dismayed, I say, to see that some perfect automaton in the Post Office department. after reading this malicious and felonious

and heinous and nefarious but respectable article, which would be more likely to discourage enlistment than all the articles and pictures ever published in The Masses put together, promptly issued a mandate to the New York Postmaster ordering its exclusion from the mails. He was acting of course upon a very stupid and literal deduction from the exact words that were used in the exclusion and indictment of The Masses and other socialistic publications. I am compelled to think that his brains must be made out of machinery, for I do not know of any case in which anybody but a professor of formal logic ever conducted his reasoning in so ineptly consistent a manner. He was, to my infinite relief, and the relief of every person of cultivated feeling, promptly over-ridden by his superiors, and a second mandate dispatched to the New York Postmaster "explaining that although the first communication might have been "so unfortunately worded as to fully warrant" such action, nevertheless there was of course no intention of the Post Office department to exclude the Metropolitan from the mails. Thus it became evident that however stupid the sub-ordinates may be, who draw up indictments and dispatch automatic communications from the capital, the proprieties of justice are understood by the administrative officers of the republic. And the respectable felonies, that enliven the pages of The Metropolitan, and the Kansas City Star, and Collier's, and the news-papers of William R. Hearst, may continue with impunity, as they should do of course in a society whose ultimate and really admired ideal is respectability.

MAX EASTMAN.

DISTINGUO

FREEDOM, yes, but a Freedom combed and curled, A safe, tame Freedom, eating from the hand, A Freedom which will lie down at command, Not this wild wench whose scarlet flag unfurled Threatens our cozy, comfortable world With voice like thunder echoing through the land, Who tramps the highway with her ragged band Of va-nu-pieds from the depths upwhirled. God save us from her-We've no use for kings, Crowns are obnoxious, scepters are taboo, But lawyers, plutocrats, are sacred things. Touch not the Black Coat, lest you should undo The very woof of life and fling destroyed, Our spinning earth to chaos and the void.

Lizinka Campbell Turner.

8 This and That

takes all kinds of people to make New York, including

those who are calm under the perils of democracy but draw the line at spoiling the grass in Central Park to make Liberty Loan trenches.

OUR best wishes to Wall Street in its new campaign against the wildcat concerns. Among the speculator's inalienable rights is that of losing his money to regular, respectable people.

ITHAT movement to curb luxuries for the duration of the war might be called "The Deelight Saving Act." N pinning some new tinware upon the Crown Prince, the Kaiser telegraphed : "I am convinced that the brave and war-proved regiment will always be worthy of its princely Chief."

The headline man missed his chance: `"Kaiser Damns Army with Faint Praise."

MOST of the German papers have been quoting with cynical glee from a writer in the New York Times who said we must take Mexico for reasons of military necessity. Thus the Times, denouncing democratic-minded people as unpatriotic, sticks a knife into its Uncle Samuel's floating ribs.

THE 7'ageblatt says the New York Times "represents public opinion in America." What hope is there for a people who are as superstitious as that?

RUSSIA'S sentiments on Germany and Japan seem to be, "I could be unhappy with either, were the other dear charmer away."

NELSON MORRIS, the meat packer, testifies that $8oo a year (with two pairs of shoes apiece), is plenty for a workingman's family of five. His employees, he says, think more of the present than of the future-a touch of gayety that is needed in this all too sombre world.

THE House investigation shows that the navy has done its duty with great efficiency and skill. This is sad news for the Navy League, which is carrying on a private little war with Secretary Daniels.

JAPANESE has discovered that America's secret am-

bition is the annexation of Kamchatka. (Business of digging up the old geography to discover where, if any place, Kamchatka is, or are.)

'THE Supreme Court of Indiana has declared the state-

wide prohibition law unconstitutional. The same court recently saved the people from a woman's suffrage law. Indianians might put in an order for a little of that sel ['-determination everybody is talking about.

POKER winnings are taxable, the Internal Revenue Bureau rules, but losses may not be deducted from incomes. Per-sons with no military tastes may patriotically devote their evenings to increasing the public revenues,

COLLECTOR EDWARDS of the Wall Street revenue office says the war tax hits the rich hard; John D. Rockefeller may have to pay 38 million dollars on an annual income of sixty millions. How is John D. expected to make ends meet with only $415,000 in the envelope on Saturday night?

CHARLES E. HUGHES is president of a new society to promote closer relations between this country and Italy. Well; maybe he will have better luck as a harmonizer than he had in California.

THE Prussian government has broken its promise of universal secret suffrage and is substituting a crooked scheme of plural voting. Obviously any people who would continue to put up with that kind of government deserves to have it.

PRESIDENT LOWELL of Harvard says that professors should be allowed to tell the truth as they see it, without restraint, on any subject, in the class-room and out, in books and in periodicals-in short, that institutions of learning are in some way related to the diffusion of knowledge.

THE alacrity with which politicians of both parties are climbing upon the suffrage bandwagon suggests that we will have a new slogan for the coming campaign: Votes From Women !

HOWARD BRUBAXER.

INTO GREEN PASTURES

FIELDS where sunshine warms green grass, And the careless breezes pass-Here, out of the crowded slum, Women, men, and children, come!

But their steps are halted then By the jeers of Business Men: "Enter not-we paid the price. Do not taint our Paradise!"

Is this all our boasting's worth Of a brotherhood on earth? Are green field and forest glen Made by God for Business Men?

Clement Wood.

May. 1918 9

Arthur Young

"Will you tell me what time the train that starts for Louisville reaches Glenside, and where I can change cars for Caldwell?"

"Madam, I just told you all that."

"Yes, but I have a friend who wants to know."

Just Before the Drive

Pages from An Italian Diary, by Inez Haynes Irwin

Udine, Wednesday, October 17, 191 7.

WE left Rome for our ten days in the Italian war zone last evening in a pouring rain. The station was filled with soldiers going back to the war zone, and their womenfolk were taking gay or despairing leave of them according to their temperament. How often in France, in England and in Italy, we have pushed our way through these knots of women. Some are silent and stark and others are weeping agonizedly, but all trying to control themselves-at least until the car is out of sight...

When we woke in the morning we had passed Padua. Then came Mestre. We went past the familiar marshes and lagoons-stopped. It was a curious sensation to know that Venice with all her faded luscious loveliness lay there right at our hand and we could not get out even to look at her. In that high screening station, we might have been in Chelsea, 'Massachusetts, or Hoboken, New Jersey, or Oak-land, California.

And soon now, turning north towards Udine, the Headquarters town, we were passing all the definite evidence of war; soldiers and soldiers and soldiers in the picturesque long capes of Italy, of the magically vanishing green-grey color; war-carabinieri with their big, three-cornered hats; troop-trains; hospital trains with huge red crosses painted on their roofs and small ones painted on their sides; some of them with shutters down and moving fast, full of their' bloody burdens; others with windows open, cots all ready, the bed-clothes turned nicely aside, waiting to welcome their responsibility of torn flesh...

A little after twelve we arrived at Udine...You could hardly see the town for the soldiers. They poured-arriving -from the station into the square and flooded-departingfrom the square to the station; shouldering their little trunks or.dragging them or followed by porters, who carried them, soldiers in capes of dun green-grey; soldiers in coats of dun green-grey; soldiers in mackintoshes of a brilliant poisonous green. A few civilians moving about their perfectly lawful errands looked somehow as though they had no right to be there.

At lunch the big dining room was crowded with soldiers. The place rang with talk, sharply accented, staccato; laugh-ter, ringing and happy. Great wefts of smoke floated over the scene. Nearby sat a group of officers. All boys; young, debonair, comely. They laughed; they joked each other; no-body- could have been more happy or care-free...One hears a great deal of talk of the Great War putting an end to war forever. But whenever I look at a tableful of young officers I wonder if war will not always represent the greatest of all gambles-the supreme adventure-to male youth.

* *

Friday, October t9th. The authorities gave me a little trip to Aquilea this afternoon. Few towns in Italy have had a more bloody history. Once, centuries ago, it was a Roman town. Between that time and this almost every European race with the conquering instinct has tried to take it. Some have succeeded. The last to wrest it from the Italians were

the Austrians. But it has cone back to Italy again. A very short while ago, it was in Italia Irredenta, but now it is in Italia Redenta. It is about thirty miles from Udine.

We rode in one of the military cars and at the military speed. We passed all the signs of the war, except the actual fighting or the return of the wounded, so many soldiers in fact that had I been told I had seen a hundred thousand, I would have believed it. We passed hospitals with great red crosses painted on their roofs-for the information of hostile aviators, of course. We passed transport of all kind, martial and civilian; indignant cows who had been pressed into the alien service of carrying heavy loads; strings of the huge velvety oxen, wide-horned and mouse-colored, of the country; mules, horses, camions, carts bearing all kinds of mysterious loads that were covered snugly both from the rain and from our prying eyes. And three times we passed rest-stations, where all the men seemed to lie washing. They washed everywhere. Groups of them knelt at troughs, fountains, rivulets, employing the immemorial cleaning process of the country, beating the soiled clothes with stones. And every bush, every wall, every door, every window, every roof held drying masculine garments of some sort.

* * *

Agirilca. We went first to the church, where, at Christmas last year, General Cadorna and all his staff went to mass; on that day, according to old-time rites, the priest preached his sermon with a drawn sword across the book...In this. church there stands on a pillar a bust of the dead Christ, done by a wounded eighteen-year-old soldier during his convalescence in the hospital. • In his illness there appeared to him a vision of a brother who had been killed in the war. and this is a translation of that vision into marble. It is an extraordinarily striking, haunting performance-the head of the Christ set at a droop, the tossed long hair, still stiff with pain-sweat, tears oozing between the tangled lashes. The face is unmistakably the face of the dead and yet in the expression is set all the harrowing spiritual agony of life.

We visited the graveyard, a patch of ground set in the shade of the cathedral, guarded by a high campanile, and screened here and there with towering night-black cypresses. There were many fresh graves; some with the humble little crosses which mark the grave of the undistinguished private everywhere. Others-those of the men who had been decorated-bore crosses, all of iron, wreathed with branches of the oak, signifying strength, and of the laurel, signifying glory.

* * *

Coming home the car was held up by troops going forward to the trenches. They marched close to the car-hundreds of young boys in their war-faded grey-green uniforms, carrying guns. I shall not soon forget that procession of faces; pale, smileless, but resolute and flashing-eyed. I feel as though I had caught a glimpse of the eternal Young Italy-the Italy of Ceasar, the Italy of Garibaldi, the Italy of the Great War.

May, 1918 11

Sunday, October 21st, 1917. Udine again. Narrow streets curving past old palaces, tiny shops and across the toy-bridges on the canals, spiral into the inevitable Italian tangle. But sooner or later, they all seem to come out on the spacious principal piazza. Back and to the left-and surely, this is the very irony of propinquity-a wreath-crowned statue of Peace, studies the picture of war below her. That Peace is not a great bit of sculpture. But somehow she intrigues the imagination as she sits in her chair, relaxed, reposeful, serene -waiting...

* * * *

Not far away is the town-market. An Italian market in normal conditions is the despair of painters; but a market in the war zone is even more colorful than in times of peace. For there are the uniforms of half a dozen allies to add to its rainbow quality.

Of course the place is full of soldiers buying for mess. The Italian soldiers are invariably young, almost invariably hand-some. Perhaps the Latin is better adapted physically to be-come a uniform than any other race. Or perhaps the Italians have been unconsciously clever in suiting cut and color to the national type. Certainly always they make pictures. Mainly of course, they wear the war green-grey, but occasionally an apple-cheeked lad sports one of the long military capes, blue -almost sky-blue-of pre-war days. A scene like this has the effect of translating much mediaeval Latin art.

But they are not always Italians. Here come to rest is a big grey army camion with a group of French poilus in their refreshing horizon blue. Here a solitary Serbian in straight pale tan-colored blouse and his high black shoes, in one hand a lustrous copper tea-kettle. There an English Tommy comes pelting round the corner on a motor-cycle, stops and immediately disappears into a shop. At once, the cycle is surrounded by a group of Italians, making keen comments on its mechanism. Yonder, a, group of Americans in long brown coats, braid-trimmed on the sleeves and with the wide, cord-encircled hat, create a wave of turned heads as they pass through the ocean of grey-green; for they are recently come to Udine and the uniform is new.

* * * *

Girls. And such girls. Most of them softly, roundedly brown in the expected Italian way; others, and a surprising number of them, with the bushy brilliant red-gold hair so loved by Titian and Veronese, parted in the middle and bunching in great sun-kissed waves to their ears. They wear black shawls and black pattens. Some of them carry baskets that hang from hooks at the end of a curved pole, which rests, Chinese fashion, across the shoulders. A group of girl car-conductors come into the piazza ready to go on duty. They wear belted grey uniforms, their numbers in silver pinned on the crowns of their grey caps and they are very taut and efficient-looking except where, in lace collars, ear-rings, chains and charms, they break into inevitable femininity.

A group of officers very young, very gay, very handsome and, alas-but I said they were young-very haughty and supercilious-eye the pretty bare-headed girls as they pass. They are just below me and I can almost hear their comments. They arc so young that they are very cynical indeed, and very difficult to please in the matter of female beauty. Indeed, it is quite obvious that no one of them has ever met that ideal of feminine pulchritude which he holds up to him-self. They shrug and deprecate as the fair creatures pass.

Ten years from now-if they are still alive-they will not be half so fastidious. * * S

Tuesday, October 23. Last night I woke from the soundest of sleep to the noise of guns. I lay for a long time listening to them and marvelling at the strange world where one could lie warm and safe, with loud death booming not far away. I prided myself on my serenity. The guns died down. ' And then suddenly a rat began to gnaw his way through the walls. My heart turned to water...

We cline at the table with the correspondents ; English, American, Italian representatives of the American press. These war-time talks! People who have once had garlic in their salad can never again eat it plain. Will peace-time talks be spoiled for us forever, I wonder! I do not want to believe that. And yet-and yet-there is an enormous thrill, horrible sometimes but always there in the war atmosphere....

One of a group of newly-arrived American Red Cross men, who have been lunching in state with Italian officials, comes over to our table to offer us some of the butter which has been presented to them. He cuts off a generous third of a big roll. Butter in butterless Italy! It is weeks since we have tasted butter. We fell on it ravenously.

* * *

Thursday, October 25. We left Udine early this morning for Venice.

War ! Venice! What an anomaly ! There she stands though in all her colorful beauty, sophisticated and wistful, the black gondolas shooting like arrows of mourning over the tangle of multi-colored reflections in her green canals, the red, lateen sails trailing a shadow of blood over her silvery lagoons. But oh, what a difference from that gay, glad Venice of peace!

As you pass along the canals, you see through the iron grill-work of the lower windows of the palaces enormous piles of sand bags. This is everywhere. You come to the Piazza of San Marco to find the great square entirely metamorphosed. The little shops which sold such charming frivolities are mostly closed. St. Mark's itself is no longer itself. It has been shorn of its golden horses. Sandbags, inside and out, both here and about the base of the Campanile and around the Doge's palace, conceal all their greatest treasures of carving and color. Packed marvellously, these sandbags mount in serried ranks over a framework of wood to which they seem to give a curious structural value. One wonders if they may not result-these war-protectives-in a new impulse to architecture. But the saddest thing of all is that the old beautiful, colorful life of the square seems to be entirely sucked out of it. Soldiers-and here in great numbers, sailors-form the bulk of the passers-by. There is but a trickle of the old-time, care-free strolling and sauntering. Every-where young girl-mothers with babies in their arms accost you-begging. All the gondoliers are old men.

* * * *

Venice, Friday, October 26. Up early and out alone in the vapory Venetian morning, I saw in the Piazza San Marco a really touching ceremony-the municipal feeding of the droves of St. Mark's. Poor creatures! How they must yearn for peace and the well-filled purses of the tourists which' kept them fat as butter-balls. About nine came along an old man with a big sack of-what do you suppose? Macaroni ! He spilled it out of the nearly-closed end of the bag in a great

12 THE LIBERATOR

circle. Doves flocked from everywhere by twos and trios, by dozens and scores by hundreds. Following that circle of scattered manna, eating so close that heads were concealed and tails uplifted, they looked like an enormous wreath of fluttering, irridescent-petalled, gray orchids. People gathered about in a sympathetic circle. And when it was found, after the frantic feeding stopped, that much macaroni was left uneaten because the sticks were too big for the doves to handle, everybody knelt down and broke them carefully

into practicable portions.

* * *

Moments when we actually forgot the war... But we re-membered quickly enough .a little later when a group of the few Americans left in Venice sat in Piazza San Marco at tea. We were talking with something of an old-time vivacity. After all it was Venice. And-constant air raids to the contrary-what could the soul of Venice have to do with war?

Near us, the daily coznmwsique was put out. A group gathered about it. That group grew swiftly to a crowd, almost a mob. People emerging from the mass went about spreading the news. Suddenly-and how quickly it came about-it was as though somebody had thrown a constricting gas into that human blend. The square which, a few moments ago, had been a normal scene full of supple, easily-flowing streams of people, had changed, had crystallized into tight groups. Little knots of men stood all about talking low or loud, but quickly, earnestly, with furrowed faces and a strange air of bewilderment.

"Something doing!" one of our men said. And the males hastened to the conti nunique. "The Bainsizza plateau is being abandoned !" they explained on their return. "Why that's serious! Something has happened!"

The Bainsizza plateau! A position of great importance and gained by the pluckiest kind of fighting. Abandoned ! We looked at each other and suddenly we too, were a very serious group. But there was nothing to be learned to-

night. Perhaps to-morrow....

* * * *

When we left the restaurant somewhere between nine and ten, we came upon a picture of war which for dazzling beauty I shall not ever sec equalled. Everybody had been saying that we might expect an air raid to-night. And the Venetians were evidently preparing for it. The air was full of the flashing blades of searchlights-hundreds of them. They played back and forth, crossing and re-crossing, tearing and rending the moonlight, stabbing the zenith. It was as though the surface of the earth were a sieve, through the holes of which shot the white fire of a colossal cosmic blaze. One night last June when an air raid threatened Paris I saw some such similar exhibition over the Seine from the Pont Royale, and to that extraordinary effect was added the flashing twinkle of swarms of aeroplanes rushing like rockets to the zenith. That was beautiful enough, but here, with the spacious openness of the canals and the lagoons, with that imperial group, St. Mark's, the Doge's palace, the Campanile turned to bits of frosted lace-work by the moon, it

was like the titanic pyrotechnics of the gods of Olympus
* * * *

Ten days later. Those guns I heard in the night in Udine were the artillery preparation of the great Austro-German offensive. And that day we watched the square of San Marco grow tense with anxiety was the beginning of the great drive that took them through.the Italian front. We were worried

even then. Had we known what the true situation was, we should have been even more worried. When we left Udine it was as calm and securely serene as at any time since the beginning of the war. That was Thursday morning. The next day, Friday, in the afternoon, came the order to evacuate the town. Saturday afternoon the Austrian advance scouts rode into Udine. Sunday morning they took the town. Had we stayed out the last of our ten days of permission to the front there instead of in Venice, as we were much tempted to do, we should have had to walk over a hundred miles to safety in frigid, pouring, torrential rains, eating at rare intervals and sleeping under hedges or, if we were lucky, in barns. It would have been the great experience of a lifetime-if one survived it. Some of the correspondents, who formed those delightful luncheon and dinner groups in Udine stayed until the Austrians were almost in sight. They had a horrible experience getting out, though. They had to re-treat at it pace so stiff that sometimes they threw themselves exhausted on the ground. They slept on billiard tables or in the gutter. One walked many miles with feet that pumped blood at every step. He went to a hospital the instant he reached safety.

* * * *

The last day in Venice was wonderful. It was beautiful, sunny and with a still warmth in the air. In the morning we gondolaed the length of the Grand Canal, then through a net-work of the little canals. Curving streets which open at every dip of the paddle on a new vista; scene after scene of crumbled-stone palace beauty or shadow-haunted garden beauty; tiny bridges set on a slant; broken, faded loveliness of all description-all made more bewildering by reflections in the magic waters of the canals.

* * * *

That evening we packed and got off in a light rain that trailed the sunset, . .The first sign of trouble was at Mestre, where we were to change. The train was late. But it would arrive, according to the Station-Master, in twenty minutes. Twenty minutes went by and it was still late-and later-and later. It would be here in another fifteen minutes, the Station-Master promised, in a half hour, in another hour. Finally he admitted that he did not know when it would come. In the meantime the station was the scene of the wildest hub-bub. Every minute troop-trains were arriving; disgorging close-packed grey-green contents which immediately piled into other trains and whizzed off. Officers were giving quick, sharp low-voiced orders or excited impatient louder ones. Civilians, men and women and children, all with big bundles, began to choke tip the waiting-rooms. I was ordered to stay inside ; perhaps because I was obviously a foreigner, they could take no chaces with what might be a spy in this beginning of the rush of troops forward and an evacuated population backward. I went into the waiting-room and sat there until midnight.

Near me, a little slender woman, delicate to the point of thinness, with night-black hair and eyes, and a strange grey-olive skin, sat surrounded with bundles and babies. One child of nearly two, well--covered against the searching damp, lay in her arms-asleep, Beside her on the settee, under a cape, lay a boy of about three-asleep too. On the other side, under a shawl, lay a boy of about five-asleep also. On an adjacent bench Iay a fourth child-a boy of about seven-he, too slept. She was all alone, nobody to help her with those heavy bundles and those heavier sleep-logged babies when her train

May, 1918 1l

Sunday, October 21st, tgti. Udine again. Narrow streets curving past old palaces, tiny shops and across the toy-bridges on the canals, spiral into the inevitable Italian tangle. But sooner or later, they all seem to come out on the spacious principal piazza. Back and to the left-and surely, this is the very irony of propinquity-a wreath-crowned statue of Peace, studies the picture of war below her. That Peace is not a great bit of sculpture. But somehow she intrigues the imagination as she sits in her chair, relaxed, reposeful, serene -waiting.. .

* * * *

Of course the place is full of soldiers buying for mess. The Italian soldiers are invariably young, almost invariably hand-some. Perhaps the Latin is better adapted physically to be-come a uniform than any other race. Or perhaps the Italians • have been unconsciously clever in suiting cut and color to the national type. Certainly always they make pictures. Mainly of course, they wear the war green-grey, but occasionally an apple-checked lad sports one of the long military capes, blue -almost sky-blue-of pre-war days. A scene like this has the effect of translating much mediaeval Latin art.

But they are not always Italians. Here come to rest is a big grey army camion with a group of French poilus in their refreshing horizon blue. Here a solitary Serbian in straight pale tan-colored blouse and his high black shoes, in one hand a lustrous copper tea-kettle. There an English Tommy comes pelting round the corner on a motor-cycle, stops and immediately disappears into a shop. At once, the cycle is surrounded by a group of Italians, making keen comments on its mechanism. Yonder, a group of Americans in long brown coats, braid-trimmed on the sleeves and with the wide, cord-encircled hat, create a wave of turned heads as they pass through the ocean of grey-green; for they are recently come to Udine and the uniform is new.

* * * *

Girls. And such girls. Most of them softly, -roundedly brown in the expected Italian way; others, and a surprising number of them, with the bushy brilliant red-gold hair so loved by Titian and Veronese, parted in the middle and bunching in great sun-kissed waves to their ears. They wear black shawls and black pattens. Some of them carry baskets that hang from hooks at the end of a curved pole, which rests, Chinese fashion, across the shoulders. A group of girl car-conductors come into the piazza ready to go on duty. They wear belted grey uniforms, their numbers in silver pinned on the crowns of their grey caps and they are very taut and efficient-looking except where, in lace collars, ear-rings, chains and charms, they break into inevitable femininity.

A group of officers very young, very gay, very handsome and, alas-but I said they were young-very haughty and supercilious-eye the pretty hare-headed girls as they pass. They are just below me and I can almost hear their comments. They are so young that they are very cynical indeed, and very difficult to please in the matter of female beauty. Indeed, it is quite obvious that no one of them has ever met that ideal of feminine pulchritude which he holds up to him-self. They shrug and deprecate as the fair creatures pass.

Ten years from now-if they are still alive-they will not be half so fastidious. K * * *

1'uesdav, October 2.3. Last night I woke from the soundest of sleep to the noise of guns. I lay for a long time listening to them and marvelling at the strange world where one could lie warm and salve, with loud death booming not far away. I prided myself on my serenity. The guns died down. And then suddenly a rat began to gnaw his way through the walls. My heart turned to water...

