cilables would not stop with the reservations formerly discussed, but would demand a complete overhauling of the treaty, the reopening of the questions of the division of the Austro-Hungarian territories, the status of Dantzic, the Polish corridor, and similar questions. Manifestly, the hope was that they could manoeuver M. Viviani into a position where he would say, "Gentlemen, if you plan any such reopening of the whole medley of treaty questions, it will be better that you have no relation whatever to the settlement." M. Viviani astutely refused comment, despite reports circulated to give the opposite impression. The first thought this situation suggests is that the friends of decent international relations should lock arms with these irreconcilables and checkmate their influence upon Mr. Harding, who, I believe, honestly wants to effect a constructive settlement. But the practical likelihood is that no such effective action will be taken by the innumerable friends of a real league of nations.

Before these lines reach the reader the likelihood is that Mr. Harding will have been manoeuvered into support of a sterile peace by resolution and a policy of drift respecting international policy. That will mean that we had as well give up hope of settling the problem of our foreign policy upon a political basis. The one hope that will be left will be the evolving of a decent foreign policy from the economic angle. In this we must pin our hopes on Mr. Hoover. He has the ability to meet the opportunity and the challenge, and he realizes, as many of our public men do not, that the restoration of our own business and industrial health is absolutely dependent upon a constructive program of international coöperation.

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The other opportunity that confronts Mr. Hoover is the opportunity to teach American business men that, if they are to be masters of world-trade, they must become students of worldpolitics. A few months ago, in these columns, I discussed the regrettable lack among our business men of an intimate study of their foreign markets; but what I am discussing now goes deeper than that. The whole round of world political conditions react upon business. A knowledge of world politics is as essential as a knowledge of production costs. The time must come when every big banking and export institution in the United States will have on its staff an expert in world-politics, a man who is something of a combination of savant and business man, a man who has acquired a sound and comprehensive historical background, and who is in constant touch with the social and political forces of the contemporary world. Here, again, is the opportunity for Mr. Hoover to make a lasting contribution to American business.

HOPE AND TRAGEDY IN THE NEW SOUTH

ONE of the things that militate against our highest possible efficiency as a nation is our intersectional ignorance. We and our representatives think in terms of our own county, congressional district, or State. We shall never think nationally until all of us know more about our country as a whole. The weekly and monthly magazines of limited circulation render fine service in spreading information about condi

tions the country over, but their limited circulation means a limited effect. The newspapers can, if they will, inform millions where the magazines inform thousands. It is gratifying, therefore, when newspapers like the "New York Evening Post" print a series of articles like the recent Ray Stannard Baker articles on conditions in the South. I do not know how widely these articles were commented upon, but they deserved syndication in every city in the United States. If every great newspaper in the United States would undertake the publication of several such series of factual articles about the various sections of the United States, the result would be a national education that would go far toward enabling us to think nationally and dispassionately about the vexing issues that confront us in this period of deflation and readjustment.

I know that both Mr. Baker and the editor of the "New York Evening Post" will be glad to have me pass on to the readers of THE CENTURY MAGAZINE some of the outstanding generalizations that emerged from this highly informative series of articles.

The farmers of the South, as we all know, have been hard hit by the collapse of the market for their 1920 crops. We have heard much of the staggeringly high prices the Southern farmers received for their 1918 and 1919 crops, and, at some distance from the facts, it was at first difficult to understand the cry for help that went up when the market crash came the following year. Why were they not able to weather the storm by grace of their surplus profits of the previous two years? If they are in such dire straits, they must have wasted their substance in riotous extravagance.

Mr. Baker suggests the fallacy of such reasoning. The Southern farmer did indeed receive a huge income during 1918 and 1919, but two factors entered to make his actual surplus suprisingly small: first, the increase in living costs almost counterbalanced the increase in prices for farm products; and, second, the Southern farmers were debt-ridden from former years and were obliged to pay up many old accounts out of their 1918-19 surplus. There was also, of course, not a little unwise investment. All sorts of stock-fakirs flocked South at the news of high prices for farm products and took their toll. But Mr. Baker emphasized the fact that a lot of money went into genuine improvements, such as new buildings,-houses, barns, school-houses, and churches,better farm machinery, modern conveniences for the rural home. Out of it all there is a new rural South, with homes equipped with water-supply, modern plumbing, lighting, washingmachines, better furniture, musical instruments, and the like.

The cotton farmer of the South, like the wheat and cattle farmer of the West, is unable to sell what he produced in 1920 for enough to cover costs of production. This sounds extreme, but Mr. Baker supports his statements with facts. And added to this are the facts that prices of necessities are still distressingly high, the merchants are pressing the farmers for payment with the present low-priced cotton, despite the fact that the farmers secured the credit on the basis of high-priced cotton, taxes are higher than ever, and the Southern farmers face a more difficult labor problem than ever before, while the banks are tightening up on credit and pressing for payments.

