when the vote is to be taken. You hear this matter of time brought forward in every plebiscite. The Germans make bitter complaint that the plebiscites were all held when German prosperity was gone, the mark falling, food scarce, and, defeated and burdened with the war debts and threatened by communist risings, Germany stood alone in a hostile world. The Poles, for their part, complain with equal bitterness that the plebiscites in East and West Prussia were held at just the moment when the Bolshevist army was threatening Warsaw.

In all the plebiscites there were highly organized propaganda committees on each side. The force which these committees attached to economic arguments may be seen from the colored posters of which all sides made wide use. In Silesia the economic advantage was with the Germans, for, though the German mark was low, the Polish mark was still lower. This the German posters emphasized by pictures showing the fraction of a German mark which a Polish mark would buy if the region went to Poland. The ingrained German scorn of the lower level of Polish ability was turned into another

economic argument. There is a very effective poster of a German Little Red Riding Hood raising out of the reach of a hungry wolf, marked with the Polish eagle, a basketful of city buildings labeled "Schlesien" (Silesia). Above it is a verse which reads: "You want my little basket? It holds my darling Silesia! Undivided it shall stay with me, for with you it would become arid and wild." To this the Poles answered with a poster of a butcher, his arms already flecked with blood, whetting his knife above a small calf. The words are in German, in order to catch the young generation of Poles who had been forbidden the use of Polish in the schools, "It is only the stupidest calves that vote for their own butchers." Another sings out, over the Polish eagle, "Vote for Poland and you will be free!"

In Schleswig, the economic argument being with the Danes, Germany based her case on sentiment and an appeal to history, for this was all she had to offer. The German posters carried the legends, "We wish to be German, as our fathers before us"; and, emphasizing loyalty to the smaller and older unit, "For a thousand years we have been Schleswigers. We wish

to remain Schleswigers. Therefore we vote German." There was one, too, which read, "Shall the Danes reap what the Germans have sown?"

The Danes answered with their own appeal to history, for before 1866 Schleswig had belonged to the Danish crown; but the economic argument was emphasized far more, for the Danish krone was thriving, and the land flowing with milk and honey. Of the two zones into which North Schleswig had been divided for the voting, the northern one was sure to go for Denmark, the southern one was doubtful. "Why should you vote for Denmark?" asked a Danish poster of the citizens of Flensburg, the chief town of the southern zone. The question is printed above a large hand, and the answers come one on each finger: "I. Because your race is Danish. II. Because Flensburg will die if cut off from North Schleswig. III. Because no other country takes better care of its children and aged. IV. Because in Denmark a man earns as many kronen as he does marks in Germany. V. Because the Danish krone buys eight times as much as the German mark."

The Danes had many posters on the famine conditions in Germany. One reads, “If again the flag is white and red, then will be ended the bitter need"; and another, directed to the women, is of a little boy, with above him the words: "Mother! Vote Danish. Think of me!" This poster was sent by the Danes to the Polish propaganda committee in upper Silesia, and they, too, made a wide use of it, changing the words to Polish; and, as the Poles are all Catholic, hanging an amulet about the neck of the child.

The Danes made a still more effective use of the argument of the lack of food in Germany by sending daily into

the two plebiscite zones automobiles laden with butter, pork, tea, and coffee, to be distributed free, and by inviting the German Socialists to send ailing children to Denmark for a week's outing. It is said that as many as ten thousand children were entertained in this way. The Danes insist that this was all for charity, with no political purpose whatever, but the Germans point to the fact that the automobiles came no more after the vote was counted. The Germans, who are certain that the food affected the vote of the mothers, for, owing to the blockade, the children were woefully undernourished, make the comment that "A plebiscite lets loose the worst side of human nature. It makes people forget country and think only of food."

In the Carinthian plebiscite the Jugoslavs also took advantage of the famine conditions in Austria and sent in automobiles every Sunday laden with milk and eggs and white bread. The Austrians had an economic argument in the fact that Klagenfurt, which was sure to go for Austria, was the market town for the region. They added others, however, and in particular, they made much of the fact that Austria was a republic while Jugoslavia had a king, and that Austrians were now free from military service, while Jugoslavs must serve two years. "You will be sent to the Serb army in Macedonia," they warned the peasants. So the Jugoslav leaders in one of the villages induced about eighty girls to sign a manifesto reading, "I would not have a son who was not a soldier."

Although you can never, in discussion, induce either side to admit it, advantage on one side seems always balanced by advantage on the other. While Germany no doubt lost heavily

on the economic argument, it is a fact, of which the Danes and Poles both bitterly complain, that Germany enjoyed a stupendous advantage from the opportunity which she had enjoyed for many decades to carry on her process of Germanization through her control of the local government, the schools, and the churches. Moreover, the German judges, teachers, priests, and pastors, as well as the fonctionnaires, or "beamten," which are the Continental words for the administrative officials and the railroad, post, and telegraph officials and operatives, all appointed by the Government, were still in office, with their ancient prestige intact, and with every opportunity to use their enormous influence in propaganda both open and secret, direct and indirect.