We' dine at the table with the correspondents; English, American, Italian representatives of the American press. These war-time talks! People who have once had garlic in their salad can never again eat it plain. Will peace-time talks be spoiled for us forever, I wonder ! I do not want to believe that. And yet-and yet-there is an enormous thrill, horrible sometimes but always there in the war atmosphere....

One of a group of newly-arrived American Red Cross men, who have been lunching in state with Italian officials, conies over to our table to offer us some of the butter which has been presented to them. He cuts off a generous third of a big roll. Butter in butterless Italy! It is weeks since we have tasted butter. We fell on it ravenously.

* * * *

Thursday, October 25. We left Udine early this morning for Venice.

War ! Venice ! What an anomaly! There she stands though in all her colorful beauty, sophisticated and wistful, the black gondolas shooting like arrows of mourning over the tangle of multi-colored reflections in her green canals, the red, lateen sails trailing a shadow of blood over her silvery lagoons. But oh, what a difference from that gay, glad Venice of peace!

* * * *

Venice, Friday, October 26. Up early and out alone in the vapory Venetian morning, I saw in the Piazza San Marco a really touching ceremony-the municipal feeding of the droves of St. Mark's. Poor creatures! How they must yearn for peace and the well-filled purses of the tourists which kept them fat as butter-halls. About nine came along an old man with a big sack of-what do you suppose? Macaroni! He spilled it out of the nearly-closed end of the bag in a great

12 THE LIBERATOR

circle. Doves flocked from everywhere by twos and trios, by dozens and scores-by hundreds. Following that circle of scattered manna, eating so close that heads were concealed and tails uplifted, they looked like an enormous wreath of fluttering, irridescent-petalled, gray orchids. People gathered about in a sympathetic circle. And when it was found, after the frantic feeding stopped, that much macaroni was left uneaten because the sticks were too big for the doves to handle, everybody knelt down and broke them carefully

into practicable portions.

* * *

Moments when we actually forgot the war...But we re-membered quickly enough ,a little later when a group of the few Americans left in Venice sat in Piazza San Marco at tea. We were talking with something of an old-time vivacity. After all it was Venice. And-constant air raids to the contrary-what could the soul of Venice have to do with war?

Near us, the daily communique was put out. A group gathered about it. That group grew swiftly to a crowd, almost a mob. People emerging from the mass went about spreading the news. Suddenly-and how quickly it came about-it was as though somebody had thrown a constricting gas into that human blend. The square which, a few moments ago, had been a normal scene full of supple, easily-flowing streams of people, had changed, had crystallized into tight groups. Little knots of men stood all about talking low or loud, but quickly, earnestly, with furrowed faces and a strange air of bewilderment.

"Something doing!" one of our men said. And the males hastened to the communique. The Bainsizza plateau is being abandoned !" they explained on their return. "Why that's serious! Something has happened !"

The Bainsizza plateau ! A position of great importance and gained by the pluckiest kind of fighting. Abandoned ! We looked at each other and suddenly we too, were a very serious group. But there was nothing to be learned to-

night. Perhaps to-morrow....

* * * *

When we left the restaurant somewhere between nine and ten, we came upon a picture of war which for dazzling beauty I shall not ever see equalled. Everybody had been saying that we might expect an air raid to-night. And the Venetians were evidently preparing for it. The air was full of the flashing blades of searchlights-hundreds of them. They played back and forth, crossing and re-crossing, tearing and rending the moonlight, stabbing the zenith. It was as though the surface of the earth were a sieve, through the holes of which shot the white fire of a colossal cosmic blaze. One night last June when an air raid threatened Paris I saw some such similar exhibition over the Seine from the Pont Royale, and to that extraordinary effect was added the flashing twinkle of swarms of aeroplanes rushing like rockets to the zenith. That was beautiful enough, but here, with the spacious openness of the canals and the lagoons, with that imperial group, St. Mark's, the Doge's palace, the Campanile turned to bits of frosted lace-work by the moon, it

was like the titanic pyrotechnics of the gods of Olympus * * *

even then. Had we known what the true situation was, we should have been even more worried. When we left Udine it was as calm and securely serene as at any time since the beginning of the war. That was Thursday morning. The next day, Friday, in the afternoon, came the order to evacuate the town. Saturday afternoon the Austrian advance scouts rode into Udine. Sunday morning they took the town. Had we stayed out the last of our ten days of permission to the front there instead of in Venice, as we were much tempted to do, we should have had to walk over a hundred miles to safety in frigid, pouring, torrential rains, eating at rare intervals and sleeping under hedges or, if we were lucky, in barns. It would have been the great experience of a lifetime-if one survived it. Some of the correspondents, who formed those delightful luncheon and dinner groups in Udine stayed until the Austrians were almost in sight. They had a horrible experience getting out, though. They had to re-treat at d pace so stiff that sometimes they threw themselves exhausted on the ground. They slept on billiard tables or in the gutter. One walked many miles with feet that pumped blood at every step. He went to a hospital the instant he reached safety.

* * * *

The last day in Venice was wonderful. It was beautiful, sunny and with a still warmth in the air. In the morning we gondolaed the length of the Grand Canal, then through a net-work of the little canals, Curving streets which open at every dip of the paddle on a new vista; scene after scene of crumbled--stone palace beauty or shadow-haunted garden beauty ; tiny bridges set on a slant ; broken, faded loveliness of all description-all made more bewildering by reflections in the magic waters of the canals.

* * * *

That evening we packed and got off in a light rain that trailed the sunset... The first sign of trouble was at Mestre, where we were to change. The train was late. But it would arrive, according to the Station-Master, in twenty minutes. Twenty minutes went by and it was still late-and later-and later. It would be here in another fifteen minutes, the Station-Master promised, in a half hour, in another hour. Finally he admitted that he did not know when it would come. In the meantime the station was the scene of the wildest hub-hub. Every minute troop-trains were arriving; disgorging close-packed grey-green contents which immediately piled into other trains and whizzed off. Officers were giving quick, sharp low-voiced orders or excited impatient louder ones. Civilians, men and women and children, all with big bundles, began to choke up the waiting-rooms. I was ordered to stay inside; perhaps because I was obviously a foreigner, they could take no chaces with what might be a spy in this beginning of the rush of troops forward and an evacuated population backward. I went into the waiting-room and sat there until midnight.

Near me, a little slender woman, delicate to the point of thinness, with night-black hair and eyes, and a strange grey-olive skin, sat surrounded with bundles and babies. One child of nearly two, well-covered against the searching damp, lay in her arms-asleep. Beside her on the settee, under a cape, lay a boy of about three-asleep too. On the other side, under a shawl, lay a boy of about five-asleep also. On an adjacent bench lay a fourth child-a boy of about seven-he, too slept. She was all alone, nobody to help her with those heavy bundles and those heavier sleep-logged babies when her train

May, 1.918 13

Tired

should come. When our train arrived at midnight, she was still sitting there, her great eyes gleaming like still pools in her tired face, set on the distance - and perhaps on the future.

We were due in Rome the next morning at nine. We arrived the next night at ten, after a nightmare of cold, many stops. little and inadequate food at eccentric intervals, great crowds pouring onto the trains-the first of the evacues who, in the next few weeks, were to pour in such numbers into Rome that finally many hotels had to he requisitioned by the government to house them.

* * * *

The world knows now all the story of the Great Drive which brought Austrians and Germans on a wave of marvellously-conceived German propaganda far into Italy-a drive that took from the Italians all the Italia Irredenta that they had made into Italia Redenta-a drive, nevertheless, that made of Italy a unit so solid that nothing shall ever again shake that unity. But ahead of that drive sped the evacuation, a story which has not yet all been told and which can never of course be wholly told.

The correspondents described-some with streaming tears -that rout along the road from Udine: old men and women swaying through the driving rain; mothers with children; women in evening cloaks and satin slippers; destroyed munitions, destroyed stores of every kind, broken bridges. And as I listened, I thought of that little mother in the station at Mestre, her little brood sleeping tranquilly about her, her wide eyes fixed on the distance and the future.

* * * *

I met later one of the Red Cross men who had been in Udine when we were there. He told me their story. They got out as far as Treviso. There they felt safe. Indeed, they took a trip to the front the very Friday that Udine was evacuated.' The next day, however, came advices to go. At the station from which they left, they found a great crowd of women-five hundred at least-and all mothers with nursing babies. They stood there-those five hundred mothers-with their babies in their arms, silent and quiet, composed and ready. And as the Red Cross men waited, after those mothers had gone, another train came disembarking hundreds of little boys and girls under ten. They evacuated, you see, in the order of helplessness. "At Udine," he said, "we visited one of greatest hospitals for plastic surgery that I have ever seen anywhere-it was a revelation to all of us. They were treating many jaw cases-men whose faces had been partially blown away by shells. Some of those men had no lower jaws; their tongues were hanging down on their chests."

"And are they in the hands of the Austrians now?" I asked.

"Oh yes," he answered, "there wasn't time to move them. Of coarse, a certain number of physicans and nurses were tolled off to stay with them."

"Will the Austrians know how to take care of those jaw cases?" I asked.

"I don't know," he replied.

Many times since then, I've waked up in the night to think of those men with their faces half gone lying there and waiting to be taken by an enemy traditionally cruel ; thinking the terrible thoughts that must come at such a time....

But Peace still sits on her chair at the top of the pillar in Udine and surveys the crowd of Austrians as calmly as she surveyed the crowd of Italians. Quiet, serene, secure, she waits in silence. She knows her day must come.

LOVE THE DEVOURER

"The female (mantis or praying insect) being the strongest and most voracious, the male, in making his advances, has to risk his life many times, and only succeeds in grasping her by slyly and suddenly surprising her; and even then he frequently gets remorselessly devoured."-Quoted from "Science," Vol. IFIII, p. 325, in Ward's "Pure Sociology."

SAW him itch with love; his body taut,

His front legs twitching, on a brittle twig ; His long antennae stretched to her he sought,

His eyes bore on her, and grew stiff and big At sight of the female mantis he must love.

She sleepily occupied the branch below, Ignorant of the male who ached above,

Who inched upon her, clutch on clutch, in slow And timid progress, fearful of her grasp,

Fearful if death lurked in the prize of lust, Yet driven on to dare the dangerous clasp

By some sharp, painful, inevitable "must." A stir, a tremor, a look,-she sees her prey, And stiffens her sharp front claws for the fray.

And now he turns wishing he had held back,

Willing to scuttle off to loveless peace ; But she has flung herself to the attack,

Has grasped the hindmost leg ; he seeks release. She holds him, crunching brittle scales, and winds

Her legs around him, biting out an eye;

The reckless surge of love shakes him, and blinds ;

He clenches her, he does not wish to fly Till he has slaked his passion-thirst upon her.

She munches now a leg, his head, his chest, While he writhes ever amorously on her,

Pressing his headless body to her breast. At length, fed-up, she stops her cruel task, And stretches herself, again to laze and bask.

III.

This is the moment that he has been waiting ;

He twists himself into a close embrace, Accomplishes with his murderess the mating,

Wins the completion of the deadly chase. He shivers with his unabated fire,

And what is left of him has its full will, Easing his body of the ached desire,

Waking in her an answering lusty thrill For lingering hours she does not move or stir,

While he clings ever feebler, ever weaker; And then, when hunger comes again to her,

Eats all her spouse, whose sin was but to seek her. She climbs to whispering leaves, where she can creep Into a cradle and a sated sleep.

Clement Wood.

On the Inside

By William D. Haywood

CLANG ! clang ! a bell rang out, big iron doors slid back, the auto patrol wheeled up to the rear entrance of the Cook County Jail; and here we are.

We are in the wing of the "old jail," a room about 6o by 6o with a double row of cells four tiers high; our cells face the alley to the west. Cells are six by eight, about eight feet high with ceiling slightly sloping to the rear.

This cell is parlor, bedroom, dining room and lavatory all in one. Decorations black and white-that is, the interior is painted solid black on two walls, black half way on the other two walls. The ceiling is mottled white. Wash bowl, toilet, water-pipe, small bench, a narrow iron bunk, flat springs, corn husk mattress, sheet and pillow case of rough material, blanket, tin cups and spoons, constitute the fittings of our temporary homes where we spend twenty hours out of every twenty-four, involuntary parasites, doing no more service to society than the swell guys who loll around clubs or attend the functions at fashionable resorts.

The reveille of this detention camp is the sharp voice of the "runner," "Cups out! Cups out!"

It is the beginning of a new day. The light streams through the grated door and falls in a checkered pattern across the cell floor.

One stretches his body on the narrow cot and awakens to the fact that he is still in jail, accepting the situation philosophically, wondering, some of us perhaps, what manner of independence and freedom it was that our Forefathers fought for in this country.

A prison cell is the heritage we gain for the blood and lives our forefathers gave; they fought for religious freedom and left us with minds free from superstitious cant and dogma; they waged war for political justice; they carried on the struggle against chattel-slavery-these were the titanic battles that were fought, bringing us to the threshold of the greatest of all wars-the class war-in which we are enlisted as workers, against all kinds of exploiters.

Abolish the wage system, is our battle cry. With an idea that is imperishable, Organization and Education as our weapons, we are invulnerable.

With thoughts of this kind imprisonment becomes a period of improvement. It may be remarked that members of the Industrial Workers of the World have had many opportunities to take advantage of these enforced vacations.

Many thousands of members of the I. W. W. have in the past few years wakened in cells similar to this, to the reveille of "Cups out ! Cups out!" until the jails have be-come recognized as a temporary home-a detention camp of the Master Class-where we are confined or interned as it were, not as criminals, but as victims-prisoners of the class war. Over 400 members of the I. W. W. are in jail in different parts of this country at present.

So we roll out, wash and dress to snatches of I. W. W. songs from other cells, make the beds, sweep out and are ready for "breakfast." The cell doors are unlocked by the guard at 9.30; we have the range of the narrow corridor until 1t.3o; dinner at r2 M.; out again at 1.30 until 3.30. In

the Wing of the "old" jail these hours are spent in diverse ways. Here there are none but members of the I. W. W. Every day there is a physical culture class-breathing and exercise-to help keep the boys in good health in spite of the dismal damp and cold of the jail. The afternoons are de-voted to discussion, gossip and song. Business meetings are held at regular intervals and a big entertainment is held each Sunday with recitations, dramatic sketches and songs. There are 48 men confined in this part of the jail.

In the "big tank," or main portion of the "old jail," there are about 58 members incarcerated. These men are locked up and must exercise with about five hundred criminals of all walks of crime.

It is on this side that all executions take place. There are three black holes on the corner wall into which the beams of the gallows are adjusted. When the gallows are not in use an old piano takes their place and this grewsome spot is sanctified each Sunday by sermons and religious hymns. It was in this corner that the martyrs of the eight hour movement of '87 danced upon the air, and that Parsons, over thirty years ago, delivered his unforgetable prophecy: "The day will come when our silence will be more eloquent than the voices you strangle to-day."

Of course it is impossible for the I. W. W. men on this side of the jail to hold business meetings and entertainments as they do in the "wing," but, nevertheless, the spirit of all is characterized by the cheery bouyancy and unbreakable determination of the One Big Union.

The class-war prisoners have a prison library that is remarkable in many respects. It contains many of the finest works on Sociology, Economics, History and poetry that are obtainable, as well as novels by the best modern novelists. A new book is always welcomed with great enthusiasm. These books were nearly all donated by members or sympathizers on the outside. One is safe in saying that more books have been read in this gloomy old institution since the I. W. W. boys have been held there than were ever read in the place before.

The prison fare, never too plentiful, has, on account of war conservation, almost reached the point of starvation. Only one piece of coarse prison bread is now served with each "meal." In the morning the menu consists of a dry piece of "punk" and a cupful of a libelous decoction of "coffee," at noon, stew, fish or sausage-usually of a quality that is fairly nauseating. For supper, "coffee" and dry bread again with an occasional cupful of suspicious "soup."

Aside from the poor food and ventilation, overcrowding is the chief cause of discomfort and illness. Three, and sometimes four, men are locked up twenty hours out of every twenty-four in a cell about as large as the average bathroom in a city dwelling. Sunlight seldom filters through the grimy, gray, and iron-barred window panes-nothing but the sickly glare of electric lights, day and night.

In spite of the brave efforts the men are making against this unwholesome environment, the poor food, foul air and the prison chill have made awful inroads upon their health.

16 THE LIBERATOR

One young Russian fellow-worker, Jancharick, who entered the jail in rugged health, was taken out to a hospital-spitting blood-and just in time to die. Nigra, an Italian miner who was terribly beaten up in the Springfield, IIl., jail, before being brought to Chicago, is in a hospital suffering the tortures of hell because of lack of proper treatment for his wounds while in the Cook County jail. Miller, a textile worker and member of the General Executive Board, was forced to undergo an operation because of an ulcerous growth, probably caused by the foul air and rotten food. Kimball, an Arizona miner and one of those deported from Bisbee last July, has been released on bail after a great deal of effort. He is now a physical wreck-"spitting up his lungs" as his fellow workers say; a mere shadow of his former self. MacDonald, Ashleigh and Lossieff are each either on the sick bed or near it, and many other fellow-workers have lost vitality that can never be regained.

Then there is the case of Henry Meyers. His incarceration cost him his reason. Day by day he became more secretive and morose. With furtive glance he sulked about among the hundreds of prisoners in the "bull pen." One of them had told him that he would be hung. Beneath the weight of worry and fear his sensitive artist mind gave way. Like a frightened animal he ran wild around the galleries until captured by the guards. He is now in the madhouse at Kankakee-his reason has fled.

It was he who painted the well known picture of Joe Hill. He made the death masks of our martyred members who were murdered on the "Verona," that fateful Sunday morning in November, 1916. It was his deft fingers that shaped the clay that forms the face of fearless Frank Little that hangs upon the wall of the Chicago Recruiting Union.

This young fellow worker I do not believe ever committed

a crime. He united his strength with others to improve conditions of all. Now his mind has lapsed; he is dead to the life he knew; his strong body is as useless as a burned-out cinder. This is but another indictment of the frightful system under which we are living. And this is only one of the stories that could be written of this frightful place. Be it recorded now that we are pledged to a new method of living -a new society, where injustice will not be known, where jails and prisons such as this will be things of the past, and where a human being will enjoy a friendly communal interest from the cradle to the grave.

The io6 class-war prisoners in the Cook County jail are of many different nationalities and from nearly all industries. They are strong, rugged, open-air types, taken right off the job and thrown into prison. They have undergone and are undergoing hardships and suffering, but in spite of all they manage to make the gloomy walls ring with rebel songs. They have been in jail, some of them for eight and nine months, most of them for six months, but their spirits are as dauntless as ever. During the long winter months they have been walking round and round the narrow corridors in the very shadow of the gallows. Always round and round, like angle worms in the bottom of a tin can, go the prisoners in the Cook County jail. But the members of the I. W. W. keep hope and courage alive in spite of all.

Such a group of men one is proud to be associated with-workers, clean hearted, clear eyed; all fighting for the principles so plainly set forth in the Preamble of the Industrial Workers of the World, which proclaims the only kind of Democracy worth going to jail to advocate-and this Pre-amble, the chief count in the indictment against us-is still nailed to the masthead !

Surrender

By S. N.

BECAUSE happiness had wrapt itself about her with the tightness of a lover's embrace, she did not see what was quite plain to other people : that their love was not the transfiguring thing for Neal that it was for her. She had given herself to him unquestionably, joyously, unashamed. Her brother, who had been to Clinton, where Neal had worked before he came to her town, heard there that Neal was wild, especially with women. He came back and told it to Ellen, but without dimming the steady glow of her love for Neal. Big, handsome, fine Neal who had come from a strange place, out of mystery, and had singled her out to love when he might have had so many others-the best-looking girls in the factory, the heartiest, the gayest. But he had singled her out, she who was so quiet, shrinking, only at second glancing noticed.

There had been a Saturday night party at her cousin Helen's, and she had been there, sitting quiet as usual in a corner, taking little part in the jollification. She remembered her first glimpse of Neal-as he entered the room with his crony, Decker. She remembered watching him fascinated as he talked to the other girls, making them laugh, and

Behrman

then his going to stand near Elizabeth Murphy, who was "talented" and played the piano. Elizabeth was frankly making up to him, but he seemed to tire suddenly of her chatter and too-frequent laughter and moved away. It was then that he had seen her and sat beside her. The rest of the evening he did not leave her. Someone whispered "cradle-snatcher," and there was a laugh-she was only seventeen-but he only looked more closely into her eyes and pressed her hands covertly as they lay folded in her lap. Later when they moved the chairs away and started dancing he asked her, over and over again, to dance with him. She could not understand it. She kept asking herself: "Is it true? Can it be that he really likes me, wants to dance with me? Why . . . why . . . ?"

That question never answered itself to her. Always it savored to her of the miraculous, the not-to-be-understood, that Neal, who was so big and strong and masterful, should have singled out for love herself, who was so small and slight and shrinking. And yet it was so. . . . He loved to play with her pale hair which he said was like gold and to look into her eyes which he said were as blue as flowers

May, 1918 17

one saw in the fields. In a crowd he made no effort to conceal the fact that he preferred her above all the others. And when they were alone to gether he would crush her in his arms and run his fingers through her hair and turn up her face to kiss. . . .

Life, which up to the time of Neal's coming had edged by her a vague, misted stream, in which sights and sounds and events were blurred and slightly unreal, became suddenly vivid, sharpened, tense. It was like a gray canvas splashed suddenly with color by a capricious artist, like a darkened room flooded with light. Ellen was the youngest of seven children. The three eldest were married; her three unmarried brothers worked in the great wire factory, in the shadow of whose towering smoke-stacks the town sprawled, shapeless. Her mother was dead and her father, a hopeless invalid, stayed at home under her care. He was a raucous, evil-minded man, with a high-pitched, exasperated voice who did what he could to make those about him miserable. It was the only revenge he could take on life for leaving him stranded, helpless. . . . It was Ellen's duty to tend him and make the meals for her brothers when they came home from the factory. Thus even the larger life of the town was shut off from Ellen; she was the only one among her girl friends who did not work in the factory. The rivalries, the gossip, the flirtations of the factory girls were things alien to her; she grew accustomed to thinking herself an automaton, destined to work at solitary, unrewarded tasks. Her father's rasping voice, the piles of dishes to be washed twice a day, the sweeping and monotony came to seem to her as facts of nature, as little to be altered or railed against as the cold of January or the heat of August. Life was a thing to be endured. . . .

And then Neal noticed her. Neal thought her beautiful. Neal loved her. It was like emerging from nonentity into consciousness. Life took on contour, things became beautiful to see, lovely to touch, good to taste. Suddenly the aim-less complexity of life focussed into meaning. The sun and the stars, the factory and meals and the kitchen-even her father-became co-ordinated into harmony. Discords even had their place, were part of a scheme. And the core of that scheme was that things were good, that life was fine. It was Neal who had brought the change. It was as though, before his coming, she had not been born. Was it any wonder that she was proud and grateful for his love of her?

She would have thought no more of hiding her love for Neal than she would have thought of trying to hide the sun. That her brothers should be surly, that her father should shriek anathema, when they found out that she was going to bear a child to Neal, was incomprehensible to her. But she accepted it, as she now accepted her drudgery and her father's outbursts of lascivious rage, with the sunny calm of those who have achieved an inner happiness which no external encroachments can break, or even enter. She knew that all these things people said were outside, irrelevant compared to the one fact that she was now sentient where she had been dulled, living, when she had been, as it were, dead. She went about happy, humming snatches of tunes, making things for her unborn child, while her father called her foul names and her brothers, having given up admonitions, excused her because she was a "child" who did not understand the enormity of her crime. Only on one point were they determined: that their sister must be married to Neal. Ellen begged them not to "bother" Neal. She was

afraid lest they anger him. It was in vain that they told her that Neal did not love her; that he had only "played" with her. All these insinuations she flouted. Neal did love her. He had told her so lots of times. Besides it was no one's business but her's-and Neal's. He would marry her in his own good time. Couldn't they leave him alone? Yet all the time she knew serenely that Neal was stronger than her brothers and would do as he wished, and that she was the strongest of them all and could wait. . . .

Neal was evasive. With half-promises he put the brothers off. Yes, he loved Ellen. But it was not convenient for him to marry her now. He had no money saved. In six months. But it must, they insisted, be before the baby was born or they would make it hot for Neal. Neal asked for a little time. He would see. As for the baby, perhaps, he suggested, something could be done. . . .

