Britain and Germany. The British Labor platform has as its first plank: Appropriate land-values for social uses." Practically every German city of importance taxes the unearned increment. Paris now assesses land and buildings separately, which is the first step toward land-value taxation. France has a single-tax review. In Sweden, Parliament has been discussing sundry single-tax measures and the conservative leader has honored us by declaring that ours is "the most dangerous heresy yet promulgated." In Denmark, twenty members of the Danish Henry George League have been elected to Parliament. The last Spanish Cabinet was openly in favor of a municipal single tax. The under-secretary to the Prime Minister was leader of the land-values group in the Cortes. The South African Labor party has petitioned for the single tax. Australia and New Zealand have it in part. China has its almond eyes fixed upon it. In Uruguay, in the Argentine, in Sao Paolo, the most advanced State in Brazil, there is single tax agitation and official help. In this country, Everett, Washington, and Pueblo, Colorado, have voted to follow our gospel. Houston, Galveston, Beaumont, Waco and San Antonio, Texas, assess buildings at a lower rate than land. Nearly one-third of the members of the Lower House of the New York legislature are pledged to support this part of our faith. Pittsburgh and Scranton have been authorized by State law to reduce gradually taxes on buildings. Before the law was submitted, the Mayor of Pittsburgh sent his chief tax expert to Western Canada to study the system in operation there. He reported in favor of it. The Minnesota Tax Commission reported as the result of its special study of Canadian conditions that the concentration of taxes on land values had worked so well that nobody there wished to return to the old system. Glasgow, Scotland, sent a tax expert there last October. He reported in favor of the plan of exempting buildings from taxation. In February, 1913, the Province of Saskatchewan abolished all taxes outside of cities except those on land-values, with a surtax of 64 cents per acre upon large areas not cultivated. Step by step, we draw nearer our goal.

As I have said in substance elsewhere:

When the full rental value is taken, enough of all land

will be forced into such use as it is best fitted for. This will mean a great demand for labor. No labor of any kind is possible without the use of land. The more land used, the more labor employed. The wage scale will leave the minimum wage far behind. With employment open to everyone, involuntary poverty will disappear. Drunkenness, which is caused by poverty more often than it causes poverty, will cease to defile our civilization. The hideous traffic in women, based in almost every white-slave case upon the pressure of poverty, will also cease. The happiness which has died in many a tenement will be born again in many a home. People may scorn us as fanatics and madmen. Better men have been so scorned. But people can understand the faith and the zeal that burn within us and make us toil for the single tax only when they understand that we verily believe that through the single tax the nation that abolished kingcraft in the eighteenth century and slavery in the nineteenth will in the twentieth abolish involuntary poverty.

God speed the day.

C. TOWNLEY-FULLAM

I

T is not many years since an accomplished writer, Mr. Archibald Colquhoun, with whom, by the by, I have

IT

shivered socio-political lances in agrarian fields, threw light, in the pages of The North American Review, upon the extent to which we moderns have revived the semi-divine cult of Pan.

What he did not mention, what America may scarcely be prepared to hear, is that, substituting geographical for racial incidence, the God was reincarnated in the infant Republic herself.

Such, nevertheless, is the fact. Years before a genial British Minister had asked to be conducted upstairs and shown "where those dam Colonies are "; a century before Germany had become a corporate entity; before the birth of Cavour; at a time. when the view of Russia from her oriel on the Neva was still a little obscure, the germ of Pan-Slavism had passed its embryonic stage in the fertile and constructive brain of Alexander Hamilton. That he should have found his interpreter in Monroe, a man saturated with political parts fundamentally diverging from all that was characteristic of his own brilliant genius, is one of the two classic ironies of American history. But, Federalist or Republican, America, so soon to stagger beneath the weight of the white man's burden, did certainly foreshadow the sober recognition of those imperial responsibilities which still obscure her ultimate Destiny, long before Europe had emerged from the cataclysm of the Encyclopædists.

