and striking; and certainly not to sell them for any plausible and partial "participation" in management. I distrust the latter because it is in line with the whole oligarchic strategy by which democracy has been defeated in detail. The triumph of capitalism has practically consisted in granting popular control in such small quantities that the control could be controlled. It is also founded on the fact that a man who can be trusted as speaking for the employees often cannot be trusted for long when speaking with the employers. He can carry a message, especially a defiance; but if he prolongs a parley, it may degenerate into a parliament. The parley of partners would be lifelong; and I fear the labor partner would be a very junior partner.

SOME CONSTRUCTIVE EFFECTS OF THE WHITLEY PLAN

As I have stated earlier in this paper, the suggestions of the Whitley Report are not the last word in industrial relations. The value of the plan lies in the fact that its acceptance will establish certain fundamental principles without which there is no hope of escaping from the balance of power system of industrial relations. The fundamental principles which the plan establishes may be summarized as follows:

(1) The plan is based upon a sound conception of what the ultimate labor issue is the issue of representative government in industry.

(2) The plan establishes the principle of conference between equals.

(3) The plan establishes the principle of equal representation of equally strong and well organized forces.

(4) The plan establishes open diplomacy in business as a counter-measure to the suspicions and lack of confidence that mar the present relations between labor and capital.

(5) The plan establishes the principle of legislation by industry for industry.

(6) The plan marks the beginnings of constitutionalism in industry.

CONCLUDING OBSERVATIONS

THERE are two equally grave dangers

involved in the consideration of this question of government in industry. It will be dangerous to assume that labor is incapable of assuming joint responsibility in the larger matters of industrial policy and management. It will be equally dangerous to ignore the fact that men need training in the use of power, and push the organization of industrial government beyond present trained capacity in the ranks and leadership of labor. Only a middle course offers safety.

An effective carrying out of the ideal of government in industry will react favorably upon the quality of political action in the community.

A constitutionalizing of industry will mean a turning of our factories into training schools that will develop political capacity in the workman. It will not only reduce friction in industrial relations, but will make the average workman a better citizen and a more intelligent voter.

The advocates of the Whitley Report have wisely pointed out that the representation of labor in the counsels of industry is imperative not because management is unimportant, but because the importance of management is so critical that it is essential that it have behind it the confidence and coöperation of all who are affected by it. The manager of the future will see the need of the sympathetic support of the working force, and realize that his effectiveness, no less than the effectiveness of a premier and his cabinet, demands the ability to secure a vote of confidence when a critical situation arises.

But the movement toward representative government exists in industry just as it has existed and exists in politics. The question that concerns men who want consistent and orderly progress instead of revolution is whether the King Johns of business and industry will collaborate with labor or take an attitude that will drive labor to wrest from them by revolutionary methods the Magna Charta of a new order in industry. Far-sighted business leadership will follow the former course; and nothing will help so much as a careful reading of the history of political progress.

the problems of peace. Proportionately as well as actually, France is the power which has made the greatest sacrifices in blood and treasure. From the first days of the war the fighting was largely on French soil. In her hour of triumph France faces economic disaster through the ruin of her richest industrial and mining regions. Of all the warring nations, France could afford least the terrible toll in young manhood.

The peace conference has brought to Paris a host of journalists from AngloSaxon countries. Few of them have been in Paris before, and there is a tendency among them to pass hasty judgment upon the attitude of France toward peace. If what they write finds general acceptance in the British Empire and the United States, the effect will be deplorable. The more background one has-background of intimate association with the French before and during the war-the more one hesitates to attempt an analysis of France's state of mind in the hour of victory. But the analysis must be made in order to counteract the impression which is going abroad that the French people are hostile to the construction of a new

world on the basis of what is coming to be known in peace-conference circles as "the American point of view."

Imperialistic and chauvinistic elements are at work in France, as in all other countries, to make an old-fashioned peace in which the spoils will be to the victors. Reactionary influences are more apparent among the French than among the British and Americans. They seem to possess more power. They have wider and franker newspaper support. And one finds very few Frenchmen who are willing to champion without reservations President Wilson's program for peace.

Seeing these surface indications, many who have come to report the peace conference are filled with amazement and disgust. They are impatient with the French for not falling into line immediately with the American program. I am sorry to find so little inclination to try to get a sympathetic understanding of the French attitude, so little effort to study the problems confronting France, and to appreciate their complexity and intricacy.