But Ellen would not hear of anything being "done." Her father screeched and called her bad names, the brothers scolded, the married sisters were scandalized. Yet Ellen remained firm. Neal loved her, he would marry her in his own good time. That was all that could be got out of her.

"She's only a child," said the more tolerant of the brothers helplessly.

"Child ! Child !" screeched the father. "She's a That's what she is. Nothing else !"

And in the midst of this Ellen continued to make things for her baby, smiling in a tranquil, far-off manner. Neither her brother's tales of Neal's wickedness in Clinton, the town from which he had come, nor the fact that he was unwilling at once to marry her, nor the vilifications of her father, shook her deep faith in her lover, her gratitude, her worship.

On Neal, Ellen's attitude began to have a curious effect. It made him nervous, uncomfortable. As he told his boon companion Decker, he would much rather she reproached him, burst into anger, flew at him. Her eternal, unquestioning belief was disquieting. What a child she was! Could she not see?

It was what one got, commented the sage Decker, for "robbing the cradle!"

Neal's position had grown worse than uncomfortable, it had become slightly ludicrous. The whole town knew of his adventure. The worst of it all was that Ellen, with entire disregard of smirking looks, went calmly about telling people that she could not go to this place or that because she must stay home, rest, be careful. . . . Ellen was no more reticent than if she had been married. Neal didn't at all like it. It took away, somehow, from his seduction, all glamour. . . .

Neal found the situation increasingly unbearable. Recrimination and violent anger he could endure-they were quite in the tradition; not a complete trustfulness, content, unasking. Many times he had made up his mind to tell Ellen that she must not talk as she did because he meant never to marry her. But she never allowed their talk to drift at all close to such a subject. She never broached it. She left everything to him, she asked nothing but his presence, glad of his embrace and his kiss. She was tremendously proud of him, of his looks, of his height, of his strength. She was like a child. It was impossible, Neal found, to be rough or unkind with her.

He even knew a wavering temptation to yield and marry her. But no! He could not give up his youth, his freedom

18 THE LIBERATOR

-to this baby. He was not yet twenty-five. He could not find it in his heart to marry and settle down, not for a long time to come. He would not be happy that way. He must be free, to go whither he liked, to make love as much as he liked, to be as always.

Yet this temptation, pugnacious though it was, frightened him. He was afraid, lest, in an impulsive moment, he would succumb to it. Ellen's laughing eyes, her fair, golden hair, her lips up-turned to his, might make him forget. He knew her beauty could not last. She would become like the wives of his friends, stolid, slattern. He must be careful, he must go away, or he would be lost. Ellen's brothers were becoming insistent. The town was no longer comfortable. Yes, he must go away. . . .

And then there came over the land the call to arms, and Neal saw his chance. It was almost providential. To merge his destiny with that of a force infinitely greater than his, in the mighty vortex of which his little peccadillos would be swamped, forgotten, was the ideal solution for his problem. With the relief of a rich mediaeval sinner purchasing a heap of indulgences, he went to the recruiting station on the second daffy and volunteered.

Though he had told only Decker, the news spread rapidly through the town. It reached the ears of Ellen's brothers, who whispered about it among themselves and then went to Neal to find if it were true. He denied, then admitted, his enlistment. There were sharp words and threats. At length the brothers withdrew. There was nothing to be done. The scoundrel, Neal, had ruined the good name of their sister and outwitted them besides.

The most Neal would do was to promise to leave Ellen his insurance money if he was killed. . . .

The brothers tried their best to keep the news from Ellen. They feared its effect on her. But the dying old man at home, who had an uncanny, rat-like scent for whatever untoward was stirring in the house, pried it out of them. They begged him to say nothing to Ellen, but he took a malicious joy in torturing her. As soon as she came into the house he screeched at her:

"I suppose you know your man is a hero now, eh?"

And to Ellen's inquiring look : "He's gone and enlisted. Brave man! So he'll be rid of you and your brat for good. He's going soldiering, your man is. You'll have to be looking for someone else. . . ."

When her father's voice died down through sheer feebleness she turned to her brothers. She was a bit pale. They were afraid she would faint.

"What does he mean?" she asked quietly.

They tried to put her off.

"What does he mean?" she insisted.

"It's true then," said one of them. "Neal's enlisted." "In the army? He's volunteered?"

"Yes."

She was silent a moment. They wondered what would happen. But she only turned to them with shining eyes and clasped hands :

"Isn't that like him ! Isn't that just like my Neal ! My big, brave Neal ! To be among the first! Tell me-has he got his uniform?"

She insisted on going at once to see him. On the way over she met four people to whom she told the news: that Neal had enlisted, the first in town. Wasn't that wonderful?

She found him sitting in his room in his shirt-sleeves.

He had answered to her knock with a surly "Come in," and was greatly surprised when he saw her standing in the door-way. He uttered a silent curse when he saw her. So she knew, then, and had come to throw it up to him !

' She put her arms about him and stood up on tip-toe to kiss him. "You big brave boy," she whispered. "You big, brave boy ! It was just like you to do it. I'm proud of you, Neal, boy, proud of you, but I'm a little bit afraid, too. Yes, I am, Neal ''

He stared at her, incredulous.

"Afraid of what?" he said gruffly.

"You're so brave, Neal. You'll rush in where it's dangerous. You'll be hurt !"

"They can't hurt me," he said to reassure her. He was embarrassed, he did not know what to do. He was taken completely off his guard.

She stood off from him, looking at him, love and admiration shining from her eyes.

"My won't you look great, Neal ! In your uniform. I'll be the happiest girl in town. I'll just walk you about the streets till you're tired. Yes. When are you going to get it? And your gun? You'll be all brown- !"

He turned away.

"You'll be a hero, Neal," he heard her whisper. "My big, brave boy !"

He turned fiercely and caught her in his arms.

"Ain't you got any sense at all!" he exclaimed. "Keep quiet with your silly talk."

"Baa---baa-baa-!" she mocked in her familiar way, not listening to him. "Big Neal don't like to be called hero. But he is, just the same. He is, just the same-big hero. Big boy hero. I hope," she whispered, "hull be as brave as you -just like you."

"Who?"

"You know. I hope he's as big and as brave as you."

She nestled in his arms. He felt his cheeks burning with shame. It was intolerable. It was a long time before he could utter a word. Then he bent low over her.

"Listen Ellen," he whispered. "I want you and me to be married. Before I go away. Right away. You hear? Right away. . . ."

ANNIVERSARY

THE flowers we planted in the tender spring, And through the summer watched their blossoming, Died with our love in autumn's thoughtful weather, Died and dropped downward altogether.

Today in April in the vivid grass

They flash again their laughter, pink and yellow , They wake before the misty sunbeams pass, Gay bold to leave their chilly pillow.

But love sleeps longer in his wintry bed,

He sleeps as though the lifting light were dead, And spring poured not her colors on the meadow, He sleeps in his cold sober shadow.

Max Eastman.

Wilson and the World's Future

By Max Eastman

ipRESIDENT WILSON conducts his own thinking with

a large freedom and interior democracy that is not usual either among professors or politicians. He gives a voice to every new fact and every new suggestion that the current of events and meditation throws out. He seems to me to bring into statesmanship some of the same thing that Bergson and William James and John Dewey have brought into philosophy-a sense of the reality of time, and the creative character of change. He is a president in the original sense that he presides over, rather than trying to create, a political development. He is not impatient or meddlesome. He is not high-strung. He does not have to be busy. He does not have to be sure. He knows how to use doubt. He knows how to cooperate with evolution.

This is a rare gift and requires an exceedingly healthy state of the nerves-a state which is immediately apparent in President Wilson's bearing. He is one of the few men of high cerebral organization who can go to bed and to sleep while a problem is actually unsolved. When I saw him last March in the days of "armed neutrality," after two years of continuous international suspense and a responsibility that can only be described as planetary, he held balanced in his hand the whole future history of his country; and I saw in him no sign of neural fatigue, or restiveness, or the weakness of extreme anxiety.

It was typical of what is best in the power of his character, I think, that when every other brain in the nation was frantically striving to formulate a dogmatic resting-ground as to our relations with Germany, lie was able to leave them in a completely fluid and undetermined condition. He had declared that he would resist any "overt act" of the submarines against the sovereignty of our ships, and while it seemed to the conventional mind supremely urgent to decide exactly what an "overt act" would be, his attitude was that he did not know, but he thought he would recognize one when he saw it!

This poise and fluency of mind is more extraordinary than is perceived even by those whom it exasperates the most. It is the expression of a wisdom which is new and peculiar to our age.

William Hard's Attack

William Hard, in his brilliant attack upon Wilson in the Metropolitan tVlagarine for March, scores a great hit for old-fashioned ears when he makes Evangelista, the Santo Domingan bandit, reproach the president with being for revolutions at one time and place and against them at an-other.

President Wilson replies: "Evangelista, one fact must be enough for you. In the year 1916, in the month of May, in that part of the Western Hemisphere which is comprised within the boundaries of Santo Domingo, I was against revolutions."

"Now," says the German Kaiser (who also is a party to this conversation), Now. we are getting on. Principles are things of times and places. I have always felt it. You will admit that."

A terrible indictment for old-fashioned ears, but for those who understand how large a part facts play in the formation of true principles, not a fundamental indictment at all. Principles are, .and they ought to be, things of times and places. And a man can not be attacked-speaking now analytically and ultimately-for changing his principles with changing facts. He can be attacked only on the ground of the motive for which he changes his principles. If for in-stance he was for revolutions where they furthered his own or his nationalistic interest, and against them where they opposed it, then he would be reprehensible. Arid I am not saying this was not the case in the Carribean. I only say that it would need to be proven in order to show that Wilson was actually unwise in that matter as well as intellectually inconsistent. In simply pointing to the amazing pliancy and free play with which the president holds abstract ideas in his mind, Hard is paying him the best tribute he could pay to a man who has suffered and come through the misfortune of being a professor.

No doubt this talent is a danger as well as a boon. Some-times we feel that the President's ability to sit relaxed and meditating while dramatic opportunity arrives and pauses and passes by, is a terrible thing. It is one of the faults o f his virtue. And perhaps another fault is that inefficiency as a business executive which is being so cried up by the Re-publicans in Congress. I should think it would be hard for a man trained to this sort of wisdom in literature and politics, to find in himself the dynamic head of the most colossal industrial enterprise of history. And if it is true, as an insidious phillippic in Collier's Magazine asserts, that he is unwilling to delegate real power to strong men, then his great talent may act to the detriment of important interests. About this I do not know. But I do know that in the light of modern wisdom his mere logical inconsistencies can not be dismissed in the off-hand manner of the old-fashioned de-bating society.

That new conditions create new truths, is the chief affirmation of the intellectual culture of our age. It is an affirmation that intellectual people are usually the Ieast able to act upon, for intellect is somehow absolute and dogmatic in its very nature. But President Wilson combines a very high intellectuality with the rarer power of holding it in suspense, and though that makes him easy for logical people (like William Hard and me), to attack, it makes him difficult for anybody to overthrow. He can move with the utmost agility from one position to another, and yet offer an in-flexible resistance in any position that he occupies. He is strong as water is strong. being fluid but inelastic.

The League of Nations

I l-emember another example of that instinct for co-operating with evolution, which is the essence of the President's strength. In his first great speech to the Senate-the speech advocating a League of Nations-he avoided the advertised expression, "League to Enforce Peace," and spoke rather of a "League to Ensure Peace." And this caught my atten-

20 THE LIBERATOR

tion because I have always considered the idea of a "League to Enforce Peace" a little utopian. The nations comprising this league are supposed to pledge themselves to make war on any nation which disturbs the peace. That is, in case a state of war arises, they are to decide which country is the aggressor and then join arms to defeat that country. This involves two things that in my view of human nature appear impossible.

First, that nations will go to war in remote parts of the earth, and merely in the interest of an abstract principle or promise.

Second, that in cases where they will go to war, they will be capable of making or acting upon a dispassionate decision as to who is the aggressor.

The League to Enforce Peace seems to me a somewhat naive scheme, based upon an incorrect view of human psychology, and of the motives that are dominant in history. The distinction between this scheme, and the plan proposed by the British Labor Party of establishing an international congress and standing tribunal with executive power, such as will constitute a world-government, is very important. For the latter plan rests upon a fact already well established in history, that states in political federation do actually lose the continual motive, as well as avoid the principal occasions, of war.

When I asked the president to be specific upon this point, his answer was altogether characteristic. He spoke with that grave patience of the sympathetic and interested teacher -the one who knows-and he spoke of the error of trying to impose any artificial and formalized organization upon a world in which the things that endure come into being through a process of natural growth.

He said in effect that if you set out to manufacture a government of the seas with an international police, you run into one insuperable difficulty at once. A police force must be subject to command, and what individual is there in the world to whom such a command could now be given? That is but the first of many difficulties that occur to mind as soon as you think of the problem actively. And yet these difficulties of setting up a ready-made arrangement do not make it impossible that some such arrangement might gradually grow into being as a result of a series of more simple practical steps. If a conference of the nations is called, for example, and draws a plan for action to eliminate war, and then dissolves, it will doubtless be necessary when exigencies arise, to call it again in order to put the plan in execution, or to extend or alter it. Other questions than war, too, might arise that would demand such a conference. And so in the course of time an international institution might come into being that would have some of the attributes implied in using the word government. It is thus that political institutions come into being. The important thing for us to do is not to fill in the details of such an institution in our imaginations, but to take the first step with our minds very open and free as to what may develop out of them.

The president had used the words "League to Ensure Peace," it seemed, because they implied less and yet left room for more, than the words "League to Enforce Peace." He recalled that one of the newspaper men had asked him, after that address to the Senate, whether he meant to imply that the nations should pledge themselves to the armed enforcement of peace. His answer had been-We really ought to leave something for the nations to decide !

A sense of reality when it tempers a sufficiently venture-some imagination, is most impressive. And though I could not help recalling our own league of nations, the United States, how it was manufactured and put together in an off-hand manner quite disrespectful to evolution, still I knew that I had learned something. I recurred to the only question that remained-the question of the exact nature of that first small step that must be taken. And President Wilson emphatically assented to the opinion that such a league or conference as might be instituted after the war, would be of little value even as a beginning, if it did not immediately arrange the terms of a reduction and limitation of national armaments. I felt here again that occasional rigor and positiveness of concrete assertion which is so striking against the background of abstract fluidity which characterizes his intellectual temperament.

Four Things He Has Done

President Wilson has done things during the last five weeks, the scope and positiveness of whose impact upon history can not be denied. And they were done in the single interest of human freedom. He held up the Empire of Japan in her proposal to invade Russian Siberia, with the applause of the allies, upon the hypocritical plea that Germany, 6,ooo miles away, was endangering democracy (or something) in that quarter. And in this act he stood before the public practically alone. The allied governments were for the invasion of free Russia by feudal japan, largely no doubt for the reason that Russia is not paying interest on the millions of ambition dollars they invested in her bonds under the czar, and is even threatening to repudiate that debt-or such part of it at least as was loaned to the czar for the express purpose of putting down revolution. The capitalist newspapers of the allied countries were for this Japanese invasion for the same reason. The capitalistic papers of this country were for it-because they have no reason. They are in a state of ignorant military frenzy which if placed at the head of affairs would destroy the purposes of this war and wreck the future of the civilized world. Against this suicidal mania President Wilson stood up alone, because he had both knowledge and coolness of nerve.

Japan is an hereditary autocracy whose emperor is descended in a direct line through exactly 121 generations from the Son of Heaven. The dynasty of the Mikado is the only dynasty on earth that has never been changed or overthrown. It is supported by a superstitious patriotism, as well as a feudal system of politics, that makes the rest of the allied nations look like a loose union of temperamental anarchists. The Japanese Emperor has the power to declare war and make peace, conclude treaties, appoint and dismiss all officials, approve and promulgate laws, and issue ordinances to take the place of laws. Up to the year 189o he ruled without even a constitution, and in that year a constitution was adopted modelled in its features of "democratic participation" upon the constitution of Prussia, but in its reservation of power to the prince and his ministers upon no other civilized constitution on earth. Last month in Tokio a group of students calling themselves the "Young Radicals" tried to distribute among the members of the Japenese diet Ieaflets demanding universal suffrage and protesting against the influence of the clans (junker families). They were arrested and imprisoned for making this eighteenth century demand.

May, 1918 21

The Japanese are a great people with a beautiful future. Energetic, delicate, friendly, liberal of instinct-they are on their way. And they will move fast. But if we mean any-thing by democracy we do not mean the present state of their institutions or social or political ideas.

In standing up against this Great Siberian Hypocrisy President Wilson did the biggest thing-of a negative nature-that could be done to comfort the soldiers of the world that they are fighting for some principle higher than national prestige. And in the process of doing this, he enunciated a doctrine-if the New York Times correspondent was correctly informed-that ought to be incorporated as a new and vital article in The Program of the World's Peace.

"President Wilson's declared attitude," said this correspondent, "toward Mexico and the perturbed Latin-American countries was that while this Government would send troops into foreign territory to defend its honor and safeguard the lives of Americans and other foreigners, it would not use its land and naval forces to protect investments and other material interests which were threatened by political disturbances. The present position of the government concerning the Japanese desire to place troops in Siberia is understood to be practically the same."

If all the nations would cease to use their land and naval forces to protect investments-they would go a long way to-wards ceasing to use their land and naval forces.

The Note to Russia

A second signal thing that the president did for liberty this month was to send an entirely generous message of friend-ship and good luck to the "Republic of Labor Unions" in Russia. His utterance was as significant as the silence of his allies. It has put the American government in a different attitude from any other government toward that class struggle for industrial democracy which is gradually displacing the blinder struggle that engages the world. Arthur Henderson, the leader of the British Labor Party and coming man of power in Great Britain, had sent a message of more unqualified endorsement to the Bolsheviki :

"In this moment of total crisis in the fortune of the revolution, British labor proclaims to the Socialist and working class parties of Russia its undiminished faith in revolutionary principles and its confidence in their eventual triumph.

"We have accepted those principles. We have urged our government to adopt them. In pursuit of a policy of concerted action on the part of the international democracy, we have embodied the revolutionary principles of `no annexations or punitive indemnities and the right of self-determination for all peoples' in the memorandum of war aims adopted by the conference of labor and Socialist parties in the allied countries, and we are taking immediate steps to seek similar agreement with the organized democracy of the central empires."

It is this lead-the lead of insurgent labor-and not the lead of the suicidal bankrupt bourgeois diplomacy in the al-lied countries-that President Wilson is disposed to follow. And this shows that he is able to entertain an idea, and acknowledge the existence of a force, as new to his ways of thinking as though it had come down from another planet.

The Letter to New Jersey

He follows the same force, I think, in his letter to the conference of New Jersey Democrats that met at Newark

on March loth. He echoes a bit of the language of the report on reconstruction of the British Labor Party-a re-port that marked the birth of a new and revolutionary democracy in England. I quote two sentences :

"A time of grave crisis has come in the life of the Democratic Party in New Jersey Every sign of these terrible days of war and revolutionary change, when economic and social forces are being released upon the world whose effect no political seer dare venture to conjecture, bids us search our hearts through and through and make them ready for the birth of a new day-a day, we hope and believe, of greater opportunity and greater prosperity for the average mass of struggling men and women, and of greater safety

and opportunity for children

"The men in the trenches, who have been freed from the economic serfdom to which some of them had been accustomed, will, it is likely, return to their homes with a new view and a new impatience of all mere political phrases, and will demand real thinking and sincere action."

Being a man of letters, President Wilson never takes a phrase from the other man's lip; but his "economic serfdom" need not divert us from the fact that the scholar in the White House, as well as the agitator on the soap-box, is now compelled to talk about wage slavery. I am not saying that the President is becoming a Bolshevik, or that he could lead an American labor movement, if a living one were born. I only say that the fluency of his intelligence is phenomenal, and is a strength rather than a weakness, and, while the world runs this way, a boon to us who believe in industrial and ultimate freedom and democracy.

To acknowledge this fact is not to endorse the proposal of Upton Sinclair, so generously disseminated by the capitalist papers, that the Socialist Party of the United States should call a convention and formally declare that it has come round to the support of the President. It might be more indicative of the state of the facts and the chronologies of the matter, if President Wilson should call a convention of his new ideas and come round and join the Socialist Party. I should be willing to take the risk of accepting him as a member. In the meantime I only mean to endorse the sagacious opportunism of Leon Trotsky, who said (in an interview on March 5th) : "America and Russia [meaning Wilson and the International Socialists] may have different aims, but if we have common stations on the same route, I see no reason why we could not travel together in the same car, each having the right to alight when it is desired."

The Conscientious Objectors

A thing that makes me especially willing to travel in this car is that President Wilson has at last turned his attention to those violations of liberty and constitutional right in our domestic affairs which have been making his great words before the world sound so hollow. On March 21st he issued an executive order which will liberate several hundred young men who have been violently condemned to long terms in prison under a military invasion of civil righte that I can hardly believe was intended by Congress. I quote the crucial sentences of this order, because it is a fourth important thing that the president has done for liberty in the past month.

"2. Persons ordered to report for military service under the above act who . . . . object to participation in war be-

22 THE LIBERATOR

cause of conscientious scruples, but have failed to receive certificates as members of a religious sect or organization from their local board, will be assigned to non-combatant service as defined in paragraph i to the extent that such persons are able to accept service as aforesaid without violation of the religious or other conscientious scruples by them in good faith entertained. . . .

"3. On the first day of April, and thereafter monthly, each division, camp, or post commander shall report to the adjutant general of the army, for the information of chief of staff and the secretary of war, the names of all persons under their respective commands who profess religious or other conscientious scruples as above described and who have been unwilling to accept by reason of such scruples assignment to non-combatant military service as above de-fined, and as to each such person so reported a brief, comprehensive statement as to the nature of the objection to the acceptance of such non-combatant military service entertained. The secretary of war will from time to time classify the persons so reported and give further directions as to the disposition of them. Pending such directions from the secretary of war, all such persons not accepting assignment to a non-combatant service shall be segregated as far as practicable and placed under the command of a specially qualified officer of tact and judgment, who will be instructed to impose no punitive hardship of any kind upon them, but not to allow their objections to be made the basis of any favor or consideration beyond exemption from actual military service which is not extended to any other soldier in the service of the United States....

"5. The secretary of war will revise the sentences and findings of courts-martial heretofore held of persons who come within any of the classes herein described, and bring to the attention of the president for remedy, if any be needed, sentences and judgments found at variance with the pro-visions hereof.*

(Signed) "WOODROW WILSON. "The White House, March 20, 1918."

In Prussia, at the beginning of the war, 31 conscientious objectors with religious scruples were shot. In Saxony and Bavaria about 12o were committed to insane asylums for several months, but subsequently released with certificates stating that they were "harmlessly insane"-the uniform being sufficient evidence, I suppose, that the generality were harmfully sane. In France, according to the murderous accounts of Gertrude Atherton, all the objectors were shot, and according to better authority some were shot-at least of those who lacked the influence to get a soft job in the rear. In England they were systematically brutally be-labored, tortured and intimidated.

There are not many conscientious objectors in any country. On December loth there were only 561 not exempted Some sentences of this kind are as follows:

Camp Devens, Mass.-Tony Petroshki, zo years.

Camp Dodge, Iowa-Otto Wangerin, 15 years; Harold Bruber, 15 years. Camp Gordon, Georgia-Otto Brennan, to years.

Camp Grand, Illinois-Gust. Wittrock, 3 years; Abraham Bieber, 1 year. Camp Lewis, Washington-Eno Larsen, 5 years; Alfred Bloss, to years, and Wallferd E. Maher, to years.

Camp Taylor, Kentucky-Earl Hucklebury, 3 years.

Fort Adams, Rhode Island-John T. Dunn, Teo. Hiller and Adolph T. Yanyar, ao years each.

Fort Andrews, Mass.-Fritz Stepanovitch, t 5 years.

Fort McArthur, Texas-Vane V. Dart, to years.

Jefferson Barracks, Mo.-R. H. Franke, to years.

as members of religious sects, in all the cantonments of the United States. Is it not another example of his extraordinary ability to suspend judgment that the president should have made no move towards solving this problem until its exact nature and proportions had developed? He always lets time make the first move. And it is an example of his occasional positiveness and his leaning toward genuine liberty, that finding it to be practical from a military point-of-view to do so, he should solve it in a completely humane and libertarian way.