The potential Slav element in the American problem was wholly eliminated by the Alaska Purchase. Whether this was another instance of the "traditional friendship" of Russia for America manifested so signally, according to The Moscow Gazette, by "great service to the Union in the dark days of the Civil War," is an academic point. That which matters is that

unofficial German striving in Brazil, its solidarity within the Union, Italian movements in Argentina and certain British vested interests here and there along the Continent are much nearer to the activities of the general situation than Slav ambition and propaganda. America is thus able to contemplate in perspective and with that sense of aloofness which premises stable judgment, a movement which shares with Pan-Islamism, its mortal enemy, the double characteristics of convergent direction and illimitable potentialities in spheres strictly within the orbit of the Old World.

II

Palacky, the historian of the Czechs (Bohemians), mourns the establishment of the Magyar in Europe in telling words. "Slavdom never received a more fatal blow. . . . The Magyar by driving a wedge into the heart of the State destroyed it and therewith all the hopes of the Slavs." To-day the unbroken line of Germans, Magyars and Dacian-Roumanians stretches from the Baltic to the Euxine and effectually divides the great family into two groups.

Each of these is Pan-Slav in the racial sense, but whilst the movement in Russia is merged in Imperialism, that in the southern division is directed toward the founding of a new South Slav realm and is marked by all that splendid energy, restless activity and genius for intrigue which characterized the Society of Jesuits three hundred years ago.

To the northern section belongs the great enigma, Russia. herself. To anyone not accustomed to the nuances of Slav diplomacy and the deadly patience of the race, she might appear to be for the moment quiescent. To act or to count upon this assumption would entail disaster. There is nowhere in the world a bureaucracy, a Civil or a Diplomatic Service so designedly untrammelled in respect of initiative. The Russian agent is, however, endowed with the deep, undemonstrative reverence for the Fatherland, if not for the Little Father, which is the sure guarantee of fidelity. He neither looks for nor needs instructions. Whatever the conjuncture, in Belgrade, in Vienna, in Constantinople, the Russian representative acts as

his judgment dictates, but always in a forward direction. Let the matter pass without protest, Russia has gained: let there be an uproar, nothing so easy as to disavow the act and remove the man. But that removal involves, after an interval more or less decent, sure promotion. The higher ranks of Russian officialdom are filled with men whom public opinion in other countries would have adjudged to be hopeless failures. Of such a type is Count Bobrinski, the man who so recently involved Upper Hungary in the treasonable unrest which forced the Dual Monarchy to diplomatic action.

Russia waits, still with the same deadly patience, for a reversion of spoil which must follow the expected dissolution of the Monarchy. If that moment ever come it will involve Bukovina, Galicia, the country of the Little Russians, Ruthenes, and a section of Hungary within the ring of the Carpathians. It is well worth waiting for.

To the southern section belong Bulgaria, Servia, Montenegro, Croatia-Slavonia and the Slovine districts, a formidable confederacy whose latest achievements, on strict Pan-Slav lines, have been the Balkan wars, veiled rebellion in Croatia and the establishment, in America, of guilds for the education of the West.

The main objectives of the South Slavs, of whom only the Servians and the Croats really count in America, are firstly Unity, secondly the carving out of their own and their neighbors' territory a South Slav kingdom which shall revive the old glories of Dusan.

Unity is by way of being achieved. "The Croat language is Serb written in Latin; the Serb language Croat written in Cyrilline characters." True, the religion of the one people is traditionally Catholic; of the other Orthodox; but the lines of division in this field are being ruled out as essentially subordinate to the larger aims. As for the South Slav Kingdom, the idea itself involves no inherent impossibility. What it does involve is a radical change in the organism of the Dual Monarchy; a war with Hungary, to whom Croatia stands in much the same relation as Ireland does to England; a war with Italy, whose lively concern in the Trentino, the Quarnero and the