taxes was estimated at a little over $4,000,000,000, the balance to be provided by bonds. On Sept. 18 Congress passed one war appropriation bill of $7,000,000,000, the largest measure of its kind in history; this bill authorizes Government contracts for navy and artillery of $2,314,000,000, and gives the Shipping Board for new ships, plants, material, charters, construction, &c., $1,749,000,000. The bill carries $3,477,000,000 for the army alone. IN * THE KAISER AND ENGLAND N evidence that the feeling of hatred toward England in Germany had not subsided, Emperor William on Aug. 24, in an address to German battalions that had fought at the Flanders front, issued the following official statement: It is in God's hands when in His wisdom He will give us victory. He has taught our army a hard lesson, and now we are going to pass the examination. With the old German confidence in God, we shall show what we can do. The greater and mightier the problem, the more gladly we shall grapple with it and solve it. We shall fight and conquer until the enemy has had enough of these struggles. All Germans have realized who is the instigator of this war, and who is the chief enemy-England. Every one knows England is our most spiteful adversary. She spreads the hatred of Germany over the whole world, filling her allies with hatred and eagerness to fight. Thus every one at home knows what you know still better, that England is particularly the enemy to be struck down, however difficult it may be. Your relatives at home, who, too, have made great sacrifices, thank you through me. A difficult struggle lies ahead of us. England, proud of her stubborn resistance, believes in her invincibility, but you will show that you can achieve still greater things, for the prize of the war is the German people's freedom to live-freedom at sea and freedom at home. With God's help, we shall see the struggle through and be victorious. * * BRITISH CASUALTIES IN FLANDERS ASTATEMENT issued by the British War Department shows that the Allies between April 9 and Aug. 22, 1917, captured 167,780 German and Austrian prisoners. Up to Aug. 22 Great Britain had captured 102,218 German prisoners and lost to Germany 43,000 CANAD final assent by the Justices of the Supreme Court Aug. 29, which was the final official sanction required to make it effective. It provides for raising 100,000 men and applies to males between 20 and 45 years of age; the first class is unmarried men between 20 and 34. All the predictions of dire civil conflicts to follow its enactment went amiss; Sir Wilfrid Laurier, who led the opposition, announced after the bill's final passage that “it was the duty of all loyal subjects to see that it was carried out harmoniously." The first call under the law is expected in early October. THE ** ** THE DIRECTORY IN RUSSIA AND FRANCE HE Russian revolution is following the French Revolution closely, so far as names go. Thus it has become the custom to speak of the "Constituent Assembly," where American usage would say "Constitutional Convention." And now we have the proposal to form a Directory of five, an Executive Committee to carry on the war, such as was established in France in 1795, (the Year III.) There is a marked difference: the French Directory was a committee chosen by the Legislature, which consisted of two houses. But in Russia even the Duma, the representative legislature which practically engineered the revolution, seems to have disappeared; this is the more striking because it was the Czar's intention to prorogue the Duma that precipitated the revolution. Though legally elected and endowed with authority, the Duma seems to exist only as a shadow, and the present Provisional Government has established itself without any election or legal organization whatever. In 1795 the French Directory worked hard to prevent a restoration of the monarchy, and was even accused of falsifying election returns for this purpose. It was at this point that a young officer, Napoleon Bonaparte, fired the famous "whiff of grapeshot." Napoleon was rewarded with the command over the French armies in Italy in 1796; his splendid success there so strengthened him that in 1799 he was able to supersede the Directory, establishing a government of three Consuls, but retaining all real power in his own hands. In 1802 Bonaparte had himself elected Consul for life. In 1801 a vote of the nation declared him Emperor of the French, and he crowned himself at Paris, in the Pope's presence, as the successor of Charlemagne. How far the events which succeeded the Directory in France will be paralleled in Russia remains to be seen. THE INVASION OF LUSSIA: 1917 AND 1812 HINDENBURG'Sreat of an advance against the Russian capital and the presence of invaders on Russian soil in the Provinces of Kovno, Grodno, Volhynia, and Podolia inevitably recalls the last great invasion of Russia. The refusal of the Russian Emperor, Alexander I., to enforce the blockade of England led to that invasion, and in September Napoleon's army, which had numbered 500,000 when crossing the frontier, had reached Moscow, remaining there until the middle of October, although Moscow had been burned by the Russians. When the French retreat began the severe Russian Winter had already set in, and the sufferings of the retreating Grand Army have become an epic tradition. Only 20,000 of the invaders recrossed the Nie men. Exactly the same conditions which resulted in the ruin of the Grand Army now face the Teuton invaders; with the dif ference that, while the invading army of Napoleon practically followed a single road to Moscow, thus simplifying the problems of supply, the Teuton armies will, apparently, be compelled to advance with a continuous, unbroken front nearly a thousand miles long if they try to carry out a great invasion. Such an advance, through a region of vast marshes and primeval forests, which extend for thousands of square miles immediately before the present Teuton lines, will without doubt involve