His order reserves a possibility of court martial and military imprisonment if the conscientious objection takes a form that can be identified with ordinary insubordination and tends to destroy the discipline of the army. But assuming a sincere cooperation of the secretary of war, and officers not wholly devoid of conscience themselves, one of the fundamental rights of our civilization, the liberty of conscience-more accurately described as a liberty of moral volition-has been by this order secured and defended.

Four Things He Might Do

So utterly away from, and beyond the base and contemptible range of opinion propagated by the American press, are these acts and utterances of the president, that inevitably we hope he really is with the quiet people, and that all these other things they discuss as possibilities over their dinner tables at home are in his mind too. He has compelled the allies to acknowledge his leadership in the matter of Japan. He has compelled them to unify their military command. Is it not possible to compel them to a unified, definite and intelligible statement of their war-aims?

There is some ground, no doubt, for the opinion that it is bad tactics to prolong a discusssion of peace terms while war is on-though I notice there are more Christian ministers than military experts who expound this opinion. When Dr. Manning, for instance, of Trinity Church, and other oratorically Napoleonic successors of the Prince of Peace, go about shouting that it is treason to mention the subject of peace terms, though hard-working and straight-thinking members of the army and navy privately state that a unification of the war aims of the allies is very much to be desired, I take my side with the army and navy. I do not want to believe that good fighting requires bad thinking. And if one is going to think at all about the diplomacy of this war, he will have to begin by acknowledging that the allies have bungled it.

There are two ways in which a "World's Peace" might be arrived at. One is to conquer and reduce the military party in control of Germany to the point of accepting such a peace ; the other is to oppose that military party long enough and strongly enough so that its control is weakened, and peace can be made with the other parties in Germany. The president has made it clear that the latter is his purpose; he has made it clear enough so that it is known and acknowledged in Germany. But the rest of the allies have not behaved in a way to give anyone, either in Germany or elsewhere, such an impression. In July of last summer the anti-imperialists of Germany, with the social democrats, were in sufficient control to pass a resolution through the Reichstag demanding "peace without annexations or indemnities." This resolution was not responded to until the following January, and then

May, 1918 23

only by President Wilson. For six months it was absolutely and coldly ignored by all the allies; and in Germany in that six months the heart went out of it; the moderates who voted for it became convinced that they were wrong, that the allies did not want a just peace; the military party re-gained its hold. That resolution should have been responded to when it was passed. If it was sincere, it should have been fostered. If it was a bluff, the bluff should have been called. The liberal party in Germany should have been encouraged to believe in us.

Again at Brest-Litovsk the German foreign secretary pro-posed to the Russians that they should bring all their allies to the table and discuss a peace "without annexations or indemnities." This may have been a bluff, too, and if it was, then by ignoring it we played the game well with the military party. But the effect of our ignoring it upon the anti-military parties was absolutely disastrous. For the bluff was primarily intended to deceive them, not us, and by failing to call the bluff we contributed to their deception. We con-firmed the opinion in their minds that the allies do not want a just peace.

It is probable that President Wilson's sudden and abstract enunciation of moderate peace-terms in January was not enough to offset the effect upon German liberals of these blunders. It was too lonely and too different from what had preceded, to revive their faith in the purposes of the allied governments. But even supposing it had revived them, the immediate contradictory enunciation of a bitter-end policy by the supreme war council at Versailles, must have knocked them down again. And after that, I do not see how the president's second speech, (February trth) earnestly just and conciliatory though it was, could entirely reassure them. And it appears that it did not reassure them, except as to the President's own attitude. An evidence of this is the statement (March 22nd) of Herr Evert, a Socialist member of the Reichstag, in explaining his vote for the war credits that "unfortunately there were no prospects of peace in the west, as neither President Wilson or the Belgian Government had responded to the chancellor's assent to President Wilson's four 'principles, while England, France and Italy had pronounced for a continuance of the war, and voted the necessary credits. Thus Germany was still in a position of defence in the west against a numerically superior enemy, who was threatening Germany's vital interests."

I cling to the opinion, therefore, in the face of these Christian ministers, that something ought to be done by the allied governments to assure those Germans who do want an anti-imperialist peace that the controlling powers among the allies want it too. The assertions of the Inter-Allied Labor Conference that France "can properly agree to a fresh consultation of the population of Alsace-Lorraine as to its own de-sires," and that the return of colonies to those who possessed them before the war ought not to be an obstacle to the making of peace," seem to me to contain the meat of such an assurance. It is impossible, of course, for a layman not in touch with all the facts to suggest the nature of a diplomatic action. But besides being unanimous, I think it ought to be very direct, so that it could not be ignored or evaded by the party of power in Germany, and it ought to be very brief, so that it could not be misquoted, or half quoted, or dubiously interpreted by those who publish or repeat it. A diplomatic action which would give this simple and direct guarantee to the liberals of Germany of the sincerity

of our purposes, could easily be devised by the allied states-men if their minds were bent, as in the interest of essential victory they should be bent, upon giving such a guarantee.

Recognize New Russia

Another step in the certification of President Wilson's democracy for which many Americans wait, is a formal recognition of the Republic of Labor Unions in Russia. This would add seal and substance to his message of good-will, and go far towards placing in his hand, for the purposes of war and peace, the leadership of the labor parties of the world.

Endorse the Interbelligerent Conference

That leadership bids fair to mean the leadership of the world. At the Inter-Allied Labor and Socialist Conference. at London in February it was resolved that an Inter-Belligerent Conference of Socialist and Labor Delegates ought to be called, who should seek to reach an agreement upon the general outlines of a "peace without annexations," and having reached such an agreement, return home and seek to secure, each from his respective government, a declaration of readiness for such a peace. This interbelligerent conference has been prevented in the past by the allied governments upon the ground that no special class in the nation is entitled to enter into discussion with the national enemy. But it was President Wilson's policy from the beginning to draw a line between classes in the enemy nation. He has declared that we are not at war with the German people. And as there is a class of the German people who have continually resisted and pressed against the policy of those military rulers who arc the enemy, it would not be unreasonable to permit a conference and understanding between representatives of this class and those whom they know and whose motives they trust in our own countries. It is the step which moves most directly to a democratic peace as opposed to a peace doctored together by the imperialists.

Curb the American Prussians

Finally, since the president has evidently turned his attention to the domestic violation of those human rights for which we have declared that we are fighting abroad, the hope arises that he will issue some order, or make some public statement, or otherwise bring his influence to bear against the general suppression of publications and the persecution of organizers and agitators with radical opinions, which is disgracing this country and lowering its power to take part in the reconstruction of the world. The indictment in February of the general officers of the Socialist party, and the holding up of this indictment, apparently until its effect upon the Russian government need no longer be feared, has sickened the hearts of a full million of people who desire to believe in the democratic and liberative purposes of the administration.

This unwise and unwarranted act of the federal officials, technically plausible perhaps under the espionage act because of the extreme language of the St. Louis program, has emboldened the capitalists of Minnesota to cause a similar indictment and arrest of A. C. Townley, the head of the Non-Partisan League, who never had anything to do with such a program, and whose words and activities since the

24 THE LIBERATOR

war began have been solely devoted. to the liberation from -'economic serfdom" of the farmers of the Northwest.

A principal point in the indictment against most of the 166 members of the I. W. W. who have lain so long under exorbitant bail in a Chicago prison that one of them has died, one of them gone crazy, and three of them permanently lost their health, is that they published the "Preamble" to the I. W. W.; a document which sets forth in dignified and almost academic language the basic principles of scientific socialism-principles more militantly expressed in the Communist manifesto, which was issued in 184$, and for seventy years circulated all over the world by the hundreds of millions, and which is now incorporated in every significant library of political or social science in existence. For the United States to rely upon cooperation from socialists and labor bodies in Europe, while its citizens are imprisoned on such charges by the jailful, is dangerous in the extreme.

A systematic persecution of I. W. W.'s and alleged I. W. W.'s is now employing the money and energy of those patriots to capital who framed up the Mooney case in California. The president's own mediation commission established the fact of these attacks upon labor agitators by their employers under pretense of patriotism. It is a scandal about which, if nothing at Washington can be done, at least something to restore faith can be said.

The mobbing of innocent citizens the complexion of whose opinions, or whose industrial activities, are not agreeable to their neighbors is apparently not visited with arrest and indictment, because so many of the officers of justice are en-gaged, in a more legal fashion, in the same pursuit. On March 25th, in Benton, Illinois, a woman of Bohemian birth, Mrs. Frances Bergen, was ridden on a rail through the main street of the town waving an American flag, an exhibition which ought to arouse the indignation of every patriot either to the United States or to the cause of civilization, but which passed as nothing in the American press, and will no doubt so pass the officers of justice. Following that, a Socialist agitator was lynched by a mob in Collinsville, Illinois, for alleged "disloyal utterances," although no intimation of the nature of such utterances is given in any press report of the atrocity.

I do not believe there is a disposition upon the part of any Socialists or radical lovers of liberty in this country to advocate a relaxation of vigilance against spies, or those who would seek the collapse of our machinery of war. But there are millions who are appalled at the spirit of barbarism and feudal reaction and internal autocratic militarism which, though natural to spring up in war time, has been actively fostered by the persecutory attitude of certain officials, until it seems unsafe to be an agitator of any hope for humanity beyond what is comprehended by the policeman on the next beat. All these things could be effectually put a stop to in half a day by one imperative public declaration, accompanied with a certain few private orders, from the president and commander-in-chief of the armies. And in proportion as this war is a war of right and democracy, the stoppage of these things, and the restoration of elementary liberties and justice to men without capitalistic influence, would strengthen the government in its waging of the war, and strengthen it immeasurably in that democratic world-reconstruction which it has declared to be the irreducible term of peace.

It will seem strange in history that the American President, eight months after his declaration of war, and before a single handful of his soldiers were baptized with battle, was strong enough to dictate to the entire phalanx of Allied nations what should 'be their terms of peace. It will need explanation. And the explanation will be that he spoke the word that was in the mouth of the peoples of those nations as against those who would thwart them. He has ventured into a position of almost militant leadership of those peoples for the purposes of war and peace. And if he will but move firmly into that position, with all clarity and definition, he can do more than one man has ever done since Napoleon to constitute and create a future of the world. It is so much vaster a world, so much more organized with nerves and arteries of communication. The opportunity is prodigious.

President Wilson has the openness of vision and pliancy of will requisite to see and grasp such an opportunity. Whether he cares passionately enough, and whether he has the grain of resolution, and whether his new knowledge of the difference between the interests of men and the interests of money and prestige, has sufficient emotional depth to stand against the forces that will oppose him, are questions that time still asks of his character.

Anti and Pro

THE New York State Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage held a meeting on April second to open their $50,000 campaign to have the suffrage law repealed. They used to say that if the suffrage law was passed they would have to vote, and that was why they objected to it. But now they say they won't vote. They have got into a state of constitutional aptitude which bids fair to become a regular crusade of negation. I would advise anybody who is pro anything to look out for their president, Mrs. James W. Wadsworth.

"May God fill our hearts," she cried, "with righteous indignation and touch our tongues with a divine fire of eloquence so that we may carry the gospel of anti-suffrage, anti-socialism, anti-feminism, anti-demoralization into every corner of the land with such an inspiring trumpet call that a mighty army of believers will rise and follow our flag to victory."

On the same evening that this conflagration started, a dinner was tendered by the National Woman's Party in Washington to Anne Martin in honor of her candidacy to the United States Senate from Utah. Her remarks furnish a contrast to those of Mrs. Wadsworth. She seems to have got in the habit of being for something:

"I am running as an independent, because I believe that issues are more important than party machines or party organization, and that principles are more vital than either. I am making this present fight for the principle that it is necessary as well as just for women to participate directly in the government. I stand for government ownership of public utilities, and for economic reorganization of our country and the world on the basis not of competition but of fraternity, insuring all who labor by hand or brain a fair stake in industries, and a just share of the fruit of their labor. On these issues I hope to win he support of all parties, and open the way for women in the United States Senate."

NIGHT IN PRISON

IN my cell at night . .

The blare of the electric bulb outside my door of bars: The walls of naked plaster scales, black halfway up and then dirty white . . . .

Our three beds, one above the other on the sagging iron frame.

My two mates sleeping-out of jail for a while !

And I alone in my cell . . . Alone in the gigantic profundity of the night, in my special little chamber in this hive of restraint . . .

The toilet is a running sore . . . punctuating the minutes with perpetual leakage, puffing sewer gas maliciously.

My muscles are stunned with the twenty hours' en-closing every day.

Desires spring half strangled against the walls and bars and then fall back into dull defeat.

It is all black and grey and close and unclean

Far down in me, flickering, Little one, do I know you,-

Stamped down and closed in, battened and battered?

A light !

Spring up, flame of my soul!

Burn, somber flowers of my hopes !

Cleave the bars, strong thoughts in me!

Slowly expanding, I hear the urgent music of remembrance . . . .

The cities I have made court to and which I have won, Carrying loot of love and struggle from them.

The roads,-

0, sacred roads!-

The thousand ways of the world, Leading everywhere

And seducing me to the unforseen.

There is a play of light upon a patch Of shrinking grass, so young

It made me wish to father it

The day I saw it first,

Coming down the path that twined Around the placid hill . . . .

The ship breaks obstinately Through the elusive ramparts Of the mottled waves;

And the wind

Sweeps through me

Carrying sharp cleanliness

Faces . . .

Mouths clenched in fight ; Hands,

Hard cut by work, unpraised,-A forest of battle signals;

And my voice

Lifting my soul from me

And flinging it to the faces and hands As a banner . . .

And you,

My friends,

Warriors with me in war

And worshippers with me before beauty,

Sensitive,

Swaying to humor or to tears,

But strong in rejection of the shining mess

That is called success . . . .

Those who with me have joyed in a fragrant peal of words,

Or journeyed in the cellars of the world with laughing poise.

All is with me tonight In this cell.

The battle

And beauty

And the hills and cities And the triumphant road And my friends.

0, you creaking corpses,

Billowed with pompous gasses,

Who have placed me here,-

These things you cannot take from me!

Outside,

The night is laying muted hands

Upon the tossed angles of the city,

Swathing the world in hush and moon-wrapped shadow.

The city lights ring bells of white

Against the city's mantle.

And the streets are prepared for the roaming of young men, drunken with dreams and causes.

Wine of the world,-

0, laughing pain

In the petals of the world,-Here,-

As before, on the hills,

Or the seas,

Or in the eruptive streets,-I know you . . . .

Charles Ashleigh, I. W. W. Cook County Jail.

THE LIBERATOR

LOT'S WIFE Boardman Robinson

WHEN Boardjnan Robinson shows me a drawing or a painting that he loves, he always moves a big hand over the surface of it in some generous symmetrical gesture, as though to convince me that the picture is flowing as well as poised, and to make sure that I experience the balance and motion, as well as the color and passion, which are more easily caught. Like the ancient Chinese painters, his great preoccupation, and the value that he loves most in art, is rhythm."

Boardman Robinson is composing a series of drawings out of incidents related in the Bible, choosing those incidents for their amazing concentration of dramatic feeling, and yet demanding-with some perversity-that we consider them "designs" and not dramas. They are designs of passion as well as position. There is a relation, half spatial and half spiritual, between the mad breathless neurotic fright of this figure of Lot's wife, turning and yet trying to go, wishing to turn and yet wishing she had not, warm with infantile curiosity and yet already cooling into ageless crystal-between this tall spoiled child that might have been

a woman, and the little inconsiderable round hills that pile up so plump in the background and the firm and fortified shape of nature beside her. They all relate to one another -no word can say how. But the picture is one. It is one gesture in space, even as it is one instant in time. Sculptural and energetic and heavy with emotion.

The other picture is more difficult to think of as a design because of the absorbing personal conflict that it portrays. There is ingenious human understanding in this artist who re-persons the tempter of idealists, not sly and sinister, not itching-1y demonic, hut broad and strong and comfortable-''established" as we say-and able to be almost gruffly kind and fatherly toward the poor, beautiful crank who is throwing away his great gifts on some utopian notion about mankind. "Come, come, my boy !" he might say. To portray this conflict, and contain and carry it all in a single rhythmic gesture of the hand and eye, as inevitably and grandly as nature herself carries all conflicting things in her current-that is, I think, the purpose of the artist who made it. MAX EASTMAN,

May, 1918 27

THE TEMPTATION

RED RUSSIA

A Visit to the Army - II

In his article last month John Reed described the new democratic organizations which sprang up to take charge of the Russian army under the Revolution. In this article he tells of the workings of democracy in the rank and file.]

IN the Iskosol automobile, painted war-gray, we slipped 1 down the hill out of Venden, through its German-looking medieval streets, thronged with masses of soldiers, past a long train of bullock-carts coming back empty from the direction of the front. At the edge of the village a regiment was swinging up, headed by its band playing the Russian "Marseillaise," and a great flag all red, with gold letters, "Peace and Liberty." The soldiers were coming out of the bloody trenches. They had marched thirty miles through mud. To the great sweep of the revolutionary music they tramped stiffly, arms swinging with the peculiar motion of the Russian infantry, heads thrown up and back, grey, gaunt faces strained and stern. A forest of tall bayonets swayed above them, and they choked the narrow street-a torrent of mud-colored humanity. The coats of several were in rags-some were walking in bare feet. The window in a house wall high-up swung open, and a yellow-haired girl leaned out, laughed and waved. . . .

It rained, as it had rained steadily, monotonously, for days ; as it would probably go on raining for weeks. . . . The Jewish lieutenant who went with us was pouring out scraps, odds and ends of interesting information. He told how the Jews had always been forced to serve in the ranks, but that since the Revolution thousands had become officers . .

although many preferred to stay in the ranks because shoulder-straps are distrusted by the soldiers. Before the Revolution the soldiers only received 65 kopeks (now about thirteen cents), per month-but now they got seven and a half roubles (a dollar and a half), every thirty days; and out of that they often had to buy food . . . Then there was the question of decorations, the various degrees of the Orders of St. Ann, St. Vladimir, and St. George, the last of which carry with them certain small money payments. Before the Revolution these crosses were bestowed by a council of superior officers, as emanating from the Emperor; now they were given by acclamation by an assembly of the soldiers. These were only slight details indicating the profound change that had taken place in all the relations of military life.

He also spoke of the retreat from Riga, adding to the sinister story the events he himself had witnessed. "In the rout," he said, "the army hadn't the least idea what to do. The staff completely lost its head, as it did at Tarnopol. For three days it disappeared, leaving only general orders to retreat, and scattered along the roads, each officer for him-self. It was the Iskosol which decided to defend our main positions, and we set up headquarters here in Venden and organized the military resistance on our own responsibility. It was bad enough before," he went on, "but since Riga the soldiers refuse to obey any general staff orders unless counter-signed by us. . . . But it works not badly."

Now we were bumping along the wide, bleak Pskov

chaussee, orginaily paved with cobbles, but pitted and torn by the passage of armies, and deep in mud. Straight and powerful it plunged directly southwest, to the lines-and beyond to Riga-over the rolling country. Peasants, mostly kerchiefed women who grinned cheerfully as we passed, were carelessly dumping stones and dirt on the broken places. An endless succession of trucks and wagon-trains went by, cavalry with long lances and rifles slung cross-wise on their hacks, squads of infantry straggling along, single soldiers. One drove a cow, on which he had hung his rifle and a sack of carrots. There were wounded men, with arms tied in bloody rags. Many were barefoot in the cold ooze. Almost all bore upon their uniforms somewhere a spot of red; and everyone seemed to have a newspaper in his pocket or his hand.

We turned south off the main highway for a few miles over a road built of tree-trunks laid side by side, corduroy, through deep pine forests to the little village where the Stab Corpue has its headquarters. In the datchia of some long-vanished land-owner the officers of the staff welcomed us, but after glancing at our Socialist credentials, they cooled perceptibly, and did not even offer a glass of tea-which is about as near an insult as a Russian can get. However, the twenty-two year old captain who went with us soon began to talk with Russian expansiveness, telling many things he doubtless should not have told.

"Between ourselves," he said," "we all think that there was treason in the fall of Riga. Of course we were terribly overweighted by the German heavy artillery and the army was torn by all sorts of bad feeling between men and officers. But even then. . . . You remember at the Moscow Conference when' General Kornilov said: `Must we lose Riga to awaken the country to a sense of its peril?' Well, the re-treat from Riga began at the same time as the Kornilov attempt.

"After the first withdrawal of the 186th Division beyond the Dvina, all the army received general orders to retreat-not to any particular point, but simply to retreat. Then the staff disappeared for days. There was a panic. The Iskosol was trying to stop the flight. On the Pskov chausee just north of here I came upon disorganized fragments of the Seventh Division in disorder. An officer showed me the written orders from the staff-simply this-'Go north and turn to the left!'"

In the deep woods muddy soldiers were digging pits and building log huts half-underground, covering the roofs with dirt and branches-for winter quarters. All through this back country soldiers swarmed. Each patch of forest was full of artillery-limbers and horses, squadrons of cavalry bivouacked under the trees, and in the sullen downpour thin curls of blue smoke mounted straight up into the cold, quiet air. Again we were speeding along the great Pskov road, through the rich, fertile country of the Estland barons-those powerful German landowners, the most reactionary in all Russia. Great estates extended on both sides of the

B y JOHN REED

road, solid miles of fields lately plowed or yellow-green with abandoned crops; forests, deep green pines or flaming birches; lakes, pools, rivers; and the ample farmhouses of rich peasants, or chateaux of the local lords. Occasionally soldiers would be working in the fields. The Association of Zemstovs had plowed and planted all the Baltic provinces so that this year's harvest would feed the army and leave a million poods over-now almost fallen into German hands.

Whole acres of cabbages were rotting yellow, untouched, and fields of beets and carrots were washed out by the rain. The ostentatious country houses stood roofless, burnt; the peasant homesteads had their windows smashed, and trails of loot led in all directions. And over the silent country, waste and empty, only immense flocks of rooks wheeled screaming in the rain, the throbbing mutter of far-off battle sounded, and the only human life was the hysterical life of an army in battle. . . .

Off to the right a quarter-mile across the plain, the village of Ziegewald was being bombarded. Unseen, unheralded except by the muffled boom of cannons miles away, the shells came whining down out of the gray sky, and house after house heaved up and burst apart in splinters and black smoke. Our automobile turned in and entered the village. Only a block away some unseen thing roared suddenly and tore a building apart-the air was full of bricks.' Down the street some peasants stood at the door of their hut, a bearded man and a woman with a baby in her arms, quietly watching. A few soldiers went nonchalantly across the fields, hands in pockets, more interested in us than the shelling. Almost into it we drove, and then turned off to the left. The captain was laughing. Right behind us, where we had passed, a jagged pit opened in the road. Shrapnel began to burst. . . .

Along a deserted road, only used at night-for it was in sight of the enemy-we crept beside a cedar hedge, while over our heads the hurtling shells went whistling, high up. Half a mile behind, over to the right, a Russian six-inch battery fired methodically at some unseen target, so far away that the explosions were barely audible. Through a farm we went, between a big house and a stone barn, both roof-less and peopled with soldiers and field-kitchens; and along an open field to the wooded heights above the river Aa, where lay the Russian first-line trenches.

Like grotesque, mud-colored monsters the Russian soldiers crawled from their bomb-proofs to look us over-gaunt, drab-faced creatures, dressed in outlandish combinations of odds and ends of military and civilian clothes, their feet wrapped in rags. Since we were with officers they were sullenly suspicious, and demanded papers. Through the trees we could see the opposite bluffs, where the Germans lay hidden-but it was still raining steadily, drearily, and there seemed to be a tacit agreement between both sides not to shoot.

A bearded soldier came up, wearing the red arm-band of the soldiers' committee.

"Any news from Petrograd?" he asked the captain, with-out saluting. All the others crowded around. The captain answered that he himself had not seen the papers. "Huh!"

grunted the other, and turned slowly to us. "If these are Americans," he went on, "ask them why their country re-fused to endorse the Russian peace terms. Tell them that this is prolonging the war; that thousands of Russian men are dying because of it."

Half a mile further along we stood in front of the company commander's dug-out while he spoke to the captain in low tones of the desperate situation. The soldiers had been saying that soon they would go home; regiments of four thousand men had been reduced to one thousand; there was not enough food, clothes, boots ; they had been in the trenches for months, without relief ; they did not trust their officers.

