British commander by the regent, lost his life at Baltimore within the week. The invaders themselves were never very proud of the exploit, which was vehemently denounced in the House of Commons. A story easy to believe is told to the effect that English officers sailing up the Potomac on this ungrateful errand uncovered as they passed the burialplace of Washington, and remained with bared heads until Mount Vernon faded from sight. But respect for his ashes did not prevent their reducing to ashes a large part of the city that bore his name.

A storm that broke in tropic fury the day after the British entered Washington, unroofing houses that their torch had spared and burying some of the invading soldiers in its ruins, did more to hasten their departure than they would care to admit. Warned that the enemy had discovered his whereabouts, Madison spent

Mrs. Madison, cheerfully assuring her husband that she had "the necessary firmness and courage to remain in the President's house" when he. rode away to find what was left of the army, makes quite the most heroic figure in the picture silhouetted against the burning Capitol and the bursting shells of the navy-yard. "My friends and acquaintances are all goneeven Colonel C. with his hundred who were stationed as a guard to this enclosure," she wrote her sister. "French John [a faithful servant] with his usual activity and resolution, offers to spike the cannon at the gate and lay a train of powder which will blow up the British should they enter the house. To the last proposition I positively object, without being able to make him understand why all advantages in war may not be taken."

too,

She waited until the enemy was virtually at the gate, delaying even then until Stuart's large portrait of Washington could be wrenched from its frame and added to her carriage-load of government property. "Our private property," she wrote, "must be sacrificed." Then she, drove away, and French John, forbidden to carry out his bloodthirsty desires, carefully locked the White House door, deposited the key with the Russian minister, left his mistress's pet macaw at the house of a friend, and retired to Philadelphia to await the outcome.

the last hours of this storm in a miserable hut in the woods, where his wife joined him; and after all manner of danger was over the bedraggled administration returned to take up its labors in such quarters as were still habitable.

At the end of a campaign of a week or more in the neighborhood of Baltimore, productive on the American side of Francis Scott Key's patriotic song "The StarSpangled Banner," and on the British side of little that endured save the death of Ross, the English departed to join Sir Edward Packenham, relative and able lieutenant of Wellington, who had been sent to take New Orleans.

The military situation at the mouth of the Mississippi was not reassuring, and the administration could do little to better it; but it did the one thing needful when it put in command that same angular Andrew Jackson who had already made several brief, but effective, appearances in American history. He arrived on the second of December, and instantly set every local resource to work, dominating factions, and coercing all to united action in throwing up earthworks, mounting guns, and searching out every available ounce of ammunition.

The campaign lasted from the eighth of December, when the foremost of the British vessels anchored off the Chandeleur Islands, to the eighth of January, when the decisive battle of New Orleans was fought, eleven days after the treaty of peace had been signed at Ghent.

Peace negotiations had indeed been going on almost as long as the war itself.

The Czar of Russia offered his services as mediator, through John Quincy Adams, our minister to Russia, in September, 1812, virtually as soon as he heard of it. The delays of winter mails brought his friendly offer to Washington in March, 1813. It was instantly accepted, and James A. Bayard and Albert Gallatin were sent to help Adams in the negotiations. They reached St. Petersburg late in July, and there learned that England had declined the czar's offer. Hoping that the refusal was not final, they waited. In November England proposed to reopen negotiations, this time directly with the United States. British diplomatic dignity and the slow course of communication again delayed matters, so that it was early August, 1814, before the English and American commissioners began their joint sessions in Ghent. Two more Americans, Henry Clay, leader of the war party in Congress, and Jonathan Russell, minister to Sweden, had been sent to join Adams, Bayard, and Gallatin.

The mutual relations of these five men were not free from friction. Adams and Clay were especially uncongenial. Adams, son of the former President, middle-aged, learned, and precise, "one of the kind of men that keep diaries," was dominated by Puritan austerity. Clay, ten years his junior, hot-tempered, and brilliant, though only superficially educated, according to Adams's standard, was emphatically no Puritan, and outraged Adams's sense of fitness a dozen times a day. Russell, a man of only ordinary attainments, was under the influence of Clay. Bayard showed a disposition to stick to his own opinion when it differed from that of the rest. To the genial and patient Albert Gallatin fell the difficult lot of peacemaker not only in acrid private disputes among themselves, but at the tedious formal dinners through which etiquette compelled the Americans to sit with their British antagonists and jest over the impossibility of ever agreeing. Thus weeks and months dragged on as they fought their way point by point to final settle

ment.