enormous, perhaps insuperable, difficulties, now that the killing Russian Winter is beginning. The problem of supply will assume enormous proportions, since the Teuton army must be at least six times as large as the Grand Army of Napoleon. Even for motor trucks much of the country seems likely to be impassable. And the severity of Winter will last for the next six months. * * * THE ARGENTINE CIPHER AND OTHERS THE intercepted Argentine and Mex ican cipher dispatches are only the latest chapter in one of the world's great romances, the tale of secret messages sent between Kings and Ministers for thousands of years. One of the oldest examples of cipher is in Isaiah, vii., 6, "Let us set a King in the midst of Judah, even the son of Tabeal"; the last word being a cipher disguise for the name Remaliah. Another is in Jeremiah, xxv., 26, "the King of Sheshach" for the King of Babylon; the prophet's cipher consisted in using the second and twelfth letters from the end, instead of from the beginning, of the Hebrew alphabetexactly the principle of substitute letters used today. In both these instances, dating from the eighth and seventh centuries before our era, the purpose was to conceal a perilous political secret. Julius Caesar used a similar system, and cryptic writings were used by the Spartans, and by Ennius and Cicero. A group of political messages sent from England in the reign of Queen Mary by Giovanni Michael, the Venetian Ambassador, were based on a cipher so intricate that they have only recently been deciphered. Some time before Queen Mary's day Cardinal Wolsey, then at the Court of Vienna, sent long cipher messages to Mary's father, the much-married Henry VIII. And seven centuries earlier the great founder of European nations, Charlemagne, wrote his dispatches in cipher. But perhaps the high-water mark of secret writing was reached in the seventeenth century, when the Stuart Kings devoted much time and high ingenuity to crytography. Charles I. wrote long letters in cipher to his Queen, and also to his Ministers. After his defeat at Naseby in 1645 a large bundle of political documents in cipher, taken with his baggage, fell into the hands of the commanders of the Roundhead army. Some of these were deciphered at the time, one of them containing large concessions to Irish Roman Catholics; but one, at least, in a numerical cipher, was translated only as recently as 1858, more than 200 'years after Naseby, by Wheatstone, who even devised a machine for the deciphering of cryptograms based on numbers. Another set of documents in cipher, of the same period, disclosed the Earl of Argyll's plot against James II. Yet another famous cipher document of the same time is the diary of the immortal Pepys, who perfected his system in 1660. Francis Bacon in the same century applied his genius to the devising of ciphers, primarily "for the use of Princes" in political correspondence. Bacon says the three great requisites of ciphers are "that they be not laborious to write or read; that they be impossible to decipher, and, in some cases, that they be without suspicion." Applying this test to the Argentine cipher messages, it would seem that they comply with the first and last requirements: they seem to have been fairly easy to read, and, so far as the Swedish Minister, Baron Löwen, was concerned, they appear to have been wholly "without suspicion." * INTERNATIONAL SOCIALISM THE ill-starred Stockholm Conference was the latest effort to revive the international, the worldwide federation of Socialists. The first attempt to organize the Socialists of all countries into one federation was made in London in 1847 by Karl Marx and his fellowexiles. It was called the Communist League. It issued a manifesto just before the Revolution of 1848, but it was dissolved in 1852. The next attempt began through the visit of a number of French workmen to the London Exhibition of 1862, and called itself the International Association of Workingmen. It was not till 1866, however, that the first congress was held-in Geneva. The outbreak of the Franco-German war seems to have struck the deathblow of this international, for it never really recovered from the fact that owing to the war it was unable to hold a conference called in Paris. After the war its headquarters were removed to New York. It died in 1873. No further attempts at the international fraternization of workingmen were made till 1889. The centenary of the French Revolution was being celebrated in Paris, and the French Socialist Parties called an International Socialist Congress. There were, as a fact, two Socialist Congresses the Maixist and Possiblist. They combined later, and congresses were held at Brussels in 1891, Zurich in 1893, London in 1896, and Paris in 1900. It was at the Paris Congress that the International Socialist Bureau was formed. Conditions of affiliation were drawn up, and were drawn to exclude anarchists, while including trade unions and other labor organizations. The conditions of affiliation are: (1) All associations which adhere to the (2) All the constituted organizations One of the duties of the bureau was to summon ordinary congresses at stated intervals and special congresses at times of international crises. In the present war nationalism proved stronger than French official figures for the three weeks ended Sept. 9 show the following sinkings: Over 1,600 tons, 7; under 1,600 tons, 6; fishing vessels, 2. One of the largest steamers recently lost was the Atlantic Transport liner Minnehaha, 13,714 tons. The vessel was sunk off the coast of Ireland on Sept. 7, with a loss of forty-three lives. Since the war began she had made twenty-six voyages between America and England, carrying 16,000 tons on each trip. More exhaustive studies of submarine sinkings for the last eight months will be found on Pages 135 and 137. OF * * * THE WORLD AT WAR F the six continents-Europe, Asia, Africa, North and South America, and Australasia-Asia and Australasia are the most completely involved