The South is literally sitting up

nights to find ways and means of meeting this critical situation. Broadly speaking, there are three types of remedies proposed: first, the cutting down of production by limiting the acreage-production for 1921 by one third of the 1920 production; second, an appeal for government aid, help in marketing the 1920 surplus, a more liberal credit policy from the Federal Reserve Board, and, perhaps, a protective tariff; third, the adoption of more diversified crops, so that the South will not, in the future, be dependent upon cotton and tobacco, but will be able to raise more of its own food, for which it now must pay high prices while its own crops stand in warehouses.

The thing that strikes one on hearing these proposals is that, with the exception of the third, they are negative and devised to meet a temporary crisis. They do not deal constructively with causes. They overlook also the fact that Southern farmers face the same general problems, aside from their own peculiar problems, that all the farmers of the United States face. Many Southern leaders see this, and there are, therefore, larger and more fundamental remedies being proposed. These larger remedies deal with root causes. Mr. Baker suggests that the most hopeful thing in the admittedly tragic situation in the South is the way in which Southern farmers promise to tear a leaf from the experience of the orange-growers, raisin-growers, prune-growers, almondgrowers, and honey-producers of California. These California farmers, when they faced a critical situation, did not blindly appeal to the Government for help, but turned frankly to the problem of organizing businesslike marketing

associations that meant self-help and self-protection.

The farmers of the South have never been and are not now "revolutionary" in their discontent with existing conditions. They have been rather, as Mr. Baker suggests, given to "insurrectionary" methods, like "night riding" and the like. If they have not been revolutionary, neither have they been statesmanlike. They have shown a strange facility for avoiding direct dealing with root causes. They have not tackled their problems with the vision that has characterized the California fruit-growers.

But the facts seem to indicate that the Southern farmers are emerging from their insurrectionary night-riding period and entering a period in which they will look less to government help and more to self-help through coöperative organization. That is the note of hope that Mr. Baker strikes in his telling of the Southern tragedy of a shattered market and serious economic conditions. The thing that justifies this hope is the fact that there is going on in the South a veritable crusade for education and the general lifting of the levels of domestic and community life. This crusade, in which the schoolmasters are taking an effective part, is laying the foundation upon which the will and structure of coöperation can rest.

MODERN POLITICAL DEMONOLOGY

THE present orgy of anti-Semitic propaganda affords an interesting study in political demonology. Many casual readers have assumed that the present wave of anti-Jewish hostility is of relatively recent origin. It is, of course, only one of the intermittent revivals

of a campaign that has for more than a century appeared in many countries, wearing many different cloaks, and serving many different causes. Its latest manifestation began with the circulation of the so-called protocols of the Elders of Zion. A series of articles appeared in the "Morning Post" of London, based upon these documents. The subject matter was later published in this country under the title "The Cause of World Unrest." And, of course, every one knows of the antiSemitic campaign that Henry Ford has been conducting.

The theory underlying all this campaign may be stated briefly and simply. The theory starts with the assumption that the present unrest that vexes the world is artificial, that it has been deliberately stirred up by a "Formidable Sect" that belts the globe in its sinister activity. The membership of this "Formidable Sect" has been variously guessed, but the present campaign rests upon the assertion that it is an international organization of Jews, plotting to overturn the existing order of society and erect upon its ruins a universal Jewish dominion. The theory is that this organization has been steadily at work for at least a century and a half. Every subversive social and political movement of the last one hundred and fifty years is credited to its malevolent plotting. It is charged with having caused the French Revolution and all the succeeding revolutions to the present time. Socialism, trade-unionism, syndicalism, Sinn Fein activity, the unrest in India and Indian nationalism, and, above all, Bolshevism, are said to have resulted from the activity of this international Jewry. The anti-Semites do not deny that genuine social griev

ances and evils lie at the bottom of much of the present-world unrest, but they assert that the Jews have with malice aforethought brought all these evils into existence to further their dark plot.

I shall not go into the rather involved proof of the manifest forgery of the documents upon which this whole campaign rests. The most detailed and scholarly presentation of the facts may be found in a little book on “The Myth of the Jewish Menace in World Affairs," by Lucien Wolf. I want only to point out certain general facts that are essential to the formation of any sane judgment in the case.

First of all, this is not a new thing that began with the series of articles in the "Morning Post" of London. The present wave of anti-Semitic propaganda began in the eighties of the last century. At that time and afterward anti-Semitic propaganda was deliberately used in Germany, Russia, and France for political, military, and clerical purposes. Bismarck used it in Germany in his fight against the National Liberals. Lasker was a Jewish leader of the Liberals, and there were other leaders of the party who were Jews. Bismarck thought he could discredit Liberalism by attacking its Jewish leaders, thereby bringing less antagonism against himself than he would by a more direct attack on liberal principles. In that period revolutionary tendencies were already threatening the autocratic régime in Russia, and the Russian Government, after the ancient manner of autocratic governments, turned the discontent of its people away from itself and focused the discontent in a hatred of the Jews. The anti-Jewish hostility in France, terminating in the Dreyfus