The treaty as signed on the twentyeighth of December was variously regarded. Clay thought it "a damned bad treaty," and did not hesitate to say so. In certain high quarters in England, on the other hand, it was looked upon as a great opportunity thrown away. "An able minister would have continued the war," Lieutenant-General Sir Charles Napier declared, "until the Northern States withdrew from the Union, making a separate treaty with England; after which England could have raised the negroes of the South, marched to Washington at the head of an immense force of armed and disciplined black regiments, and dictated peace, making Delaware an independent black State in alliance with England." So much depends upon the point of view!

The treaty was certainly a great gain over Great Britain's original demand that the United States set apart all the territory now occupied by Michigan, Illinois, and Wisconsin, with large portions of Ohio and Indiana, to be a buffer between Canada and the Union, and for perpetual use of the Indians; that the United States, moreover, give Canada a piece of Maine through which to make a road from Halifax to Quebec; that it renounce the right to keep armed vessels on the Great Lakes, and assure to British subjects the right to free navigation of the Mississippi.

As finally agreed upon, it left the question of territory exactly where it had been at the beginning of the war, and it failed to mention impressment or the rights of neutrals, for which the United States had taken up arms. But it carried our point in fact if not in words. A speaker in the House of Lords declared that the Americans had "shown a most astonishing superiority over the British during the whole of the conference," and in Canada it was predicted that such a disgraceful peace could not last. "Torrents of blood must flow" on both sides, the Montreal "Herald" declared, before a real peace could be obtained.

Despite the chagrin of those Americans who had talked so grandly about invading

But there is another side to the picture. An enormous number of businesses have been partly or utterly ruined. Trade has been so dislocated by the change from peace to war, and will be so much more dislocated by the further change from war to peace, that it will take years to recover. The rise of prices has impoverished great numbers of people. For a time peace will cause appalling unemployment. The overstrain of war work must be followed by a period of slackness and inefficiency. Finally, many taxpayers will have been disabled for life, and many have been killed. Striking a balance between these two conflicting factors, there is little doubt that when peace comes and the nation is faced with the problem of meeting the huge war debt, it will find that the people as a whole are poorer than they were before the war began. From this it follows that the same taxes will not bring in so large a return as they did in 1913.

The second point to be remembered is that an increase in a tax does not generally bring in a proportionate increase in the revenue from that tax. If, for instance, the excise duty in Great Britain levied on the production of beer and spirits, which in 1913 brought in two hundred million dollars of revenue, should be doubled, it would certainly not bring in four hundred millions. It might, indeed, scarcely bring in more than the original two hundred. The main result would be that less beer and spirits would be drunk, which, however satisfactory to the temperance reformer, would not be a solution of the financial problem. Customs duties which brought in 180 million dollars to the British exchequer in 1913 are in somewhat the same position. On the other hand, income tax and super-tax are not very much affected by this consideration; and partly owing to this and partly owing to the fact that these taxes are the principal means in Great Britain of attaching the funds of the well to do, there is little doubt that much of the required new taxation will be of this shape.

Before the war the British income tax and super-tax formed between them a

joint system of taxation of incomes graduated from a tax of about 4 cents on the dollar on moderate incomes up to about 122 cents on the dollar on really large incomes. These taxes were doubled in November, 1914, and were again increased in October, 1915, so as to run from II cents to 35 cents. If the war lasts till July, 1916, further increases will be necessary; and it is not unlikely that for many years to come the tax will run from some 15 cents on the dollar up to as much as 40 or even 45 cents, so that the very rich will be called on to pay away nearly half their income every year to provide the charges involved by the war. This gives an idea of the approach to the bankruptcy with which Great Britain will be faced if the war lasts for two whole years from its beginning.

Turning to Germany, it will be found that the cost of the war to the German Imperial Government is approximately the same as the cost to the British Government. To those who have not followed the national financial statements the fact that Germany, with its much larger number of men engaged, is not spending at a much greater rate may come as a surprise. It is due partly to the fact that Germany is fighting at smaller distances from its base, partly to really greater economy, but largely because of its entirely different method of paying for the war. The German Imperial Government does not pay for what it takes. It demands sacrifices on the part of its citizens. It does not pay its soldiers in the field wages, but only the minute pocket money of five cents (American money) a day. Unless I am mistaken, it does not itself pay full allowances to wives and dependents of soldiers, but leaves these charges to be supplemented, where necessary, by the finances of the separate German kingdoms or by the municipalities. Similarly it makes a demand on other men not in the field for their services in mines and munitions at rates of wages less than they could command in open competition. Also, it has to a greater extent than the British Government prevented employers in certain cases from

making large profits, while a larger number of other businesses have been ruined. For all these reasons the impoverishment of the German people owing to the war is far greater than that of the people in Great Britain, and this despite the greater personal economy which the Germans. have practised during its continuance.