"Tell them in America," cried a soldier, "that we are not cowards ! We did not run away from Riga without fighting. Three-quarters of us are dead. . . ."

"True! True !" muttered others, crowding around. A voice shouted, "Riga was betrayed !" There was silence.

Now the rain had at last ceased, in the western sky the towering clouds moved and broke through to blue gold. The rich green land steamed. Birds sang. A group of soldiers stood looking up to heaven with haggard and apprehensive faces; for with good weatlier the firing begins. Indeed, aI-most immediately came the faint high drone of an aeroplane, like a wasp, and we saw it slowly circling up above the trees. All around us the soldiers began scattering to their trenches. Rifles cracked. Behind us the Russian batteries gave tongue, and on the pale sunny sky flowered shrapnel.

"Useless!" The captain shrugged. "We have no anti-aircraft guns, no aeroplanes. The Twelfth Army is blind."

Overhead the thing soared low, running along the lines, and on its painted armor the sun glanced dully. Guns roared now all over the country; shells burst before and behind it, but it glided on Iightly, contemptuously. From the woods they shouted hoarse insults and fired.

"Come on," said the captain. "Let's get out of here. They are going to shell this place. . . ."

We had got up the hill behind the gutted farmhouse when it began-the far thud-thud-thud of German three-inch guns, followed by sharp explosions in groups of three, over the place where we had stood. Rifle fire began pricking along the nervous miles. Batteries far and near, concealed in copses, behind old walls, spoke to each other and replied. Invisible missiles wove in the sky a tapestry of deadly sound. The aeroplane swooped and circled alone, humming.

Behind us as we went, all the west turned swiftly golden-red, pouring sunset up the sky, and the clouds piled up in ruins like a city on fire. In the clear yellow-green between a star began to burn, and below it a sausage-shaped German 'observation balloon crawled slowly up and hung there, sinister, like an eye. . . . Night fell. The fire freshened, pricking and crashing everywhere. Birds sang sleepy songs. A flock of rooks wheeled around a windmill wrecked by artillery. From far-off came the feverish stutter of a machine-gun.

Back through Ziegewald, in the quiet dusk filled again with vague human shapes which moved among the ruins, and along the Pskov road through the blasted country, so empty and yet so full of unnatural life. The stars were out. It was cold. Behind us the battle fell away. Fires twinkled

30 THE LIBERATOR

over the plain, in the woods-fires of soldiers, fires of refugees who camped there, many of them without blankets, because the towns were crowded. Echoes of great choruses floated to us, of songs about home, and love, and peace, and harvest -and Revolution. Our headlights picked out details of the miserable interminable procession - the homeless, the wounded, the weary, those with naked feet, patrols, reliefs. . . .

The captain was giving concise details about the state of things. Every regiment had lost at least 6o per cent of its strength. Companies normally of 25o men had now less than too. Battalion commanders now were at the head of regiments; regimental commanders of divisions; he himself, nominally the captain of a company, now commanded a battalion. He had been gravely wounded four times.

As for politics, the captain laughingly protested that he had none. He was just an amused onlooker, he said. "What will come will come. To me, a philosopher, life is always the same. Nitchevo. After all, external events do not matter . . . ."

* * * *

Back in Venden . . . . The day betore we had seen a notice of a bolshevik meeting. Tavaristch Peters was to speak. The commandant had forbidden it. But we learned that it had taken place after all. The Iskosol sent word that it must not be held, but the Iskosol was disregarded. The commandant of the town sent dragoons-but the dragoons stayed to the meeting.

The open market-place was thronged with soldiers, and with the few peasants who still remained in the surrounding country. The peasants had cabbages, apples, cheese and some rare belts of home-made cloth to sell; and the soldiers had loot-chiefly worn silver watches such as the peasants carry, with here and there a ring. The wide cobbled place was thick with moving masses of dun-colored soldiers, often in rags, sometimes without boots. Bits of leather capable of being made into a shoe-sole brought fifty roubles; aluminum shaving dishes were highly prized, and accordions. I saw a broken suspender hid in for ten roubles.

The "Death March"

A squadron of Cossacks, rifles on backs, rode up the street with their peaked caps over one ear, and their `love-locks' very prominent. The leader was playing an accordion ; every few minutes all the voices crashed together in a chorus. Then a Lettish regiment came marching along down, swinging their arms and singing the slow Lettish Death March, so solemn and courageous. As they went along comrades ran out from the sidewalk to kiss them farewell. They were bound for the line of fire.

In the town-hall sat the Refugee Committee, almost swamped by the thousands of people who had fled before the advance of the Germans or the retreat of the Russians-homeless, helpless. The committee had originally been created by the Imperial government, but since the revolution all members are elected by the refugees themselves. The secretary took us down into the foul, flooded cellar where every day were fed seven hundred women, children and old men.

Loot

"Why did the Russian soldiers loot ?" he repeated, thought-fully. He himself was a Lett. "Well, there were the crim-

inal elements that every army has, and then there were hungry men. Considering the general disorganization it is remarkable they looted so little. Then you must understand that the Russian soldiers have always been taught that on a retreat it is a patriotic duty to drive out the civilian population and destroy everything to prevent it falling into the enemy's hands. But the most important reason is that the Russians were suspicious of the Lettish population, which they thought were Germanophile, and the reactionary officers encouraged this resentment. Hideous things have been done by counter-revolutionary provocateurs."

War As Class Issue

The Russian soldiers really consider the Baltic provinces alien territory and do not see why they should defend it. And they have looted, robbed. But in spite of all, it is only the German overlords who want the. Germans to come in, and the bourgeoisie which depends upon them ; the rest of the population has had a belly-full of German civilization, and the workers, soldiers and landless laborers have long been Social-Democrats, thoroughly in sympathy with the Revolution. That is why the war against Germany was so universally popular in Livonia-it was a class issue.

A Working Class Army

This was corroborated at the office of the Iskolostreel-the Executive Committee of the Lettish Sharp-shooters, of which nine regiments, some 15,ooo men, belonged to the Twelfth Army. The Letts are almost all bolsheviks and relied almost altogether upon their own organization, a really revolutionary crowd of fine young fighters. Originally a volunfeer corps of the bourgeoisie, the sharp-shooters had finally been reorganized to include all the Letts drafted'into the Russian Army, until it was overwhelmingly a working-class body.

Visitors

Word had gone about that Americans were in town-the first within the memory of local mankind-and we had visitors. First was a school-teacher, who spoke French, a little man with a carefully-trimmed beard and gold-rimmed glasses, who declared he was a member of the Intelligentsia and approved of revolutions, but not of the class struggle. He averred the he had been deputed by the peasants of his village to come and ask us how to end the war . . . Then there was a fat German-American baker by the name of Witt, who had an American passport and had lived in Cincinnati. He professed himself to be a great admirer of President Wilson, had a very hazy idea of the Russian revolution, and came for advice as to where to emigrate ; was the bakery business very profitable in Siberia? Finally a sleek, oily prosperous-looking peasant, who represented the Lettish Independence Movement, and deluged us with bad history and shady statistics to prove the yearning desire of every Lett that Livonia should be an independent country-a desire which we already knew was almost non-existent.

The Iskolostreel Investigates

Bright and early next morning thundered at our door Dodparouchik Peterson, secretary of the Iskolostreel. The soldiers' committee of the Second Lettish Brigade had sent

May, 1918 31

in a complaint about the inefficiency of sixteen officers; a delegate of the Iskosol and the Iskolostreel was going down to the lines to see about it; did we want to come along?

This time it was an ambulance which carried us, together with Dr. Nahumsen, the delegate army surgeon, holder of several German university degrees, veteran revolutionist and prominent member of the Bolshevik faction. We had aboard also about half a ton of bolshevik papers-Soldat and Rabotchie Foot-to distribute along the front. No passes were necessary, for nobody dared stop such a powerful personage.

"The condition of the army?" the doctor shrugged his shoulders and smiled unpleasantly. "What do you want? Our French, English and American comrades do not send us the supplies they promised. Is it possible that they are trying to starve the Revolution ?"

The. Death Penalty

We asked about the death penalty in the army, over which such a bitter controversy was raging between the radicals and reactionaries.

"Consider," he replied, "what the death penalty in this army signified. Today I will show you regiments, entirely Bolshevik, who have been reduced from four thousand men to sevexc-in this last month's fighting. In all the Twelfth Army there have only been sixty men officially proclaimed deserters since- the fall of Riga. No, my friend, Mr. Kerensky's death penalty has not been applied to cowards, deserters and mutineers. The death penalty in the Russian Army is for Bolsheviks, for 'agitators', who can be shot down without trial by the revolver of an officer. Luckily they have not tried it here-they do not dare . .

Whenever we passed a group of soldiers, Peterson threw out a bundle of papers; he held a pile on his lap, and doled them out one by one to passersby. Thousands of papers with the reactionary program of the new coalition government-suppression of the Soviets, iron discipline in the army, war to the uttermost . . .

Reactionary Officers

Brigade staff headquarters were in a brick farm-house, on a little hill amid wooded meadows. In the living room the officers sat at a long table, a polkovnik, his lieutenant-colonel and a group of smart youths wearing the cords of staff duty, eating stchi, mountains of meat, and drinking in-terminable tea in a cloud of cigarette smoke. They welcomed us with great cordiality and a torrent of Moscow French-which is very like that of Stratford; and in fifteen minutes Dr. Nahumsen and the Colonel were bitterly disputing politics.

The Colonel was a frank reactionary-out to crush Germany, still loyal to Nicholas the Second, convinced that the country was ruined by the Revolution, and utterly opposed to the soldiers' committees.

"The trouble with the army," he said, "is that it is concerned about politics. Soldiers have no business to think."

All the rest followed their superior's lead. The podpolkovnik, a round, merry person with twinkling eyes, informed me confidentially that "no officer of any character or dignity would have any dealings with the soldiers' committees."

"Are there no officers who work with the committees?" I asked.

He shrugged disdainfully. "A few. But we call them the 'demagogue' officers, and naturally don't associate with them."

Pity the Officer!

The others volunteered further interesting information. In the first place, according to them, there were no bolsheviks in the army-except the committees. The Lettish troops are ignorant and illiterate. The committees interfere seriously with military operations. And the masses of soldiers are bitterly jealous of the workmen in the towns, who get phenomenal wages and only work eight hours, while "we are on duty here twenty-four hours a day."

By this time we had sat at the table two long hours, drinking tea and smoking, during which time the entire staff did absolutely nothing but talk. One tall boy, with a smell of brillantine floating around his shining hair, went over to the piano and began idly fingering waltzes. Occasionally two bent and aged peasants, man and woman, she with bare feet, crept through the room to the tiny closet they had been allowed to keep for themselves. . . . An hour later, when we left to go to the soldiers' committee, the staff of the Second Lettish Brigade was still "working twenty-four hours a day," and expressing its honest resentment against the factory workers of Moscow and Petrograd. . . .

Fraternization

The way to the Committee led down across a little brook, up a winding path through a wood all blazoned yellow and red, and out upon lush meadows where the view plunged westward forever across the rich, rolling country. A gaunt, silent youth on horseback led the way, and as we got further and further away from the staff he began to smile, and offered his horse to ride. And he talked, telling of the May days when the Russian troops fraternized with the Germans all along this front.

"The Germans sent spies," he said, "but then, so did our officers. There is always somebody around to betray the people, no matter what nation you belong to. Many times they tried to make us attack our German comrades, but we refused. And they also refused; I know of one regiment, where I had many friends, which was condemned for mutiny, reorganized, and twelve men were shot. And still they would not fight the Russians. So they were sent to the Western front. As it was, they finally had to tell us lies to make us advance."

A Soviet Committee

It was about half a mile to where the low, wide, thatch-covered farm house and its great barn stood baldly on a little rise of ground. Artillery limbers stood parked there, horses were being led to water, there were little cook-fires, and many soldiers. A huge brick stove divided the interior of the house. On one side lived the peasant and his wife and children, all their belongings heaped in the corners; the other half was bare except for two home-made benches and a rough table, heaped high with papers, reports, pamphlets-among which I noticed Lenine's "Imperialism As a New Stage in Capitalism." Around this sat six men, one of them a non-commissioned officer, the rest privates-the presidium of the Soviet of the Second Lettish Brigade. Without any place to sleep except the hay-loft, without winter clothes or

32 THE LIBERATOR

enough to eat, the committee sat permanently, and had been sitting for a month, doing the work the staff should have done.

This is no unsupported assertion on my part. One had only to ask any soldier where he got his food, his clothing-what he did get-who found and assigned his quarters, rep-resented him politically, defended his interests; he would always say, "The Committee." If the Commander-in-Chief of the Russian Armies gave an order for the Second Lettish Brigade to attack, or to retreat, not a single man would move without the endorsement of the Committee. This resulted from two fears; one that they would be sent to Petrograd to suppress the Revolution, the other that they would be tricked into an offensive as they were tricked in June.

They welcomed us with great friendliness, wiping off the bench where we were to sit, fetching cigarettes, taking our coats; other soldiers crowded in and stood about the door, silently watching.

"Good Training"

A youth with a bright, happy face and towsled hair was the chairman. He told us how the Lettish regiments had been in the front ranks for six months without rest, and they had sent word to the Ministry of War in Petrograd that if they were not relieved by October first, they would simply leave the trenches. One regiment had been reduced from four thousand men to seven, and all were without adequate food or clothing.

"How can the men stand it?" I asked.

"The officers say it is good training," he answered, and everybody laughed. A soldier near the door cried, "You don't see many officers going barefoot!" And again they laughed.

The Committee seemed highly amused at the officers' accusations.

"They say we are jealous of the workmen in the cities. But we are ourselves workmen, and we will share the short hours and high wages they have won for us, when we return to the cities after the war. Most of us are union men . . . There are no bolsheviks in the army? Well, this committee was only elected last month, and every member of every committee in this brigade is bolshevik . . . We are not illiterate; on the contrary, less than two per cent. cannot read and write. The Letts all go to school. As for interfering with military matters, we have nothing to do with them whatever, except in the case of mass movement of troops, which are always arranged beforehand."

Revolutionary Tribunals

There had been no killing of reactionary officers in this Brigade, even in the Kornilov days-although Colonel Kruskin went around at that time openly praying for the success of the counter-revolution. Several brutal officers had, however, been forced to retire, and one was brought before a revolutionary tribunal for beating a soldier; but he died in battle before the judgment.

Courts martial in the Twelfth Army had been replaced by revolutionary military courts. Each company had a petty court of five elected members-soldiers or officers; above that was the full regimental court, composed of 28 soldiers and 14 officers, elected by the full regiment; and a presidium of six chosen by this assembly sat permanently for the trial

of minor offenses-such as stealing. If the soldiers were dissatisfied with their officers, they appealed first to the Commissar of the Army, and if he did nothing, to the Central Executive Army Committee.

"We know," said the chairman, "which officers are for us and which are against us. We know that Riga was betrayed. On the first of August we had aeroplanes, heavy artillery; but when the Germans attacked, all those things had been sent away." He shrugged. "But what can we do? We must defend the Revolution, and Petrograd. We must watch them, and make them fight. . . ."

They showed us copies of all orders of the staff, kept carefully on file here; the chart of location of all troops of the brigade, which had been quartered by the committee; requisitions and purchases of food, clothing, shells, guns ; and the record of the political transactions of the soldier party-groups with the Soviets and with the Government.

"We're the Ministry of War!" said one member, jocularly. "The Ministry of War? We're the whole government!. . . ."

"Nobody Left in Siberia"

In the loft of the barn outside were quartered several batteries of light artillery, part of a Siberian regiment which had just arrived from Irkutsk. With their enormous grey wool shapkis, boots made from wild beast hides with the fur outside, new blouses and ruddy faces, they looked like an-other race. They complained bitterly about their food.

My companion picked out a boy who looked about thirteen.

"Aren't you too young to be a soldier? Why, you're only just big enough to have a girl."

"If I'm old enough to be in love, I'm old enough to fight," answered the boy. "When the war broke out, I was only fifteen, but now I'm a man."

"Aren't you afraid somebody will steal your girl while you are away?"

The boy shrugged. "There's nobody left in Siberia to steal her," he said simply.

Russia's losses in the war are already more than seven mil-lions at the front-twice that in the rear. Four years. Children have grown up to manhood, put on uniform, gone to the trenches. . . . "There is nobody left in Si-

beria. . . . * * * *

A Market for Loot

Sunday in Venden. A gusty heaven overhead, thin clouds opening in a washed blue sky, with a watery sun riding there. Underfoot, black mud, trampled by thousands of boots, townspeople and peasants, who had driven in for miles around, thronging the Lutheran church, with mingled Russian soldiers, very curious but respectful. In the open market place the bartering of odds and ends of loot was going full blast. Immensely high above the town an aeroplane drifted southwest, and all about it the firmament was splotched with white and black smoke-bursts. The sound of explosions and the hum of the motor came faintly. People looked up carelessly and said, "Niemessy!" (German.)

Along about midday tables appeared in two corners of the square. Then the banners-the revolutionary banners, in every shade of red, with gold, silver and white letters on

May, 1918 33

them, moving bright and splendid through the great crowd. Speakers mounted the tables. It was a double mass-meeting, Russian in one corner, Lettish in another, forbidden by the Conimandant and frowned upon by the Iskosol. All the town had turned out for it, and most of the fifteen thousand troops. And there was no doubt of the sentiments of that audience-from the great flags behind the tables, one in-scribed, "Power to the People ! Long live Peace!" and the other, "Bread, Peace and Freedom !" to the thunderous roars that met the hot words of the speakers, denouncing the government for not forcing the peace conference, daring it to suppress the Soviets, and dwelling much upon the Imperialistic designs of the Allies in the war.

A Peace Meeting

Surely never since history began has a fighting army held such a peace meeting in the midst of battle. The Russian soldiers have won freedom from the tsar, they do not believe that there is any reason for continuing a war which they consider to have been imperialistic from the first, they are strongly impregnated with international Socialism-and yet they fight on

Under the wintry sun the banners moved in a little wind, alive and glittering, and in thousands the dun-colored soldier-masses stood listening, motionless, to any man who wanted to speak. The chairman of the Iskolostreel managed the meeting with a tiny white flag. Overhead always the aeroplanes passed and passed, sometimes circling nearby. From far rumbled the thunder of heavy artillery-it was good weather for battle. A flock of rooks wheeled in hoarse agitation around the church spire. And past the end of the square went unceasingly long trains of trucks and wagons.

There was too much noise. The speakers could not be heard. And every time a German aeroplane came near, *here was an uneasy craning of necks-for the village had been bombed three times, and many people killed. The chairman of the two meetings signalled with their little flags, the speakers leaped down, tables rose upon shoulders, the great red banners dipped and moved First
went the Letts, headed by a band of women singing the mournful, stark revolutionary songs of the country; then the banners with Lettish inscriptions; then the Russian banners, and after them all the thousands and thousands, pouring like a muddy river in flood along the narrow street. In at a great gate we went, and past the baronial manor of the Sievers family, liege-lords of Venden. Here on a spur of rock rose the tremendous ruins of the medieval castle of the Teutonic Knights, and below the ground fell steeply down, through ancient trees all yellow and crimson with autumn leaves, to a pond with lilies. From the window of the high keep one could see miles across the fertile, smiling country, woods, lakes, chateaux, fields all chocolate brown or vivid green, foliage all shades from gold to blood-red, gorgeous.

Rushing down torrent-like through the trees the Lettish banners moved with wailing song to the hill under the castle, while the Russians paused midway down a steep slope and set their table under a great oak tree. Around the two tribunes the people packed themselves, hung in the trees, heaped on the roofs of some old sheds. . . . Speaker followed speaker, all through the long afternoon. Five hours the immense crowd stood there, intent, listening with all its ears, with all its soul. Like a glacier, patient, slow-moving, a mass of dun caps and brown faces carpeting the steep hill-

side. Spontaneous roars of applause, scattered angry cries burst from it. Almost all the speakers were bolsheviks, and their unbroken refrain was, "All the power to the Soviets, land for the peasants, an immediate democratic peace.". . .

Toward the last, someone undertook to deliver an old-fashioned "patriotic" oration-but the fierce blasts of disapproval quickly drove him from the platform. Then a little professor with gold-rimmed spectacles tried to deliver on the Lettish national movement; but no one paid the least attention to him. . . .

A Relic of the Dead Past

On a knoll over the water was a black marble tomb, lettered as follows :

"Dedicated to the memory of the creator of this park, Count Carl Sievers, by his tenderly-loving and high-regarding son, Oberhofmeister Senator Count Emanuel Sievers, this memorial is erected on this little hill, which was named Carlsberg after his own name Carl. On this spot he, at that time the last-surviving lord of Castle-Wenden, together with the Duckernschen Peasants' Council and their wives, ate lunch, while the peasants' children danced on the nearby flat place.

"Thereby had he, with his own artistic sense, with his own creative talents, an idea to dig a large pit in the midst of a stream from the rich springs of Duckernschen, and to place here a great pool, by himself beautifully imagined, in which the noble ruins of the old Ordens-Schloss could reflect themselves" . . .

A couple of soldiers came lounging up. One slowly spelled out the first words.

"Graf ! Count!" he exclaimed, and spat. "Well, he's dead, like so many comrades. He was probably a good guy." . . .

Around the monument, the "great pool," across the rustic bridges and in and out of the artificial grottoes of the aristocratic old park, roamed hundreds of gaunt men in filthy uniforms. The ancient turf was torn to mud. Rags, papers, cigarette stubs littered the ground. Up the hillsides were banked the masses of the proletariat, under red banners of the social revolution. Surely in all its stirring history the Ordens-Schloss never looked down on any scene as strange as this !

Beyond the park music was going down the road toward the little Lutheran cemetery. They were burying three Lettish sharp-shooters, killed in action yesterday. First came two carts, each with a soldier who strewed the road with evergreen boughs. At the gate of the cemetery one of the soldiers brushed off his hands, heaved a sigh, took out a cigarette and lighted it, and began to weep. The whole town was now streaming down along the road, peasant women in their Sunday kerchiefs, old men in rusty black, soldiers. In their midst moved the military band, slowly playing that extraordinary Lettish death-march, which has such a triumphant, happy note. Then the white coffins, with aluminum plaques saying: "Eternal Peace."

Peace, peace-how many times you hear that word at the front. The Revolution means peace, popular government means peace, and last of all, bitterly, death means peace. No funeral has the poignant solemnity of a funeral at the front. Almost all these men and women have lost some men in the war ; they know what it means, death. And these hundreds of soldiers, with stiff, drawn faces; they knew these three

34 THE LIBERATOR

dead-perhaps some of them even spoke with them, heard them laugh, joke, before the unseen whining shell fell out of the sky and tore them to bloody pieces. They realize well that perhaps next time it will be their turn.

To the quiet deepness of the pastor's voice and muffled sobbing everywhere, the coffins are lowered down, and thud, thud, drops the heavy wet earth, with a sound like cannon far away. The chairman of the Iskolostreel is making a revolutionary speech over the graves. The band plays, and a quavering hymn goes up. Nine times the rifles of the firing squad crash on the still air. . . .

Overhead is the venomous buzz of an aeroplane. From the woods comes a faint roar of applause. Here death-there life. And as we slowly disperse comes a committee to get the band, excited and eager. . . . In the park they are still speaking, and the temporary chairman asks, "Is there anyone here who wants to say anything against the bolsheviks?" Silence. There appears to be no one. The hand will be here in a minute" -a great shout-"and then we'll make a demonstration through the town !"

One People-For a Moment

And now the hand is coming down through the trees, still playing the death march. On the flat place near the pool it forms, strikes up suddenly the Marseillaise. All the dun-colored thousands are singing now, a thunderous great chorus that shakes the trees. The banners are coming together in front. The chairman waves his white flag. We start-at first slowly, feet rustling over the fallen leaves, then gathering volume, pouring swifter and swifter up through the trees, a wild flood roaring up, unstoppable. . . . The band tries to play-there are snatches and rags of music, confused singing. Everybody is exalted; faces are alight-arm and arm we go. . . . It is like what the first days of the Revolution must have been. It is the Revolution horn again, as it is without ceasing born again, braver, wiser after much suffering. . . . Through all the streets and al

leys of the town we rush impetuous, and the town is people again for the moment, as Russia will again be people-for a moment. . .