Not only was their power to use pressure of the first importance; prestige itself is a great force, particularly with the peasant mind. A woman active in one of the Polish plebiscites told me that, knowing how the peasants looked on the Prussian officials as inevitable and unchangeable, she had made heroic efforts to induce the Plebiscite commission to remove at least the chief administrator of the county in order to prove to the peasants that Prussia was not omnipotent. When she failed in this, she had then put all of her extraordinary energy (during this period she had given birth to a daughter who is nicknamed "Plebiscita") into opening kindergartens where the children might hear Polish, and so bring home to the mothers a realization that the Prussian dispensation could be changed.

The fact of the inevitable presence of an army of government employees is sure to be one of the chief difficulties

of any Continental plebiscite. The vote they cast is enough in itself to turn the scale in many places such as railroad centers or governmental headquarters. It made it all the more galling to the opponents of Germany that these employees as a rule were not native to the region, but had been sent there from some other part of the empire. It is impossible to gage to the full the effect of their presence, no matter how low in the hierarchy they come. The telephone and telegraph operators have been accused, for instance, of holding up messages in several places, and it may easily be true. In fact, I was surprised not to hear of it oftener. I might quote M. Korfanty to the effect that no plebiscite can ever be fair because it is virtually impossible to remove all the officials; and indeed the fact that in upper Silesia none was removed at the outset, but only after they had broken the plebiscite regulations, is given as the reason for the Polish insurrections there before the voting. The Schleswig plebiscite proved, however, that the initial removal of only a few of the higher officials gives a sufficient feeling of confidence. In Schleswig the officials were replaced by civilians chosen together by the local Germans and Danes.

In the Carinthian plebiscite the officials and employees were not Austrian, but Jugoslav, for before the decision at Paris to hold a plebiscite the Slav state had invaded southern Carinthia and incorporated it in Jugoslavia, and had replaced all the Austrian judges, teachers, and fonctionnaires, by their own. The priests they had left, for they had shown themselves patriotic adherents of their bishop at Laibach. To show how ig

norant these Windisch peasants are, the Austrians will tell you a story of how, when the Karawanken Mountains were first tunneled, thirty or forty years ago, the peasants from miles around flocked to the mouth of the tunnel to feel the warm air from the south. But even the peasant women, ignorant though they were, were sufficiently independent to vote against their priests' advice, for a Slav told me that many of the women had come to the priests for absolution for having voted for Austria. One gleans a further insight into the priests' activities through their complaint that many of the population had deceived them and had accepted food and clothing from both sides.

There are other kinds of bribery and pressure that are inevitable in any hotly contested election. Everywhere in these plebiscites, virtually all the landlords and industrialists were German. The Poles and Danes say that the landlords frightened their tenants into voting for Germany and that the industrialists threatened to move their factories away if the vote went against them. On the other hand, it was part of the Polish propaganda to promise the peasant not "forty acres and a mule," but part of the landlord's land, plus a cow. The "Korfanty Cow" is famous in upper Silesia, although Korfanty himself denies the cow. It certainly has not been delivered.

In virtually all the plebiscites one of the greatest sources of trouble was the lack of sufficient Allied troops to police the area. This made little difference in Schleswig, where there was, as I have said, no coal to whet the appetite of the opposing governments, and where Danes and Germans, though with a feud of many years behind

them, have, nevertheless, a mutual respect as well as kinship. But in all the plebiscites between Poland and Germany it allowed of continual disturbances, and in upper Silesia, where the plebiscite was long delayed, these amounted to organized violence. In the whole of the upper Silesian plebiscite area, a region of four thousand square miles with a population of 2,300,000, there were only at the most 14,000 troops, chiefly French, and these were stationed only in the cities. There was a German-Polish police organized by the plebiscite commission to replace the former local German police, but these proved wholly inadequate, and the country-side was left to the mercy of terror bands of both sides, the German "Orgesch" and the Polish "Sokols." These, largely made up of wild youths unsettled by the war for a life of peace, and roving about in pursuit of excitement, were each ostensibly organized to protect their own race against the violence of the other. Each was able to get sufficient arms, owing either to the helplessness or to the various partizanships of the members of the plebiscite commission. Not only did the bands spread general terror, but they appear in some places to have actually invaded the secrecy of the ballot in the following way. In all the plebiscites the voters were handed two ballots, one for each of the two countries. All the plebiscite commissions, except that in Carinthia, instructed the voters to put the ballot they wished to vote into the envelop provided and to tear up the other and throw it away. In some places in Silesia this arrangement was made use of by the terror bands, which visited the peasants before the day of the voting and warned them that they must