And yet it is not difficult to explain the distrust, if not actual antagonism, of the French, in the opening days of the peace conference, to our idealistic program. In the first place, French mentality is different from ours. The French are less given than we to generalizations, and they do not have the Anglo-Saxon ability of self-deception. If the French are less sure of the infallibility of their judgments, it is not because they are more cynical than we, but because they are less naïve. In the second place, France views the present

situation and the peace settlement from a European-Continental point of view. America and most of the British Dominions have oceans between them and Europe. Great Britain is an island world power whose interests are largely extra-European. Since the German Navy has disappeared and the path to India is no longer menaced, Mr. Lloyd George and his associates have changed their attitude toward Mr. Wilson. The entire Anglo-Saxon world is able to view the actual and future state of central and eastern Europe with an equanimity and a detachment that no Frenchman can feel.

From sheltered positions across the seas and on an island that has not been invaded for eight hundred years, we Anglo-Saxons of Great Britain, the United States, and the Dominions could go to the peace conference with splendid ideas of world reconstruction, and could call upon the nations of the world to deliberate first of all upon the society of nations, with the disposition of Germany's colonial empire as the initial practical test of our plan. And at the same time we could calmly proceed with the rapid demobilization of our armed forces. But we should not have been surprised or aggrieved when M. Clemenceau and his associates (and the French press and nation behind them) demurred. The French delegates demanded that the peace conference put at the head of its program the imposition of terms of peace on Germany and the reëstablishment of order in Russia. The entire French nation has been under arms for four and a half years. Northern France is in a lamentable state. There is economic chaos in Belgium, which threatens the stability of the Government. Germany remains strong enough to render imprudent the demobilization of the French Army. Bolshevism is spreading westward. If the Entente nations continue to keep millions under arms, and do not soon begin to center their thought and effort upon industry and commerce, serious social unrest is bound to appear. From a world point of view the French may not be logical in asking the peace conference to decide first of all the details of the settlement with Germany, and to

assume immediately international responsibilty for restoring order in Russia; but from the French point of view is any other course open to M. Clemenceau and his associates?

One may say without hesitation, also, that the weakness and irresolution shown in the first sessions of the peace conference have not reassured the French regarding the possibility of creating on the spot the society of nations. By consenting to the formation of a close corporation, with several other statesmen to run the conference, Mr. Wilson has revealed the inconsistency between his words and his actions. The initial plenary meeting of the conference was perfunctory and colorless. The second plenary meeting ended in vehement protests from the representatives of the small nations, in which Premier Borden of Canada joined, against the intention of the five great powers to dictate the principles of representation and the methods of procedure. From the beginning it became evident that Great Britain, the United States, France, Italy, and Japan had decided to make the important decisions in secret sessions, to which representatives of the other states would be invited only in a consultative capacity when problems affecting their particular interests were involved. China, with her four hundred millions, is a "secondary state." The eighty million Germans of central Europe, and over two hundred million Russians, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Hungarians, Bulgarians, Turks, Greeks, Armenians, and Egyptians, whose interests in the decisions of the peace conference are most vitally affected, are not represented at all. The advice of neutral states concerning the organization of the world league, which they will be supposed to join, is not asked.

Is it any wonder that the French, however sympathetic with the idea of a society of nations, have little immediate interest in high-sounding phrases when they feel themselves on the edge of a volcano? Put yourself in the Frenchman's place. In one column of his morning newspaper he reads that Lille, four months after the armistice, is still without food and coal and adequate transportation for the renewal of

her industrial life. The next column informs him that Premier Clemenceau is presiding over meetings where Japan and China quarrel about Kiao-chau, and Australia puts forth claims to Samoa. The official bulletin of the peace conference announces vaguely that the future of Germany's African colonies is being discussed, but no step has been taken to establish peace between France and Germany, and the conference has postponed action on the Russian question, pending the improbable acceptance of its invitation by the Bolshevists and other factions to a meeting in the Sea of Marmora. As for Poland, whose army of less than a hundred thousand is facing disaster through lack of ammunition and reinforcements, the five big powers have sent a commission to Warsaw to find out what is already known in every newspaper office in Paris. And the Turks keep on merrily massacring the remnant of the Armenians. This is the situation in February, 1919.

Without impugning the advisability or possibility of establishing a durable world peace through the adoption of "the American program," public opinion in France asks that questions be discussed and decisions made in the fol

lowing order: (1) settlement with Germany and suppression of Bolshevism; (2) creation of Poland and Czecho-Slovakia; (3) Danubian, Adriatic, and Balkan settlements; (4) Baltic and Russian settlements; (5) liquidation of the Ottoman Empire; (6) Asiatic and African problems; (7) general world questions, including the society of nations.

There are wide differences of opinion about how these questions should be solved, but as far as I have been able to ascertain from intimate contact with all classes in France, there is unanimity in regard to order of solution. I find doubt only in regard to the order of (6) and (7). Many Frenchmen are willing to admit that decisions regarding Asiatic and African problems ought to follow the formation of the society of nations, but all include the Ottoman Empire within the sphere of the general European settlement which must precede the society of nations.