But only for the moment. It is Monday, and the Little Soviet is in closed session. When the doors are closed, lights are thrown into the faces of the crowds and outsiders expelled, protesting. One by one the delegates add to the gloomy picture of disaster. The scouts are in open revolt because their bread allowance has been cut; in another regiment the officers insist on carrying the full amount of their baggage, and had to leave the field telephones behind; in another part of the front the men refuse to build winter quarters, saying it is easier to seize the peasants' houses; the Soviet of the Fifth Division has passed a resolution favoring peace at any cost; here the soldiers have become apathetic, and even indifferent to politics; there they say, "Why should we defend the country? The country has €osgotten us!"

* * *

As we sat on the platform waiting for the Petrograd train, it occurred to Williams that we might as well give away our superfluous cigarettes. Accordingly he sat down on a trunk and held out a big box, making generous sounds. There must have been several hundred soldiers around. A few came hesitantly and helped themselves, but the rest held

aloof, and soon Williams sat alone in the midst of an ever-widening circle. The soldiers were gathered in groups, talking in low tones.

Suddenly he saw coming toward him a committee of three privates, carrying rifles with fixed bayonets, and looking dangerous. "Who are you?" the leader asked. "Why are you giving away cigarettes? Are you a German spy, trying to bribe the Russian revolutionary army?"

All over the platform the crowd followed, slowly packing itself around Williams and the committee, muttering angrily --ready to tear him to pieces.

* * *

We were packed into the train too tight to move. In compartments meant for six people twelve were jammed, and there was such a crowd in the aisles that no one could pass. On the roof of the car a hundred soldiers stamped their feet and sang shrill songs in the freezing night air. Inside all the windows were shut, everybody smoked, there was universal conversation.

Meanwhile Life Goes on As Usual

At Valk some gay Red Cross nurses and young officers climbed in at the windows, with candy, bottles of vodka, cheese, sausages, and all the materials for a feast. By some miracle they wedged themselves among us and began to make merry. They grew amorous, kissing and fondling each other. In our compartment two couples fell to embracing, half lying upon the seats. Somebody pulled the black shade over the lights; another shut the door. It was a debauch, with the rest of us looking on. . . .

In the upper birth lay a young captain, coughing incessantly and terribly. Every little while he lifted his wasted face and spat blood into a handkerchief. And over and over he cried: "The Russians are animals !"

Above the roaring of the train, coughing, bacchic cries, quarrels, all through the night one could hear the feet of ragged soldiers pounding on the roof, rhythmically, and their nasal singing. . . .

TO AN AVIATOR

IF they should tell me you were dead

I would know only that one starry dawn You climbed beyond the shadows, faced the red Sweet flush before the morning and were gone. One swift and shining moment high above The little peoples and the smoke of wars-Winged and triumphant, hot with youth and love. You played along the pathways of the stars.

You reached great, empty mysteries of space, Where the forgotten worlds hang stark and gray, And even dreams grow cold and far away: Only the moaning winds live in that place. And so, too eager, weary winged, you fell Back to the dusty earth you loved so well.

Beulah Amidon.

one oue

May, 1918 35

PLAY

Is there none in the wing

And none in the breast of the shivering thing

Could we bring back the notes-make them over in red,

Color the dingy throat, breast and the head, Would the rapture be there

And all that was fair

When the song was begun?

ANNETTE WYNNE.

WHEN THE SONG IS DONE

WHEN the song is done And the notes all heard, Who can find the thrill in a plain brown bird A beggar bird shivering out in the snow-Dingy and starved? Must beauty go When the song is clone?

36 •

INTERNATIONAL LABOR

By Alexander Trachtenberg

Dr. Trachtenberg, Editor of the American Labor Year Book, and Lecturer on the International Labor Movement at the Rand School of Social Science, is probably in closer touch with working-class news than anyone else in. the United States. In these "Notes," which are to appear each month in The Liberator, he will not attempt any general review of the international situation, but will rather call to our attention events here and there of special interest and significance.

The Editors wish to state that such actions as may be recorded here from time to time do not necessarily have our editorial endorsement.

Argentina

To the railroad strike, which has been in progress for some time there, has recently been added a strike of engineers and stokers, which has paralyzed the entire coast and river shipping trade.

A report of the recent elections to the Argentine parliament seems to indicate that the Socialists polled 6o,ooo votes, and increased their representation to 17 seats. The party has a splendid daily paper-Vanguardia, which is published in Buenos-Aires, and ten weeklies published in seven different Ianguages.

Porto Rico

A strike of about 8,ooo peons and mill workers has been in progress for the last three months on the sugar plantations of the Fajordo district, where wages average fifty-five to seventy cents a day. Governor Arthur Yager has prohibited meetings or demonstrations of strikers. Santiago Iglesias, veteran socialist and A. F. of L. organizer, and member of the Territorial House of Delegates from the Workers Party, has been trying to secure' redress from the governor, but with no avail.

Spain

The recent parliamentary elections, following the labor disturbances which have by no means altogether subsided, have brought victory to the Socialist and labor forces. From incomplete reports it is known that the combined Socialist, Republican and Reformist forces which. apparently formed a "bloc" and which were supported by the General Workers' Union, have elected six deputies. Four of these, members of the General Committee which was in charge of the last strike, are serving a term of imprisonment at Cartagena. They are Besteiro from Madrid, Caballero from Barcelona,

Anguiano from Valencia and Saborite from Oviedo. It is believed that the present government, though very reactionary, will be forced to free them.

Holland

The high cost of living, the scarcity of food and similar conditions arising out of the European war are causing restlessness among the Dutch workers. At a recent conference of 36 labor organizations in Amsterdam it was decided to declare a general strike as a protest against the exportation, and the unequal distribution, of the necessaries of life.

Italy

Constantino Lazzari, National Secretary of the Socialist Party and his assistant, Bombasci, were tried recently for anti-war propaganda and condemned to 35 and 28 months of imprisonment and the payment of fines of $750 and $400, respectively. Secretary Lazzari was especially accused of sending last year a circular letter to all the Socialist mayors, asking them to resign on a certain day as a protest against the continuation of the war, as well as to show to the people that the Socialist officials were powerless to do anything to relieve their sufferings, while the war lasted. The Socialist deputy Bentine, who defended Lazzari and Bombasci, re-marked to the Court in concluding his argument for the defense: "If you free them, you will give us joy; if you convict them, you will do us honor." Secretary Lazzari, upon receiving sentence, turned to the crowded courtroom and shouted, "Long live Socialism !"

Russia

By far the most encouraging proof we have of the vitality of the revolutionary proletariat was the cryptic message sent on March 14 by the All-Russian Soviet to the President of the United States in reply to his greetings :

"The All-Russian Congress of Soviets expresses its appreciation to the American people and first of all the laboring and exploited classes in the United States for the message sent by President Wilson to the Congress of Soviets, at this time when the Russian-Socialist Soviet republic is living through most difficult trials.

"The Russian republic uses the occasion of the message from President Wilson to express to all peoples who are dying and suffering from the horrors of this imperialistic war, its warm sympathy and firm conviction that the happy time is near when the laboring masses in all bourgeois countries will throw off the capitalistic yoke and establish a Socialist state of Society, which is the only one capable of assuring a permanent and just peace, as well as the culture and well-being of all who toiI."

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AND SOCIALIST NOTES

Ireland

Pursuant to a resolution adopted by the Irish Trade Union Congress, a Labor Party is now being formed, in which, it is reported, membership will be open not only to labor organizations, but also to individual members of trade unions.

Canada

At its recent annual convention the British Columbia Federation of Labor voted to organize a Labor Party and engage in independent political activity. The convention also went on record denouncing industrial conscription, and advocating the substitution of the industrial for the prevalent craft form of labor union,

United States

The Socialist Party and the radical sections of the organized labor movement are anxiously awaiting the delegation headed by Camille Huysmans, which the recent Inter-Allied Conference voted to send to the United States.

Meanwhile, apparently to checkmate the visit of this delegation consisting of Socialists, the A. F. of L. has sent a delegation to Europe which, it is announced, will not confer with the Labor Party while in England, but with the General Federation of Trade Unions,-an organization, which de-spite its title, is small and unimportant compared with the forces united in the British Labor Party.

France

At a recent meeting of the National Socialist Council, it was decided by a small majority to vote war credits, but a threat was addressed to the Government to rescind this action tf passports are refused delegates to the proposed International Conference.

At the last annual convention of the Confederation of Labor, the resolution on war omitted reference to the Alsace-Lorraine question, declared for the Russian peace formula, against an economic war after the war, for the freedom of the seas, demanded a restatement by the government of war aims and urged an early international Socialist and labor conference.

Austria

There has been a strong movement among the workers against the invasion of Russia by Austrian troops.

The Socialists have attempted to hold meetings to demand that the government open peace negotiations with the United States.

The minority Socialists have recently issued a manifesto bitterly attacking the Austrian prototypes of Scheidemann, David and Ebert-Victor Adler, Renner, and Seitz-speaking of them as the tools of German and Austrian imperialists. "We cannot forgive their offenses and there can be no conciliation with them," declares the manifesto.

Germany

Proof is now at hand that demand for peace negotiations, not dissatisfaction with food distribution, was at the bottom of the great strikes of January and February. The following quotations from a leaflet distributed in Berlin during the strike days shows the temper of the strikers:

"When will peace come?" is the question asked and the following answer is given: "It will come when Germany will be ready for it-and the time is coming for that. It will come when the German people will learn the lessons of the war, when they will learn as every nation will have to learn, that the voice of Europe cannot be disregarded with impunity.

"The hour of peace will strike when the Germans will no longer listen to those who brought about the war. When they will treat the apostles of militarism and chauvinism with mockery and contempt. Peace will come when the Germans will say to their Kaiser: You, whom we have followed and obeyed; you, to whom we have offered ourselves;, you, who even disregarded our ideals, our beliefs and our traditions-we have given up everything for you and what have we received in return? Nothing but hunger, and cold, and nakedness; sickness and death; ruin and destruction,"

Minority Socialists, in and out of the Reichstag, continue to discredit the German Government every time they have an opportunity. Deputy Hugo Haase, now leader of the Independent Socialists, recently made public a secret under-standing between the German and Austrian governments for the forcible annexation of the Baltic provinces.

Dr. Cohn, Independent Socialist, condemned in the Reich-stag the Ukrainian treaty of peace, closing his speech, amid applause from his colleagues and shouts of "traitor" from the other seats, with these words: "I see the day coming when the revolution will reach Germany and the people will

take the fate of their rulers into their own hands."

The Leipziger Volkszeitung, organ of the Independent Socialists, carried this comment on the conclusion of peace

with the Ukraine :

"This is a typical instance of the forcible wrenching away of large territories from a State, an instance even more forcibly effected than was the wrenching away of Alsace-Lorraine from France. In this latter case the vanquished at least gave their consent, even though with gnashing of teeth. Today the wrenching away of the Ukraine from federated Great Russia is being effected against the decided protest of the Russian Government. Any conclusions of peace that bring the end of the world war nearer will be welcomed by the class-conscious German working-class. In this conclusion of peace, however, it rather sees an obstacle to an ending of the war than a furtherance of peace, an obstacle even to the conclusion of peace with Russia."

Those who are watching the growth of revolutionary spirit among the German Socialists are Iooking forward to May first.

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38 From Washington

The Irish Question

ALL my life long I have found it a pleasant thing to be an Irishman. It has cost me nothing-thus far-and it has dowered me with goods. Intangible goods. I wish I could hold your attention long enough to tell you about them, for they seem curiously necessary to my argument.

But I am afraid you won't like a Washington "political letter" that has to go back to an American boy's discovery of his aunt's pleasant Limerick accent, to his realization that Irish bosoms were deep and Irish laps were broad and comfortable, to his discovery that the Irish adoration of child-hood was something warmer and different from the American system of sparing and spoiling. You won't like it if I detain you with an account of my oration on "Home Rule for Ireland," delivered on Ladies' Night before the Royal Arcanum in our suburb when, at the age of fifteen, I discovered-not merely that my views electrified the Irish grocer, but that among my middle-western neighbors the Irish cause had won a curious prestige. Merely by being an Irishman I had inherited a great and gallant tradition. It was mine ; astounding fact, it was mine !

President Wilson, Senator Chamberlain and I all belong to the same college fraternity, a fact which amuses me hugely, for unless the fraternal tie bores them as much as it bores me, we remain with practically nothing in common. Quite otherwise was the electric summons I responded to the other day. I was in a Washington street car, reading a copy co the Irish World, when a gray-haired woman crossed over, sat down beside me and in a clear voice that carried through the car said abruptly: "Excuse me, you are reading the Irish World, -are you a Sinn Feiner ?" "Indeed, I am!" I ejaculated, with the emphasis of a quiet man thoroughly and instantly aroused.

Everybody turned around and stared. I remember,Senator Shafroth of Colorado in particular. He glared at me as though he thought I ought to be put off. Being, after all, an American male, I remembered secretly wishing that the lady's voice didn't carry so clearly, and yet-and this is the point I am trying to make-and yet there were queer fumes in-side of me, rising up and putting out my reason, making me look around and wish fervently that somebody would "start something" so that the Irish lady and I could clean out the car!

Now please don't stop reading at this point! If you knew me and my pacific habits you would realize that I am giving you, in this, a political document of the very highest importance ! Really, I am trying to tell you something for the good of the country, for the success of the war. I am trying to tell you how it is that the Irish question exercises such a spell even over generations that have never seen Ireland and know her history only at second-hand.

* * *

When I was a boy some aspects of the Irish-American situation had a certain disrepute in my household. "Never vote for a man just because he is an Irishman," said my father, "there is far too much of that." I took him at his word and

have been voting all my life for Russian-Jewish lawyers and Russian-Jewish dentists who never, by any chance, get elected to anything. "Don't join the Clan-na-Gael," said my father. "In the secret societies the `professional Irishman' has it all his own way." I have never joined an Irish society, secret or otherwise; there are hundreds of thousands like me. "Tell me," I said to the Sinn Fein Iady on the street car (who was born and reared in New Hampshire and never saw Ireland until she was forty!) "do you think the Irish-Americans will ever throw off the leadership of the time-serving politicians?" "The Irish in America have been made over since the Easter uprising," said the lady positively. "I find proof of that everywhere."

* * *

I think she is right and that the present status of the Irish question in Washington politics tends to bear that out.

For example, there are now some ten resolutions in Congress on the Irish question. Almost every congressman who has a big Irish vote in his district has introduced a resolution embodying some pious expressions on that subject. McLaughlin of Philadelphia and Morin of Pittsburgh have introduced such resolutions. So have Medill McCormick, Thomas Gallagher and William E. Mason of Chicago ; so has Ambrose Kennedy of Rhode Island. But the Irish societies all over the country are, as by common consent, ignoring these familiar political offerings and are heartily endorsing a short and simple resolution, introduced by whom?-by the Hon. Jeannette Rankin of Montana.

* * *

"She's got the point of view," they say. "Furthermore, she's on the square."

The old clannishness is passing; this is the new clannishness. Nothing could be simpler or shorter than Miss Ran-kin's resolution :

"Resolved by the Senate and the House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, that this Government recognize the right of Ireland to political independence, and that we count Ireland among those countries for whose freedom and democracy we are fighting."

That's all ! But pick up any issue of the Congressional Record and note the memorials and petitions bearing on House Joint Resolution 204. Difficult? Of course it is. But to put it all down, as the New York Sun does, as "pro-German" is such damned nonsense as only a New York newspaper can indulge in. The fact of the matter is that the Irish in America are utterly and absolutely through with the idea of dependence for Ireland. Every statement which the president makes. about the rights of small nationalities, about self-determination, about "the voices of humanity in the air," are all applied patiently, definitely, by the Irish in America to the status of Ireland. Once the Irish here would have been content with Home Rule. Unless I am away off in my estimates, they have set their hearts upon a full ventilation of Ireland's case at the peace conference, and the erection, with international guarantees, of an Irish Republic.

I think that President Wilson realizes this better than

May, 1918 39

many of his political advisers. He went out of his way to receive Mrs. Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington, the ablest representative that Ireland has had here in my time, and the most radical. When a delegation of prominent Irishmen, headed by Senator Phelan of California, recently presented the President with a bust of Robert Emmet, the President listened rather grimly to a Sinn Fein speech from Phelan that would have set the British embassy on fire! I don't suggest he has been convinced that Ireland can ever become a Republic. I think it is quite unlikely that he has reached any such conclusion. But he seems-from all I can learn-to have savored the new Irish sentiment better than any of his lieutenants-better than Chairman Flood, for example, of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, who has stubbornly refused a public hearing on the Irish resolutions.

But the President will have to educate his lieutenants, and that right speedily. Of the numerous resolutions in Congress on the Irish question, only one is by a Democrat. All the rest have been introduced by Republicans. And only the other day Senator Gallinger of New Hampshire, the Republican floor leader in the Senate, softly called a page and sent up to the chair a resolution on "self-determination" for Ire-land which will never set the Thames on fire but which did disturb Democratic composure. By the time this article reaches you, look for a squib in the paper announcing that Chairman Flood has called a hearing on the Irish question. And I don't know why there shouldn't be. I don't know why we should all be so well posted on the rights of Bohemia and of Poland and so chary of justice to Ireland, a country that has never, never consented to the yoke.

This being an Irishman, as I remarked at the start, has always been a very pleasant matter and has never cost me anything. To-day it is beginning to. The metropolitan press calls me and my kind "pro-German." I disdain to reply. You don't argue with a New York newspaper ; you read it and throw it away and go along. There are thousands of Irish men and women getting ready for the soap-boxes in the fall and, believe me, what they will have to say will carry conviction !

CHARLES T. HALLINAN.

Washington, D. C., April 3, 1918.

IN A FACTORY

IF you made your picture

And I made my song,

Think you they would give us bread All the year long?

The great wheels of the city Grind clothing and grind bread. And what if we offered

Songs, pictures, instead?

So, I'll make the petticoat,

You make the shoe,-

That's what the world wants

Of me and you.

Annette Wynne.

Books

A Yankee in the Trenches, by Corporal R. Derby Holmes. $1.35 net. Little, Brown & Co.

"Over the Top," by An American Soldier Who Went, Arthur Guy Empey. Illustrated. $1.5o net. G. P. Putnam's Sons.

THESE books have for me-as no doubt for many of the readers of this magazine-a distinctly personal interest. They are descriptions of what is presently going to happen to me.

It is sufficiently strange to think of myself as a soldier. You see, I had always considered myself a detached person -an observer, a critic. I belonged to that class of whom the poet might have written:

"Theirs not to do and die-Theirs but to question why ; Theirs but to make reply!"

In fact, ever since this war began I have been busy questioning why; and I have not failed to make reply to most of the rhetoric of belligerency emitted by the official rhapsodists of militarism in all countries, until Mr. Burleson, who seemed to dislike such remarks, effectively discouraged them, and reduced me as it were to a thinking part. Even then I did not complain of the obscurity or ingloriousness of my position. I was content to be a bystander. I felt, it is true, capable of telling the government what to do about Prussian militarism; but the idea of being sent in person to France to help do it, was beyond the scope of my modest imaginings.

Picture, then, my embarrassed surprise at being flung abruptly into the thick of military events ! I confess that it still seems to me a fantastic notion, violating as it does all my theories as to my inherent capacities. A member of that critical and detached class to which I have referred would naturally develop to a high degree most of the unsoldierly qualities. As Kipling said about the 'Eathen, he don't obey no orders unless they is 'is own; and he has, I regret to say, a similar constitutional incapacity for certain forms of order. In addition, he has the habit, when addressed upon any subject, of reflecting thoroughly upon it with meantime a complete temporary paralysis of his motor-reactions. In civil life this amiably comic trait leads generally to no worse than a reputation for absent-mindedness; but I hate to think what a drill-sergeant would say about it! But I forbear to descant further upon my natural shortcomings, for I do not wish to discourage the government in its happy ambition of making a soldier out of me. That plan, by its very boldness, commands my respect, and if it proves successful will have my hearty 'applause. Perhaps there is some way, short of justifiable homicide, for dealing with people like me: I trust so.

But my feelings, as I think of becoming a soldier, are not wholly of commiseration for the government: some of my feelings acutely concern myself. There is a saying, "Old men for counsel, young men for war." The fact is, I had unconsciously considered myself too grown-up for the frivolities of battle. The discovery that I am, in the eyes of the government, one of those incredibly young persons who could be expected to enter with zest into the boyish pastime

,de

40 THE LIBERATOR

of slaughter, secretly pleases me. Beckoned thus (in the phraseology of a bye-gone generation) by the bright eyes of Danger, I feel rather as I imagine a very elderly gentleman must feel when he realizes that the young harlot across the cafe is smiling at him. I feel young again. I throw off the heavy weight of thought that has chained and bowed my spirit. Exultant in my new-found youthfulness, I look with scorn upon the senile decrepitude of friends who happen to be a few years or months or weeks older than myself, and hence beyond the age-limit. I am content to leave the task of thinking out the problems of the new age to tottering greybeards like Walter Lippman.

To be precise, I feel exactly twelve years old. I have gone back to the time when I enacted select battles from the Civil and the Spanish-American wars in my back yard; my father, a veteran of the one war, and my brother, just back from the other all gnarled and twisted with rheumatism, being my tutors in these military enterprises. My psychology of that period was untainted by any of the critical independence which has since infected my whole Iife. Indeed, I am inclined to think that for me to have become as good a soldier as the government would wish, it would have been desirable to interrupt certain of the processes of my mental development at that stage. I am encouraged in this hypo-thesis by finding so many of the virtues which I remember possessing at that age, in the authors of these two war books.

They are less romantic about war than I was ; but that discrepancy is, I feel, sufficiently explained by the fact that they wrote these books after they had been in the war and found out what it is like. But the impulse which led them into it is the impulse which led me to play war-games. They did not go for any of the complicated intellectual reasons which the newspapers address to our presumably mature intelligences; they went for the fun of it. I can quite under-stand that. I was that way at twelve ; and-shall I emulate their candor and confess it ?-l feel the same boyish hi--pulses stirring in me now.

How else could I read these books and not he-shall I say, annoyed-at the prospect? For I take it that respect for personality, and the perception of the infinitely rich values of life, are among the products of a mature intelligence : and who that has an adult imagination and adult sympathies could fail to be annoyed at the idea-to leave out of question one's own personal fate-of sticking a bayonet into the bowels of an unknown German youth? It will hardly suffice, at the critical moment, to reflect upon all the excellent reasons which may exist (for I am among those who sincerely think such reasons do exist) for so horrible a necessity. The exigencies of the case require a boyish insensitiveness. It is perhaps possible for some delicate and subtle minds to steel themselves against the terribleness of war, and to endure their situation with apparent serenity. But such natures must be rare. For practical purposes, such delicacy and subtlety of mind, however cherished in the more humane intervals of the game of war, must yield to a more primitive and callous stuff. Armies are made of boys and of men with the boy mind.

When, as my more accustomed adult self, I read again in these books the familiar tale of mud and blood and "coo-ties," and try to project myself into such a future, the picture is fantastic and incredible. I do not fit. in such a picture. But there is in me a ridiculous child, my father's son, who moves, half stunned with noise, half sick with fear,

half dead with weariness, but not with any sense of strangeness, in such an imagination....

That, to my curious, adult, and as yet civilian and civilized mind, is the final and inevitable horror of war-that one ceases to realize its horror. When the author of one of these books tells us that his friend beside him had his head blown off, and that he felt sorry, he is telling all there is for him to tell. What we find missing here is not so much the gift of profound expression as the gift of profound feeling. And yet it is fairly inevitable. Doubtless that was all he had time to feel. Doubtless that is the ordinary limit of capacity for feeling under such circumstances. At another time the same man is capable of noting the beauty of a field of poppies-and of arguing their beauty to another soldier whose simple agricultural experience makes him regard them as mere ugly weeds! But the insensitiveness is pervasive. The deepest emotion recorded in either book is thankfulness at getting a "blighty one," a wound which will send one home-or disappointment when it turns out not to be quite so serious! Simple, raw, brief comments on landscape, pleasure, pain, indicate the emotional range generally possible under such conditions, and the frame of mind best fitted to cope with them. It is interesting to reflect that the sort of man who would have been most likely to volunteer on a journey into Hell would not have been Dante; he would have been a boy who, on his return, would have dictated just such a dry, mildly humorous, slightly dull record of his experiences as we have before us in these two books. And, I have no doubt, full of helpful advice to others. These two historians of our modern hell have succeeded in imprinting indelibly upon my memory, as the deepest lesson of their experience, the name of a certain brand of insect-powder, the one and only kind which will not actually stimulate the appetite of the ubiquitous and hungry louse. For this much thanks!