in the world war. Asia is completely implicated. The greater part of Asia is either British or Russian. Russian Siberia is in area equal to the whole of North America down to the Mexican border. Russia also has a large area further south, conquered by Russia from Mohammedan Princes, and generally known as Turkestan, Transcaspia, and so on. The two powers which dominate nearly all the rest of Asia are China and Turkey, holding the eastern and western parts of the continent, as Russia and Britain hold the north and south. By a treaty of 1914, negotiated after the Chinese revolution, Tibet recognized China's suzerainty, and by a treaty signed in 1905 Afghanistan intrusted the management of its foreign affairs to England, a practical recognition of dependence. In Southeastern Asia, Annam is in the war, as belonging to France; Siam has recently declared war on her own account, while Japan, on the extreme verge of the Orient, has been in the war from the beginning. While Persia has not declared war, there has been much fighting on Persian soil, and the revolt of South Arabia brings that country also in, as the opponent of Turkey. As nearly all Africa has been practically annexed by European powers, the whole continent is involved except the ancient empire of Abyssinia and unappropriated portions of the Libyan Desert. The fighting in Africa has been spread over a larger area than in any other continent, and has involved French, British, Belgians, Portuguese, and Germans. All North America, down to the Mexican line, is now belligerent; Mexico is neutral; Central and South America are more or less involved, but in a diplomatic rather than a military sense. In Europe six independent nations still remain neutral-Sweden, Norway, Denmark, (with Iceland and Greenland,) Holland, Switzerland, and Spain. Holland has large colonies in the East Indies and a foothold in Guiana, which are, therefore, out of the war. GE * * * POLISH LIBERTY POSTPONED ERMANY and Austria, by a joint decree issued Sept. 15, transferred the supreme authority in Poland to a regency council of three members, appointed by the monarchs of the Central Empires. The council has legislative powers, but its decrees must be countersigned by a Premier, likewise to be appointed. This decree does not rescind but supersedes the proclamation of Nov. 5, 1916, granting autonomy to Poland. The Central Powers explain it as being a necessary measure during the continuance of the war. It was also announced that the Central Powers "would be obliged to occupy Polish soil during the war for the purpose of defending their eastern front." In letters forecasting the new order the Emperors insist that this is simply a temporary measure, and that a Polish King and a Polish Parliament will sit at Warsaw after the war. The Polish armies raised originally as a national home organization were taken over by Austria just before the decrees were published; it is reported that they were sent to the Italian front. General Pilsudski, leader of the Polish Legion, was arrested by the Central Powers, and the Provisional State Council at Warsaw resigned in a body when the Polish troops were sent away. POPE BENEDICT'S LETTER AND THE TEMPORAL POWER IN quarters hostile both to Germany and the Vatican it has again and again been said that, in refraining from all protest against the violation of Belgium, the invasion of Serbia, and the numberless breaches of international law committed by the Teutons, Pope Benedict was obviously partial to Germany; and it was sometimes added that the Kaiser had promised to restore the temporal power of the Popes, as a reward for this partisanship. The temporal power, in this view, means, apparently, the restoration of the Papal States, which before 1860 extended across central Italy from the Tyrrhenian Sea to the Adriatic, and which from 1860 to 1870 were restricted to the western part of this area, with Rome as capital. But there is another meaning of the term temporal power; and, in this sense, Pope Benedict's letter goes a long way to re-establishing it, or at least to asserting a claim for its exercise. For Pope Benedict offers himself as the arbiter between Kings, including not only those subject to the Church of Rome but the whole of Europe, and the Moslem Turkish Empire as well, to say nothing of the Hindu, Buddhist, and Shinto nations, India, Siam, China, and Japan, all now listed among the belligerents. This claim to be the arbiter between Kings was gradually developed in the centuries which followed the alliance between the Pope and the Emperor, when Charlemagne was crowned at Rome on Christmas Day in the year 800. It was soon extended to include the right to make and dethrone Kings, while the Emperor, on his part, exercised the right to appoint Popes. Thus the Emperor Henry III. appointed four German adherents successively to the Papal throne, while Henry IV. was practically deprived of the imperial throne and restored to it again, on the occasion of the memorable pilgrimage to Canossa, when he kneeled as a suppliant at the feet of Pope Gregory VII. In the same way King John of England, who in 1215 set his seal to Magna Charta, had previously been compelled to give up his kingdom by Pope Innocent III., receiving it again as a Papal fief. Perhaps the largest exercise of this power ever made was by Pope Alexander VI., who in 1493 divided the larger part of the world's oceans between Portugal and Spain, Portugal receiving all seas, with the lands they washed, to the east of a certain line, while Spain received everything to the west of it. This led to the establishment of Latin America, and the line of cleavage still exists, Brazil, to the east of the Pope's line, still speaking Portuguese, while the rest of South America, which lies to the west of the line, still speaks Spanish. Pope Benedict claims an equally extended jurisdiction, intervening in purely political questions of territories, annexations, indemnities, which affect every region of the globe. |