If you point out to your French friends the American belief that the solution of all debatable questions would be different, easier to reach, more satisfactory to those interested, more in accordance with justice, more permanent, if we already have our society of nations as a working international organism, they will agree with you. They will say that you are logical, and that President Wilson is voicing their hearts' desire; but they add that security is France's immediate and pressing need, and that after the experiences of the last generation no Frenchman would consent to subordinate practical and necessary measures of security to theories that might not work out. Is the French attitude unreasonable? Why interpret it as hostility to the American program? The Frenchman says, "Safety first."

In the French mind, the suppression of Bolshevism must be undertaken by the Allied nations coincident with the imposition of terms of peace upon Germany. For if we conclude peace with Germany while a state of anarchy is raging in eastern Europe, Germany will still have an opportunity to come out of the war victorious. The French are more afraid now than they were during the war of the German plan to subjugate economically, if not politically, eastern Europe. A strong Poland, and the former Baltic provinces wholly free from German influence, are regarded by Frenchmen as vital necessities for safeguarding the future of their own country. Bolshevism has already penetrated the Baltic Provinces and menaces Poland. As it seems likely that the dissolution of the Hapsburg Empire will bring about the union of the German portions of Austria with Germany, the French cannot conceive of security for themselves in any other way than by having something substantial in the East to replace the Russian alliance. No Frenchman forgets that France after the war, even with Alsace-Lorraine, will have to face a Germany twice as large in population as France, and probably more closely knit together than under the Hohenzollerns. France feels, therefore, that she cannot rely solely upon the guaranties afforded her by the projected society of nations against the

possibility of a renewal of German aggression.

It is with these considerations in mind that we must interpret the speeches of M. Pichon and M. Clemenceau to the Chamber of Deputies just before the opening of the peace conference. The members of the American commission to negotiate peace and the journalists who accompanied them to Paris were dismayed at the "old-fashioned" ideas of M. Pichon, which seemed to indicate that nothing was changed in the aims and methods of European diplomacy. They were aghast when they contrasted the statements of Premier Clemenceau and President Wilson, made on the same day. Premier Clemenceau told the Chamber of Deputies that he was still a partizan of "the balance of power," and that if the nations banded against Germany had been Allies in 1914, Germany would not have dared to attack France. He admitted frankly that he could not discuss with the Chamber the Government's ideas about terms of peace, because he had a maximum and a minimum program, and was going into the peace conference to get for France all he could. At the same moment President Wilson, speaking in England, declared that "the balance of power" was an exploded theory, that the United States would enter into no alliance which was not an alliance of all nations, and that the creation of a new world required new methods.

The apparent irreconcilability between the French and American points of view need not discourage us, for the French Premier and the American President based their conclusions upon different premises. Premier Clemenceau was thinking of the particular interests of France at the present moment. President Wilson was thinking of the general interests of mankind in the future. Once we are able to give France definite and tangible assurances of speedy economic rehabilitation and genuine security against the renewal of German aggression, we shall find Premier Clemenceau and every other Frenchman sympathetic and enthusiastic in championship of the American program for a durable world peace. We have not the monopoly of liberalism and

idealism. There is nothing new in President Wilson's "fourteen points and subsequent discourses." One finds in the writings of a dozen Europeans, including several Frenchmen, everything that President Wilson has said about methods for establishing universal peace. Men as different in character and environment and epoch as Sully and Kant have dreamed of the society of nations, as Grotius and Czar Nicholas II have proposed to substitute arbitration for war, as St. Paul and Karl Marx have proclaimed the gospel of internationalism. What Americans are talking about at the Hôtel Crillon to-day was discussed in much the same manner in the same city by the Jacobins.

From the windows of the Hôtel Crillon our earnest Americans look out upon the spot where were enacted the scenes that drowned in blood the fair hopes of the equally earnest Jacobins. Just across the Seine, also within view of the guillotine emplacements, President Wilson is advancing his program in the closed sessions of the "Big Five." While he speaks, soldiers of the army of which he is the commander-in-chief are being shot down in northern Russia by men who sincerely believe they are fighting in defense of the principles President Wilson is declaring. And Czecho-Slovaks and Poles and Ukrainians are executing the American program for peace by cutting one another's throats in Silesia and Galicia. Invoking Wilson's "fourteen points," the Jugo-Slavs are feverishly drilling and equipping an army to fall upon the Italians.

The American commission to negotiate peace has to learn how to work in the Old-World atmosphere. We Americans are temperamentally impatient. We think quickly and comprehensively. The spell of the goal is upon us. It has frequently occurred in our fighting over here that an American regiment would push forward to capture a position regardless of the enemy on the right and left. Success has sometimes met efforts of this kind. On other occasions rashness and superabundance of confidence have led us into a bad hole. In our fight for the right sort of a peace the risk of failure is in following these tactics. At heart very few people in the Allied