It was the boast of Pericles, in his famous Funeral Oration, that Athenians could fight no legs well while maintaining as the prime things of life their love of beauty and wisdom. One cannot help wishing that this were quite liter-ally true of America in her war. But I fear that at best some division of labor is necessary. The fighters will have to confine themselves pretty exclusively to the business immediately in hand. The golden-hearted young painters and poets whom I see preparing to leave for France will have scant time to dream their dreams over there. But they can take such comfort as they may in the thought that, back at home, Beauty will be looked after by, let us say, the New York Times' Literary Supplement, and Truth upheld by Nicholas Murray Butler.

F. D.

Greenwich Village

Greenwich Village, by Anna Alice Chapin. $2.5o net. Dodd, Mead & Co.

SO fast does time fly, and so. quickly do times change, that I who was but yesterday, as it seems, the youngest new-comer to our Village, am now among its elders, a patriarch among the flock of lambs who frisk joyously in the sunlight of their newly attained Village freedom. Oh, I have no doubt that there are still in existence austere relics of the antediluvian period before I came, ancient ones who look upon me, if they look at all, as a late intruder-who are as

May, 1918 41

scornful of my claims to Village citizenship as I am of the pretensions of the latest generation. Nevertheless, if I am not among the aborigines, I am at least of those who came over, so to speak, in the Mayflower. I was among those present at the opening of the original (and how different!) Polly's restaurant on Macdougal street. I helped get up the first Village dance ever given at Webster hall. I was a Villager, that is to say, in the time before the invasion of the barbarians from Uptown, before Pepe raised the rents-the Golden Age.

In those old, forgotten, far-off days, the Village was truly a village. Artists and writers lived there because the rents were Iow, and one could gee a floor of great rooms with high ceilings and tall deep-embrasured windows (giving a true north-light) for I dare not say how little money; because the tangle of crooked little streets shut out the tide of traffic, and left a quiet island where the houses were as it seemed they had always been, where the pace of life slowed down a bit and left time for dreams and friendship and art and love. There were two or three restaurants where the cuisine was good and the prices modest, and where one knew everyone else. Because social life was so casual and easy, it was possible to spend most of one's time working. And the play was the play of artists, simple and ingenuous; the talk was golden, and the loves were frank and candid.

But, alas! some rumor of this peace being spread among the barbarians to the north, they descended upon the place. They were as a plague of locusts, that left not one green thing. They destroyed the, place utterly. The Greenwich Village that was, is no more. Let me recount the tragic de-tails of its debacle. In the first place (doubtless the whole thing was a plot of the real-estate agents), the rents were raised. Fabulous prices were charged for anything with a roof over it, so that only a few holes and corners, desperately clung to, were left to the original inhabitants. Then, as the invaders came to stare, the Villagers fled frdm one restaurant to another, leaving each new one in rage and despair as it was discovered by the enemy. Then the show-places, with imbecile names, began to be opened-"picturesque" (i. e., insanitary) places where the Uptownel's pay two dollars for a bad sandwich and a thimbleful of coffee, and look at each other and think they are seeing life. Ah ! how many honest bootblack stands and coal-holes have been displaced to make room for these new Coney Island side-shows! A new one yawns at one's feet every day. Thither, allured by the hope of finding something truly bohemian (i. e., naughty), the sad Uptowner repairs, bringing his vulgarity, his bad manners, and his money. And as in a looking glass he sees himself, for that is all there is to see. The Village is not there. It still exists, as the Christian sect existed in the Catacombs during the darkest days of the Roman persecution. But his search for it is in vain. Let him go back to One-Hundred-and-Eighty-Sixth street. He will never find it.

It will be perceived that my attitude toward the Uptowner is somewhat unsympathetic. It is most of all uncordial to the male Uptowner, whose inclination is to regard any woman he meets in the Village as an indefinite kind of prostitute; his naive concupiscence betrays itself too crudely in his speech and manner for me to be at all tolerant of his existence. If I had the patience I would endeavor to per

suade him he need not hope to find here the materialization of his pitiful erotic day-dream. But neither am I precisely tolerant toward the ,female Uptowner, whose expectations of the Village, if less obtrusively offensive, are scarcely less annoying. She hopes to be shocked. One can imagine her buying Miss Chapin's book on Greenwich Village and turning its pages in the vague expectation of being scandalized. She will be disappointed. For once I am grateful to the puritanism of the American publisher ! I can see no good reason why her curiosity should be satisfied at the expense of my neighbors.

In fact-I had intended to take advantage of this occasion to relate some reminiscences of the old, the true Village, which glow pleasantly in my memory: But now it occurs to me-though under other circumstances the fact would be irrelevant-that these reminiscences are, as it were, improper. And-who knows, this magazine might fall into the hands of just such a person, eager to be shocked. I'm blessed if I will give her that satisfaction ! But I will tell her one thing, lest finally, in the desperation of her curiosity, and after many qualms (and despite the grave dissuasion of all her male relatives), she should decide rashly to come and live here in one of those thousand-dollar a year garrets, so as to see Village life for herself : I will tell her that the first rule (for Villagers have their strict conventions)-the first rule of life for a woman in Greenwich Village, if she does not wish to be shut out utterly from its graces, is that she must work and earn her own living; just as the first rule for a man in the Village is that he must be interesting.

F. D.

On Reading the Poems of Edna

St. Vincent Millay*

[This sonnet may be explained after the Petrarchian manner, as follows: The octave is a sympathetic disquisition on the subject of youth, which, as is but too well known, seeks after the impossible. The sestet is an exordium on the same subject from the standpoint of sober and experienced middle-age. The sonnet thus has the merit, so much prized by the judicious, of presenting both sides of the subject.]

CHILD of the lightning, alien to our dust, We seek you in the tempest: you are there, Drenched with the storm of beauty, gust on gust Of poignant sweetness only you can bear. Startled, you vanish in the darkness, fleeing The too-close human handclasp; you are fain Of the caresses native to your being-

Strange joys that wound intolerably with pain.

But all in vain your hands to touch the sky Reach up, in vain your bosom to the thunders Bared-there is only you and mayhap I

And the old, commonplace, authentic wonders Of food and fire and bed. There's no use trying. So back you come, and yet-Why, you are crying !

F. D.

`Renascence and Other Panes, by Edna St. Vincent Malay. $1.50 net. Mitchell Kennerley.

42 THE LIBERATOR

That Far-off Divine Event

Approaches to the Great Settlement, by Emily Greene Balch. Introduction by Norman Angell, Bibliography, map and illustrations. $1.5o net. Published for the American Union Against Militarism by B. W. Huebsch.

AT the present moment the subject of peace may appear to have only an academic interest; yet for us who are not on the firing line, and whose anxieties are after all as legitimately concerned with the ultimate objects of the war as with its immediate fortunes, this is as proper a time as any to consider where we now stand with respect to that final settlement. Recent events in Russia have immensely complicated the situation, and the nature of the peace ultimately to be achieved may seem to be more questionable than at any time in the past. But a historical survey, such as is afforded by this book, of the diplomatic aspects of the war, reduces the problem to simpler and more encouraging terms. Miss Balch has performed a task at once extremely difficult and highly useful; she has presented and analyzed the whole official and unofficial statement and discussion of war-aims, by statesmen, by legislative bodies, by labor and socialist groups, and by significant organs of public opinion, from the be-ginning of the war down to a recent period; and together with this, which is given in the most succinct way so as to be readily available even for hasty examination, there is presented for our more extended consideration a valuable collection of interesting and important documents, including many labor and socialist formulations of war-aims and peace terms. The student will find here, also, an extensive bibliography of books, articles and pamphlets bearing on the problems of peace; and there is an introduction by Norman Angell which no one who wishes "to help and not hinder the great international effort to destroy German militarism" can afford to neglect.

Many significant aspects of the present situation are thrown clearly into relief by this survey. Especially this-that the democratic forces in the Allied nations have achieved remarkable and unprecedented results in their efforts to shape the diplomatic policy of the Allied governments. It is in some quarters regarded as treason to recognize the existence of imperialistic forces of a kind most menacing to the future of civilization, in any country but Germany. In these quarters it would doubtless be considered criminal had taste to allude to the secret treaties engineered by these imperialistic forces. It may, however, be stated without fear of offense that in general there are in most nations cynical and reactionary forces which hasten to take advantage of the opportunity afforded by war to bargain among them-selves with shameless rapacity for territorial spoils. Such forces would use the generous democratic enthusiasms of their peoples merely as a fortunate cloak for their own sinister designs. But what we have to observe in the case of the Allied nations, is the spectacle of these democratic enthusiasms growing from what might at first have appeared to an observer as mere ironic illusions into powerful political realities. The desire to free the world from the terror of militarism, which might at one time have seemed merely a happy catch-phrase, has been organized into a definite intention, and one which more and more controls the actual zonduct of the war.

That intention was first officially intimated in President Wilson's "Peace Note" of December r8, r9r6, in which he suggested the necessity of a League of Nations to guarantee and maintain a just peace. In his Senate Address that intention was formulated in historically memorable terms, and the United States formally committed to the task of carrying it into effect. Prophetic words, these, in a world-wide desert of militarism-or so they seemed. But the overthrow of Czarism and the repudiation by the new Russia of imperialistic plans brought new pressure upon the governments concerned, which produced at least formal official acceptance of the democratic formula. And meantime the United States had entered the war upon explicitly democratic terms. It is interesting to note, from this distance, that the radical effort in America, which under pressure of political circumstances took the form of opposition to the entrance of this country into the war, was one of the prime factors in insuring the non-imperialistic character of American war-polity ; the historian of the future looking down the long perspective of events, will find it difficult to understand just what President Wilson and Senator La Follette were at odds ,.bout, since both of them, as he will find, said the same things, in almost the same words, about the kind of peace America desired. (Balch, p. g8, and footnote page 99). Such an historian will discover moreover the substance of President Wilson's Senate Address as well as of the Russian peace-formula, in hundreds of Socialist documents of prior date, some of which are printed in this book.

FLOYD DELL.

The Newest Weapon

The Air-Line to Liberty: A Prospectus for All Nations, by Gerald Stanley Lee. $5.25 cents net. Mitchell Kennerley.

THIS book is devoted to the exposition and exploitation of three things-an idea, an illusion, and a personality. The personality is that of Gerald Stanley Lee; and the less said about that, by one so temperamentally unsympathetic as the present reviewer, the better. And since there are some millions of Americans who do not mind being addressed in the tone of voice habitual to Mr. Lee, let it pass. The illusion which this book fosters is of more consequence. The American businessman and salesman is all too ready to believe himself the most wonderful creature that ever walked upon God's green earth. Hundreds of magazines flatter him, tickle him, butter him to the ears with praise, month after month, until he fairly oozes with fatuous self-conceit. He is quite prepared to believe that if he were running this war on real business lines, it would really be a go. Mr. Lee encourages him in this infantile vanity by page after page of rhetorical adulation of his virtues, until it commences to sound like an address by the president of a business college to its departing pupils. Doubtless Mr. Lee's idea will gain more attention and respect when it comes with all these bowings and rubbing of palms and kissings of the earth before the feet of the American business-world; but in so far"as it tends to make its readers snug in their grandiose self-delusions, its influence is to be deplored.

But it does contain an idea, and a good one-good at least when stripped of the sentimental trimmings with which it

May, 1918

is most lavishly adorned. Briefly, it is the idea that Germans will not fight so loyally for German imperialism if they can be reached with the real truth about the war-with advertisements of the Allied cause, as Mr. Lee would put it, or, in less sentimental phraseology, with Allied propaganda.

"When Mr. Creel was asked the other day how much money he wanted a year to carry out his conception of what his Publicity Committee should do, in this and other countries, he said twenty-five mil-lions would do. For such a World Department as I have in mind, if it were properly backed by the people, the President would have to plan for a very different scale of expenditure.

"I would want ten dollars apiece a year from every inhabitant of America, to mobilize the vision and will of the people. Mr. Creel wants twenty-five cents apiece. Twenty-five cents apiece is all the President feels warranted in having taken from the pockets of the people, for vision, for mobilizing and massing and throwing upon the fate of the world the prayers and wills of the people.

"I do not believe that this will be true very long.

"I believe that the moment the people have pointed out to them what America could do at just this juncture toward winning the war and ending all war, with a billion dollars worth of listening in Germany, the President will feel backed up in taking-for such listening as he alone in the world could arrange for-

_ all the money he wants."

The idea of spending money on ideas is certainly one to be applauded,

Mr. Lee, however, is apparently unaware that the Germans have preceded the Allies in the use of propaganda as a military weapon, which he regards as still untried and as peculiarly American. But in Italy and in Russia and even in France it has been used with convincing effect by the Germans. It was used in return by the Bolsheviki upon the German army during the Brest-Litovsk conferences with such results as to constitute a menace recognized as extremely dangerous by the German command. It is, indeed, all that Mr. Lee says of it as a military factor ; and it is true that the Allies have not yet waked up to its value. It may he, as Mr. Lee hopes, the great contribution of America to winning the war against Germany. Its use even now would be instrumental in gaining the confidence of the Russian people in the fairness of American intentions, and might very well be the decisive influence in keeping Russia in the war-supposing that to be in all respects a practicable desideratum. But it is unfortunately easier to point out examples of German than of Allied enterprise ' in this matter. The astute Imperial Government has within the last few weeks turned to immense account an article published by the dear, innocent old New York Times, in which it was pro-posed to violate Mexican neutrality= in case of war with one of our present allies. The publicity department of the German Empire did not fail to point out the analogy to their own violation of Belgian neutrality ; and, on the genial assumption that the Times represents American public opinion, and that it is the same thing for one anonymous journalist to write about such a crime as for a government to commit and a nation to acquiesce in it, the German commentators are able in the same breath to denounce us for our horrid treachery and to exculpate themselves from blame. Be sure no German will fail to hear of our hypothetical wickedness, and score one to the Times for so much strengthening of the German morale. If to offset these feats Mr. Lee can .arouse those geniuses who made the dollar famous, and who

persuade us daily that we need a biscuit, to get busy on the job of alienating the affections of the German people from their war-Iord, well and good; but it is a job about which they still have something to learn, and. the sooner they get over their commercial cockiness, the better will they learn it.

F. D.

The College Muse

The Poets of the Future. A College Anthology for 1916-1g17. Edited by Henry T. Schnittkind, Ph.D. Stratford Company, Boston.

AH ME! Pan is dead. And it's hard to know from this anthology whether the collector of the poems killed him or whether our college education. I must say I doubt the ability of anyone to detect pure song who says in a preface that he has picked the poems "which have most forcibly brought home to me the truth that we continually meet God face to face"-and, to gild the lily, puts a glorified star of Bethlehem on the cover board.

I hope it is the fault of the anthologist. I should hate to believe that our American undergraduates are these genteel imitators who take a decorous delight in nature, have a mild pity for the lowly, and trust in an amiable God, and express these sentiments in had Stevensonian, Elizabethan, and Kiplingish meters.

They so modestly avoid singing of themselves. There's scarcely a trace of revolt, never the flavor of passion. Possibly the war offers them their best subject. They did seem to feel that. But one mustn't despair too much. These aren't the poets of the future. Edna St. Vincent Allay was writing at Vassar last year and there's no verse of hers in the book. No verse from Vassar whatsoever! Perhaps the girls hadn't the fear of God sufficiently. And there's no verse of Morris Gilbert, who was writing at Union College last year. Maybe these two scorned the literature of the campus and wrote for the outside world. Even "Morrie," I suppose, sent his best stuff to F. P. A. At any rate I begin to believe that what someone said is right-all the unknown poets can be found in Who's Who.

RUTH PICKERING.

A Preface to-

A Book of Prefaces, by H. L. Men-ken (Opus 13). Publislad by Alfred A. Knopf. $1.50 net.

I T is with no little trepidation that I undertake to furnish a prefatory note to H. L. Mencken's latest offense; an out-rage upon the soft susceptibilities and the softer skins of our professional lovers of (dead) American literature. This fresh attack upon the professional venerators of the past, those who recline so gracefully in the bosom of let us say William Dean; Howells, this assault on the literary necrophiles who regard a living native author with a mixture of fear and ferocity that Dr. Freud would delight in-this at-tack, as I started to say, is fraught with grave danger to the blonde and bellicose Baltimorean. Having dared to challenge the inhibiting Comstockery of our broad (in area) country, and having had the even greater temerity to champion a person like Theodore Dreiser (who, along with Hardy, Forel, Havelock Ellis and . the wildly revolutionary George du Maurier, has been righteously blacklisted by the

44 ADVERTISING SECTION THE LIBERATOR

Society for the Suppression of Vice) Mr. Mencken will come to a swift and sanguinary end. He will, if I understand the nature of contemporary jurisprudence. be indicted under the Food Conservation Bill, tried on the charge of giving aid and comfort to his publishers, sentenced to seven years hard labor under the Defense of the Realm Act, and lynched by an exasperated citizenry in front of the editorial rooms of the N. Y. Tribune. These arc the times for easy revenge; and eleven critics who have been wounded by Mencken's rough jocosities have sworn to have his scalp,-on purely patriotic grounds. One of them has already lifted a few of his back hairs in a rear attack-an effort to dispose of Mencken's incisive study of our mawkish and immoral Puritanism by the brilliant implication that Mencken was employed to write the volume by a delegation sent over from Wilhelmstrasse. One of Professor Sherman's most damaging proofs of Mencken's criminality is his (Sherman's) discovery of the fact that Mencken publicly admits he cares more for the music of Haydn, Brahms, Strauss and Schoenberg (names suspiciously Teutonic) than for the inspiring and autocthonous strains of Ethelbert Nevin, Henry K. Hadley and Carrie jacobs-Bond. But possibly the most damning evidence discovered by Professor Sherman is the presence of such words as Stantruvater, Kultur, Sklavennioral, Biertisclee, u. s, w. in Mencken's poisonous papers.

All this strikes me as a holy but somehow misdirected zeal. The more so since I have lead some of the more frankly barbarian re-views. I pick up the Freie Presse of Irving-ton, N. J., and find that a Doctor Gustav Holveg, a Danish socialist, accuses Mencken of plotting to revive the ancient Roman Empire. restore the plutocratic Caesarian dynasty and make Latin the language of the world. His quotations from the volume form a convincing presentment of his case. He proves, by Mencken's aristocratic tastes and dicta, how much the latter advocates a return of the most arrogant of aristocracies. He shows by a set of charts, and with an ingenuity that Pro- _ fessor Sherman might envy, how Mencken gradually conducts the reader through a maze of technical terms-all of them in violent contrast to the direct Saxon speech-like "coryza," "Umbilicari," "glycosuria," "Treuga Dei." Then, while the reader is benumbed by this erudition, he is sprayed with a rain of French phrases (and Dr. Holveg shows how insidious is this methodical approach) until finally Mencken conceals his empirical purpose no longer and, in his concluding chapter on "Puritanism as a Literary Force," shows his fine, Italian hand. The list of Latin words is staggering, stupendous, revealing. Dr. Holveg has found page after page literally studded with suspicious foreign slogans ; in nineteen pages alone there occur such pieces of direct Latin propaganda as "Quid est veritas p" "Eheu fugaces," Vanitas vanitalum antali.r vanities!" "mobile vulgtls, "irn.prtrraatur, "ad infinitum," "in utero," "dramatis personae," "magnum opus," "exeu,(li gratis," "brutum fulmen," "a priori," "'e. g." and "nil!"

So much for the opposing forces. It is to be hoped that the warring factious will not tear the mendacious Mencken entirely apart. A little of him should be left to carry on with unflinching determination and unflagging muscularity, the energetic ground-clearing, the creative iconoclasm to which he has devoted himself. And all this he attempts in a style that is personal and pungent; a curious blend of erudition and slang. The pedagogue turned punchinello ; the savant worshipping at the shrine of Rabelais. The volume (with its illuminating studies of Conrad, Huneker and Dreiser) might be alliteratively summed up by saying its chief qualities are the author's

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May, 1918 ADVERTISING SECTION 45

vitality, vivacity, variety and, if the opposition insists, vulgarity. For the book is und..ubtedly vulgar-especially in the way that birth and conflict, the brutal war for existence, the struggle for democracy and a thousand other trifling incidentals of life are vulgar. Mencken in criticism is, in his own racy idiom. following the lead of Heine, of Burns, of Vilion, of Herrick and Synge; all of those whose work, as Synge himself pointed out, was read "by strong men and thieves and deacons-not by little cheques only." Criticism, like modern poetry. is no longer a delicate flower-a cross between a limp lily and a weird mushroom-it is strong timber. and "there is no timber that has not strong roots among the clay and worms." It is the stuff that will be welcomed by a race of men, not a generation of manikins. It is, in its careful incisiveness and bewildering expositions, a-... But I started to write merely the preface, not the book itself. The hook-well, the bookstores are still selling it.

LOUIS UNTERMEYER.

How Different From the Home-
Life of Our Dear Neighbors!

Where Bonds Are Loosed, A. Novel, by E. L. Grant Watson. $I.So. Alfred A. Knopf.

MR. WATSON'S story is of human beings "completely cut off from the conserving influence of the herd," who must break from social convention if life in the wilderness, primitive life, is first to he endured and finally. enjoyed. The author says in his pre-face that his story is typical of isolated groups of people who exist by the hundreds at the further outposts of civilization. But the life of those far away on these tropical islands is perhaps too very remote for us, immersed in civilization, to be interested in it merely as a phenomena. Mr. Watson's story thrills be-cause of its romance. And if it has any significance for us beyond this fact, I suppose it serves to show us that, though society has tamed us, there is within us hopelessly ramp-ant still, all terrific desire. The tie that binds is flimsy, and we are after all glorious beasts. When inhabitants are burned away by the tropical sun and beaten down by the sea's waves, these desires stalk in naked strength across the two islands where Mr. Watson laid the scene of his story.

Somewhere off the coast of Australia are these two little islands on each of which has been placed a hospital for native patients. One Sherwin, a burly, red-haired sheep-shearer, is first imported from the mainland. His job is half policeman, half janitor to the island men patients. He finds a shiftless doctor in charge when he comes. And this doctor at one time leaves Sherwin's island for six whole weeks without a visit-preferring the other island where there are two white nurses for company. The wounds of the neglected natives become full of maggots. Sherwin and his little black slave take care of them. Sherwin is infected and for these six weeks suffers terrible pain. He roams over the island distracted. But he endures the suffering, and through it his fibers are toughened for primitive life.

Then the old doctor is discharged, and a new energetic ambitious young scientist is imported-all efficiency and ambition. Sher-win, though his arm is cured, resents the man's uppishness and reserve immediately. A lonely island is no place for emphasizing class difference among whites.

The new doctor hires a new nurse for the mainland, and from that point the story runs

(Continued on page 47.)

RECALL that golden day when you first read "Huck Finn"? How your mother said, "For goodness' sake, stop laughing aloud over that hook. You sound so silly." But you couldn't stop laughing.

Today when you read "Huckleberry Finn" you will not laugh so much. You will chuckle often, but you will also want to weep. The deep humanity of it-the pathos, that you never saw, as a boy, will appeal to you now. You were too busy laughing to notice the limpid purity of the master's style.

MARK TWAIN

When Mark Twain first wrote "Huckleberry Finn" this land was swept with a gale of laughter. When he wrote "The Innocents Abroad" even Europe laughed at it itself.

But one day there appeared a new book from his pen, so spiritual, so true, so lofty that those who did not know him well were amazed. "Joan of Arc" was the work of a poet-a historian-a seer. Mark Twain was all of these. His was not the light laughter of a moment's fun, but the whimsical humor that made the tragedy of life more bearable.

For our beautiful red half-leather edition, change the above terms to $z.so on delivery and $3.0o a month for zo months

A Real American

Mark Twain was a steamboat pilot. lie was a searcher for gold in the far West. He was a printer. He worked bitterly hard. AIL this without a glimmer of the great destiny that lay before him. Then, with the opening of the great wide West, his genius hloomed.

His fame spread through the nation. It flew to the ends of the earth, until his work was translated into strange tongues. From then on, the path of fame lay straight to the high places. At the height of his fame he lost all his money. He was heavily in debt, but though 6o years old, he started afresh and paid every cent. It was the last heroic touch that drew him close to the hearts of his countrymen.

The world has asked is there an American literature? Mark Twain is the answer. He is the heart, the spirit of America. From his poor and struggling boyhood to his glorious, splendid old age, he remained as simple, as democratic as the plainest of our forefathers.

He was, of all Americans, the most American. Free in soul and dreaming of high things-brave in the face of trouble-and al-ways ready to laugh. That was Mark Twain.

HARPER & BROTHERS, New York

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46 ADVERTISING SECTION THE LIBERATOR

LIBERATOR BOOK SHOP

New Books

Old Worlds for New, by Arthur J. Penty.

[Sunwise Turn, N. Y.]. $1.60 net.

The old world which the author offers us is the world of living arts and crafts which capitalism has destroyed. A criticism of modern industrialism and an outline of Guild Socialism.

Philosophy and the Social Problem, by Will Durant, Ph.D.

[Macmillan Co.]. $1.50 net.

A fascinating and profitable little volume which we have been intending to review. It ought particularly to be read by those who have forgotten, if they ever knew. the ultimate intention of philosophic inquiry.

The Irish Issue in its American Aspect, by Shane Leslie. -

[Scribner's]. $1.25 net.

We haven't read this, but the table of contents is pretty convincing-"The Ethics of Sinn Fein." "The Killing of Kettle," "Carson and Casement," etc.

The Record of a Quaker Conscience: Cyrus

Pringle's Diary. Edited by R. M. Jones.

[Macmillan]. 60 cents net.

To be reviewed next month. The story of a Conscientious Objector in the Civil

War. Mysticism and Logic, and Other Essays, by Bertrand Russell, M.A., F.R.S., late Fellow of Trinity College.

[Longman's]. $2.50 net.

Ten collected essays-"The Place of Science in a Liberal Education," "A Free Man's Worship," "The Study of Mathematics." "Mathematics and the Metaphysicians." "On Scientific Method in Philosophy." etc.

The Doctor in War, by Dr. Woods Hutchinson.

[Houghton Mifflin]. Illus. $2 net.

Dr. Woods Hutchinson has common sense, knowledge, and a style which makes it pleasant to learn from him. He is just returned from ten months abroad, where he has-it is not difficult to believe-seen everything.

The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me, by William Allen White.

[Macmillan]. $1.50 net.

An account, much more honest than usual, of war as seen. It "gets by," doubtless be-cause it is a humorous narrative in the Mark Twain tradition.

Fiction

Where Bonds Are Loosed, by E. L. Grant

Watson. $1.50 net. [Knopf]. A remarkable novel, and a splendid start for the year's fiction. See notice in book review section of this issue.

The Wife and Other Stories, by Anton
Chekhov. [Macmillan]. $1.54 net.

The Lady With the Dog and Other Stories, by Anton Chekhov. From the Russian by Constance Garnett. [Macmillan]. $1.50 net.

The Party and Other Stories, by Anton Chekhov. From the Russian by Con-stance Garnett. [Macmillan]. $1.50 net.

These pages will be a guide to cur-rent literature -a guide that can be trusted. Every book recommended here has the personal approval of one or more of the editors of this magazine.

All books listed are on sale by the Liberator, and we will be glad to get you any book you want, old or new.

Send orders to

LIBERATOR BOOK SHOP, 34 Union Square, New York.

Under Fire, by Henri Barbusse.

The soul of all the armies of France finds a great and terrible voice in this book. [Dutton] $1.50 net.

The Rise of David Levinski, by Abraham Cahan.

Stark convincing realism-a groping young Jewish idealist becomes an American Business Man. [Harpers]. $1.60 net.

Plays and The Theatre

Granny Maumee; The Rider of Dreams;

Simon the Cyrenian: Plays for a Negro

Theatre, by Ridgely Torrence.

[Macmillan]. $1.50 net.

"Mr. Torrence's three plays make undoubtedly the most important American contribution to drama for many a long year."-Chicago Post.

The Art Theatre, by Sheldon Cheney.

An analysis of the "little theatre" movement-with pictures. [Knopf]. $1.50 net.

Suppressed Desires, by Georc e Cram Cook and Susan Glaspell.

A Freudian comedy of marriage. One does not need to be a Freudian to see the humor-in fact the laugh is on Freud this time! 35 cents net.

Trifles, by Susan Glaspell.

A poignant little drama of American farm life. 35 cents net.

Nju, by Ossip Dymow.

One of the oddest and most convincing examples of the new experimental drama. A tragedy of every-day Russian life.

$1 net.

The Angel Intrudes, by Floyd Dell. [Washington Square Book Shop]. 25 cents net.

New Poetry

The Chinese Nightingale, by Vacltel Lind-say. [Macmillan]. $1.25 net.

Renascence and Other Poems, by Edna St. Vincent 14fillay. [Kennerley]. $1.50 net.

See book review pages.

War and Peace

Approaches to the Great Settlement, by Emily Greene Balch.

$1.50 net. [Huebsch]. See review in this issue.

England's Debt to India, by Lajpat Rai.

$2 net. [Huebsch].

An analysis and arraignment of the British fiscal policy in India.

Political Ideals, by Bertrand Russell.

A sketch of the new society, following the reconstructive ideals set forth in "Why Men Fight." Attention is also called to Mr. Russell's "Justice in War-Time." It is these id' as and the personal force be-hind them which have made Bertrand Russell today one of the leaders of the militant

working-class in England.

[Century].

The Bolsheviki and World-Peace, by Leon Trotzky. [Boni]. $1.50 net.

An Inquiry Into the Nature of Peace, by Thorstein Veblen.

A tremendously valuable book, by one of the foremost thinkers in America-the author of "The Theory of the Leisure Class." [Macmillan]. $2 net.

Militarism, by Karl Liebknecht.

A voice from the uncorrupted and uncompromising heart of the German revolutionary working-class movement. Sup-pressed by the Kaiser. [Huebsch]. $1 net.

Miscellaneous

The American Labor Year Book, 1917-18. Edited by Alexander Trachtenberg. Cloth $1.25 net; paper covers, 60 cents net. [Rand School of Social Science, New York].

A work of the greatest value and the keenest interest.

The Sexual Crisis, by Grete Meisel-Hess

$3 net. [Critic and Guide. New York]. A valuable book by a wise and sane feminist on the psychology of the situation which has arisen under the influence of modern ideas and modern economic conditions. An illuminating commentary on contemporary love, marriage and family relationships, and a discussion of future prospects.

A Short History of England, by C. K.

Chesterton. [Lane]. $1.50 net.
Written for lvorkingmen, to show them what they have lost and must regain-land, liberty and happiness.

The Psychology of Insanity, by Bernard

Hart. [Putnam]. 50 cents net.
The clearest explanation yet written of the psycho-analytic theory of thinking.

The Backwash of War, by Ellen N. La Motte.

A masterpiece. [Putnam]. $1 net.

$1 net.

May, 1918 ADVERTISING SECTION 47

"\TES, Apollo, at one

II time my figure resembled yours. I was an athlete. The boys all admired me.

"And the girls, too, for that matter.

I was the hero of many athletic meets. I could run like the wind, and I could jump and wrestle and box. I was a man supreme in those days. Where I got my strength, I never knew. I was raised on a farm, and I suppose hard work developed my muscles.

"Anyway, as a young man I was like a fiery, untamed steed, strong, resourceful, determined, enthusiastic.

"I went into the business world with an indomitable determination to succeed, to achieve.

"And I did succeed. At thirty I was in a position of great responsibility.

"All these years I had been too ambitious, too much impressed with the importance of succeeding, to assume the responsibilities of marriage. I had turned aside from many feminine friends who would no doubt have made admirable wives.

"But at thirty I met my match. She was beautiful, clever beyond all description-too clever for me, for she deceived me. played with me. I married her, but it was the be-ginning of my downfall.

""Soon thereafter it began to be `wine, women and song.'

"I knew nothing of my body. I have never given the slightest attention to physical up-building, to the rules of health. My mind became unsettled. I lost my quickness and keenness.

"And now-well, what's the use? I am now forty-five, and a nondescript has-been."

The story of this old-time athlete is repeated with some variations in the life of the average strong man. He starts with great vitality, and he does not know how to retain this vitality, nor recognize the need for such knowledge. He makes mistakes that drag him down to the lowest depths of physical life. He gets to the place where his spirit is crushed, his enthusiasm gone. The fire in his soul goes out, and thereafter he is a mere automaton, breathing, eating, sleeping -a mere husk of a man.

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Address ... .

(Continued from page 45)

swiftly to its close. Nurse Desmond falls in love with the doctor. In the calm which follows a devastating hurricane she seduces him. But his work reclaims him soon, and she throws herself at him again and again to no avail. To rid himself of her he tries to escape to Sherwin's island, but she shamelessly pursues. Then Sherwin wants her-and this primitive force of Sherwin's lust at length rouses the doctor to fight. Over the desert sands they chase each other. Sherwin, with the aid of his black slave, and the greater power of his will, wins. With blood upon him he returns to Nurse Desmond, forgetful now of his passion, thinking only that she is the one witness against him for his crime. But the woman, by mysterious wile, turns the murderer of her former lover from a prospective murderer of herself into a second lover.

And so this woman and this man remain as the only two whites to survive suffering and isolation. As Adam and Eve they are mated -and are !eft content in the hot wilderness at the end of the book.

There is a restraint and lucidity in the telling which keeps the tale from being too lurid. But the characters are so very objective that sometimes they become mere automatons in the rapidity of events. And in this fact is the weakness of the book. For I found that though for three hours I sucked in the story with intensity. nothing lived on in my memory except the vision of Sherwin, when, on a walk over the island, he sees a sheep on a ledge of rock over the sea, a destined victim either to the beating waves below, or to the hungry eagle watching him above. That perhaps is the allegorical import of the book. Nature is indifferent to living and dying.

R. P.

From Vachel Lindsay

A❑ N OPEN LETTER TO MR. FLOYD 1 DELL : First let me congratulate the Masses-Liber-

ator for at last catching sight of Woodrow Wilson. I hope it does not sound boastful to say I voted for Wilson and have never regretted it.

As to matters of literary chronicle, Mr. Yeats gave the prize money to Mr. Ezra Pound.

As to matters of debt I am greatly indebted to you for this very kind review, and for much early encouragement in the columns of the Chicago Evening Post when I was fighting Springfield and the Universe. As for actual suggestions as to style in shouting, etc., long ago Miss Zoe Akins accused me of a thing in the St. Louis Mirror. She accused me of imitating William Rose Benet's "Merchants of Cathay." I hope she was right. That poem was shouting written down musically. I quote that poem whenever I have a decent chance. Mr. Clement Wood has been accused in print by our good friend Louis Uutermeyer of imitating this same style on occasion. If there is anything in this, let it all go back to that contagious poem by Benet. Very sincerely,

(Private signature)

NICHOLAS VACHEL LINDSAY (Book signature) VACHEL LINDSAY Springfield, Ill.

[It would appear that my habitual inaccu-_ racy in matters of mere fact has betrayed me. I am as surprised as grieved to learn that it was not Mr. Lindsay who received that prize from Mr. Yeats; though my point, such as it

(Con.tiuared on page 5o)

48 ADVERTISING SECTION THE LIBERATOR

A Suggestion to Congress

WE were sitting in the smoking compartment of a Pull-man, hitched to a broken down, toughy engine that was jerking its way along the uneven tracks that paralleled the St. Croix River. I had been up the Grand Lake Streams for a few weeks' loaf,-fishing, smoking, reading, thinking. As the engine labored along,-the bleak, stubby remains of fine spruce forests on one side of it and the turgid, little river full of pulp wood on the other, I half closed my eyes and dreamily played a monstrous trout on a gossamer line. Just as I was about to land my catch, the chap sitting opposite me re-marked in the same matter of fact tone in which he might have said Good Evening! "How can they do it for sixty cents!" He seemed perfectly sane, his gray eyes were steady and calm, so my first impulse to plead an engagement developed into the conventional "I beg your pardon?" Preston continued, "When I answered their first advertisement in the New Republic, I cheerfully anticipated getting sixty cents' worth, if that-some cheap, abridged, poorly edited book printed in eye-straining type on butcher's manila. But when those two books came!-Just think-a 350 page copy of "Thus Spake Zarathustra"-I had tried for months to get that last word of "Kultur"-translated by Thomas Common and with an introduction by Frau Nietzsche, and a volume of the finest collection of 13 De Maupassant stories I've ever seen, and I think I know my De Maupassant. I felt that I had cheated the publishers." Preston paused for breath - I learned afterwards that he is an unusually taciturn man-and before he could resume, I had opened my bag and fished out two charming limp croft leather volumes, "The Way of All Flesh" and "The Mayor of Casterbridge" with Joyce Kilmer's introduction.

"I thought you were a bit queer,-at first," I said, "but they say people are judged by the books they read, so we don't need any other introduction."

"I should say not," Preston exclaimed, "collectors of the Modern Library don't. Aren't they the most satisfying companion volumes ever?"

Just then the crazy engine grunted and pulled up at Machias Junction, where Preston and I got out, stretched our legs and passed the time of night with a group of State of Maine lumber jacks. Preston told them the yarn about Isaac Newton cutting a big hole and a small hole in the side of his barn so that both his big cat and her kittens could get out at night, and we could hear their appreciative guffaws as we settled down again to our pipes and our chat.

I told Preston a lot about the Modern Library that he didn't know. He had gotten only the first twelve titles. He let his pipe go out several times when I told him there were thirty volumes to be had for the same sixty cent price and that almost every one of the new titles had an introduction by such men as Padraic Colum, Alexander Harvey, Willard Huntington Wright, etc., which some people thought alone worth the sixty cents.

I waxed eloquent and, before we thought of turning in for the night, had explained how The Modern Library had started with the idea of giving the American Public the very best in modern thought at as low a price as possible, and in a simple, attractive, convenient form. It included books that had never been published in this country before, such as "Married" and "A Miracle of St. Antony"; and out of print books; that it bought from other publishers the right to re-print such worth-while hooks of contemporaneous interest as Wells' "War in the Air," James Stephens' "Mary, Mary," and Schnitzler's Plays.

"Best sellers don't mean entree to The Modern Library," I said, "though 'The Best Russian Stories' and `The Way of All Flesh' and `Dorian Gray' and several others have been reprinted several times in this edition"--

"Do you realize," said Preston, "that those fellows are doing something big? Only one or two foreign publishers have attempted anything as fine as that Modern Library"-

"That's just what Gerould of The Bellman, William Marion Reedy, and Mencken and Kerfoot and all the critics are saying," I answered, "Clifford Smyth of the New York Times, and he knows books, says:

"If real merit in typography, binding, convenience, and-best of all-subject matter, counts for anything, these books are certainly deserving of a fine measure of success. They fill a need that is not quite covered, so far as I have observed, by any other publication in the field just now."

Preston exclaimed, "Great heavens, man, I'm a Modern Library fan myself, but you seem to remember word for word what people say about it. They ought to have you on their pay roll." "Well to tell you truth, they have," I replied with somewhat of a sheepish grin, "in fact I'm one of the publishers of the Modern Library. I wouldn't have started talking about it if you hadn't wound me up, so you'll have to excuse me, and-"

"Excuse you nothing," said Preston, "there ought to be an Act of Congress obliging everyone to read The Modern Library. I'll call it square, though, if you give me one of your new lists, and have breakfast with me at the Parker House in the morning."

So we shook hands and a few minutes later, as I pulled the tan colored blanket over my legs, the poor old spavined engine gave an extra cough or two, and the last that I remember of that night is the vision of a gigantic trout. reading "The Red Lily" in a barn with two cats.

Here is the list Boni gave Preston:

r Oscar Wilde Dorian Gray

2 Strindberg Married

3 Kipling Soldiers Three

4 Stevenson Treasure Island

5 H. G. Wells The War in the Air

G Henrik Ibsen Plays: A Doll's House, Ghosts,

An Enemy of the People

7 Anatole France The Red Lily

8 he Maupassant Mademoiselle Fifi, etc.

g Nietzsche Thus Spake Zarathustra

to Dostoyevsky Poor People

r r Maeterlinck A Miracle of St. Antony, etc.

12 Schopenhauer Studies in Pessimism

r3 Samuel Butler The Way of All Flesh

14 George Meredith Diana of the Crossways

15 G. B. Shaw An Unsocial Socialist

r6 Geo. Moore Confessions of a Young Man

17 Thomas Hardy The .Mayor of Casterbridge

18 Thos. Seltzer Best Russian Short Stories

19 Oscar Wilde Poems

eo Nietzsche Beyond Good and Evil

21 Turgenev Fathers and Sons

22 Anatole France Crime of Sylvester Bonnard

23 Swinburne Poems

25 Wm. Dean Howells A Hazard of New Fortunes

26 W. S. Gilbert The Mikado and Other Plays

27 H. G. Wells Ann Veronica

2$ Gustave Flaubert Madame Bovary

3o lames Stephens Mary, Mary

31 Anton Chekhov Rothschild's Fiddle, etc.

32 Arthur Schnitzler Anatol and other plays

33 Sudermann Dame Care

34 Lord Dunsany A Dreamer's Tales

35 G. K. Chesterton The Man Who Was Thursday

36 Henrik Ibsen Plays: Hedda Gabler, Pillars of Society,
The Master Builder

37 Haeckel, Thompson, Weismann, etc Evolution In Modern Thought

38 Francis Thompson

Complete Poems

3g Arthur Schnitzler Bertha Garlan

40 Balzac Short Stories

4r The Art of Rodin 64 Black and White Reproductions

42 The Art of Aubrey Beardsley 64 Black and White Reproductions

43 Lord Dunsany Books of Wonder

44 W. B. Yeats Fairy and Folk Tales

45 Leonid Andreye's The Seven That Were flanged and the Red Laugh

46 George Gissing Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft

47 Voltaire Candide

48 Maxim Gorky Creatures That Once Were Men and Other Stories

49 Max Stirner The Ego and His Own

so Max Beerbohm Zuleika Dobson

5e Edward Carpenter Love's Coming of Age

52 August Strindberg Miss Julie and other plays

These books bound in limp c4oftleather may be obtained at all book stores or direct from the publishers,
BONI & LIVERIGHT, 103 West 40th Street, New York City.

May, 1918 49

LETTERS FROM OUR READERS

Seeing Is Believing

"I hope it's as good as it sounds."

HERBERT MAUERII AN.

San Francisco, Cal.

"P. S. I've seen it. It is as good as it sounds." H. M.

Needed

"Of course I've seen the first number. It is a wonderful pleasure. Everybody is enthusiastic. John Reed's article snakes everybody happy, and gives us all courage. From cover to cover, every word, one reads, and re-reads many times. I guess we need all the courage we can get-with all our friends in prison and Tons Mooney's case still so serious, and the I. W. W. trial coming off so The Liberator' is a godsend."

AGNES INGLIS.

Ann Arbor, Mich.

Gods Own Reporter

"The Liberator is fine! When the Masses was murdered it left a gap-a wide and hurtful one. Now you come up stronger than ever-bless you ! Am looking forward to all Reed's Russian stuff. He is God's own reporter-guts and imagination."

CHARLES AsHI.EIGEi.

Cook County Jail. Chicago. Perhaps!

The saleswoman in the bookshop sought to fasten my browsing attention to a particular fodder. She opened a copy of the New Republic for March 16th at the article about Mooney.

"It's surprising," she volunteered, "to see such a conservative magazine as this giving all that space to the Mooney case."

"But," I protested, shocked (for I "take" the New Republic), "that is a radical paper."

"You may think so," she retorted, "but only conservative people buy it people who wouldn't for anything buy The Liberator."

Is it true, Mr. Editor, that there is any difference between your radicalism and that of Mr. Croly's?

SILAS BENT.

New York City.

A Visitor to the jail

"Came to us, thirty of us, horny-handed crude, us of the Cause, a visitor.

He was young, clean of mind, powerful of physique, and untamable of spirit.

On his youthful shoulders he carried a man's burden= Responsibility, thought; old yet new, inspiration-

All this he carried-oodles of it.

His visit was lengthy.

Each one of us he took out for a breath of fresh air. Each one he took for a glimpse of the outside world. He fulfilled his mission to us.

As much as possible, we belated his departure.

We wanted to, hold him, because so much was he liked of us. He said he was one of us, and we believed him-the untamed thirty of us.

But he left, claiming other appointments.

On his promise of return, we accepted his departure.

We already await him and his burden, heavy yet ably borne. We know he'll come, for he is the Liberator-of men."

WALTER PASEWALK.

From a Negro Paper

"On Lincoln's birthday a new magazine called The Liberator made its appearance in this city. The name and the date are significant...The new Liberator is not published especially in the interest of the Negro, but is a radical magazine that will defend all oppressed classes and attack wrong and hypocrisy wherever found...We gladly welcome a new friend in The Liberator."

THE. NEW YORK AGE.

A Comparison

"It makes me think of the difference between Eastman's Liberator and Garrison's Liberator. One difference is-Garrison believed in God, and in regeneration for the individual and the race. His was a hopeful and a happy spirit. No one need ever pity the man with a Cause Eastman is as fearless as Garrison, but he thinks he doesn't love God. Some day he will have the vision, and learn that love is more powerful than justice. When that illuminating day comes, I shall not have to escape out-of-doors or read the New Testament as an antidote to The Liberator. And more people will read The Liberator. But this is not criticism-a very humble aside. I realize that the blind must have their eyes slashed open and tl e lame their crutches flung away and the sick-at-heart made sicker before we'll do even the next thing. I am grateful for The Liberator,"

FRANCES LUCAS.

Providence, R. I.

Bad Wishes

"I was glad to receive the announcement of The Liberator because it gives me an opportunity to tell you that under no circumstances would I permit a copy of it to come into my house. An acquaintance of mine once forced a copy of the Masses upon me, and after looking it over I heartily rejoiced when the government suppressed it. Hoping that the new publication will share the same fate, and assuring you that so far as I have any influence it shall be used against you."

ANNA N. Goo0Now. I-lighlaud Park, Ill.

Oh. Yes, VV e Dare

"The conclusions of an exhaustWe study of life, by a former Cook County jail-Bird:

"(I) The world goes round and round and round, And thither gleams the sun,

The human race goes round and round

To where it first begun.

"(z) Man comes from round and round and round. From where? Who knows? Not I?

He goes on round and round and round

Somewhere beyond our eye.

"(3) So round and round and round and round For ever and for aye;

The Universe goes round and round,

Just one long night and day.

"If you are capable of casting off your assumed cloak of optimism, and facing facts, you may use this. Do you dare?"

HERBERT RUSs:er n. COLLIE.

He Walked

"Yesterday I stood on the corner waiting for the car. I saw in a window 'The Liberator, Max Eastman, Editor.' I said, 'Oh.' I had sixteen cents. I walked home...If a number misses

me, I shall sue you for defrauding me."

EDGAR B. WESLEY.

Douglas County Jail, Omaha. Neb. St. Louis. Mo.

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Three Things You can

do for THE LIBERATOR

1 Be a Subscriber

Only a large subscription list can make The Liberator self supporting. News stand sales are important but the profit is small. Therefore subscribe at once and save money, (12 copies of a 15 cent magazine post free for $1.50) for yourself and for us.

Be a Shareholder

The first six months is the critical time. Our circulation is already over

30,000 a month-with a little money for promotion we could soon double it. Then we should be established on a sound financial basis and could give our full energies to making The Liberator the great radical magazine of America. We have issued $50,000 worth of Preferred Stock at $10 a share, guaranteed to pay 6% dividends as soon as The Liberator shows a profit. If you will buy or promise to buy one $10 share now you will be helping us far along the road to a real and lasting success.

3 Buy Your Books Through Us Everybody buys at least two or three books in the course of a year. Why not buy yours through The Liberator Book Shop? They won't cost you a

penny more-and we shall make a worth-while profit. ( During March, 1918, we cleared nearly $50 in book sales-one-tenth of that month's paper bill.)

Cut off one or both of these, fill in and mail with the money TODAY

SUBSCRIBER'S FORM

1918

To the Editors of The Liberator

34 Union. Square, Nely York City

Enclosed find .$1.50. Please send me Me
Liberator for one year, beginning with the
.issue.

\tige

Address (ldress

~... ~

SHAREHOLDER'S FORM

1918 Iit the Editors of The Liberator

.3=1 Union, .Square, Yew York City

.I hereby subscribe for shares

o f

Preferred Stock in The Liberator Publishing Company ( Inc. ) and enclose dollars in full (or part* ) payment.

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*Payment by Io+lallmculn of one dollar or more in arrehlwhlo