At the same time, the war debt of the German Imperial Government for a twoyears war will be nearly as great as in Great Britain, namely, twelve billions of dollars. This gives an annual charge for interest of six hundred millions; to this must be added a further fifty millions a year, the average amount by which the German imperial revenue fell short of expenditure in the years preceding the war. So that even if there is to be no sinkingfund and no pension-money, the additional revenue to be found by taxation will not be less than 650 millions and may easily. be more. As in Great Britain, this means doubling the required taxation revenue of the country.

The chancellor who attempts to budget for Germany after the war will be faced, therefore, with the same problems already noticed in the case of Great Britain, except that his problem will be harder because the wealth of Germany was less before the war than that of her rival, and in addition the impoverishment caused by the war will be greater. As in the case of Great Britain, a large part of the imposts will have to fall upon the wealthy class either in the form of income tax or of a tax on capital, an experimental form of which was adopted shortly before the war. If the main taxation takes the form of income tax, it can hardly be less than thirty or forty or even fifty cents on the dollar.

Before proceeding to a final conclusion one exceedingly important reservation has to be noticed. In the analysis of the finan

cial position of Great Britain and Germany after the conclusion of a war lasting two years it has been assumed that the expenditure of these countries other than that of paying the war charges will remain the same after as before the war. That is, of course, a very big assumption, but it has been made in order to have some basis from which to start. If this expenditure be materially increased or diminished, then to the extent of the alteration a corresponding additional burden or relief will be given to taxation. It is difficult to suppose that there can be any considerable alteration in the civil expenditure of the countries; but the military and naval expenditure before the war was enormous (in Great Britain about 400 million dollars a year, and in Germany about 350 millions), and it may well be that the political events at the close of the war may be such as to reduce materially these items. On the other hand, there are some people who believe that expenditure on armaments will be actually increased.

Further discussion of this question is outside the scope of this article, but the fact remains that the financial condition of Great Britain and Germany at the end of a two-years war, whether there be reductions in armament expenditure or not, will be exceedingly grave. Moreover, these two powers are among the richest of the belligerent nations, and up to the time of writing neither of them has suffered seriously from the destructive effects of invasion. The other countries, which are worse off in this respect, cannot fail to feel the situation still more acutely.

Such will be the effects of a two-years war. If the struggle is prolonged beyond that period, then for every additional month that it is continued Europe will draw nearer and nearer to that state of actual bankruptcy which the British exchancellor predicted.

THE

Their

HE Balkans, where Constantine I, king of the Greeks, has taken position as the latest significant figure in the near-Eastern political procession, may properly be likened to a bottle. dark interior processes remain mysterious. This, too, is true: in the peninsula blood ferments as wine does. Events there have been as frequent as unexpected, but during the last year, to pursue the simile further, from that narrow neck only two figures, like genii, have loomed up with any tangible proportions, those of Czar Ferdinand of Bulgaria and that imposing Cretan, Eleutherios Venizelos, lately Prime Minister of Greece. As a personage that it is possible to appraise definitely the Greek king is just emerging.

It is the purpose of this article not only to establish Constantine's relation, but his exact relation, to the present crisis, and to do so in a manner uncolored by sympathy for one side or the other in the European unpleasantness. Nor will this writing attempt either to justify or excuse the king of the Greeks; it merely seeks, with some claim to honest precision, to mirror Constantine's point of view. Anything more is for the reader's own judgment to supply.

To do even this it is first necessary to clear away the rubbish of opinion sedulously spread broadcast by certain portions of the American press. Let it be said at once, then, that the king is not pro-Teuton. He is primarily for himself and his people, the Greeks, and his attitude, based upon a common sense both manly and patriotic, has been bulwarked by events.

The belief that Constantine has German leanings has been premised on two facts: his wife, Sophia, is the German emperor's sister; at his brother-in-law's war

college in Berlin the future conqueror of Janina received his later military training. The value of this training he acknowledged handsomely when, in September, 1913, he was invested by the kaiser's hand with the dignity and baton of a fieldmarshal in the Prussian army, and declared in a speech of thanks that Greek victories could be ascribed first to the courage of the troops and then to the training "given me and my officers here at the staff college in Berlin." Later that month, at President Poincaré's luncheon in Paris, King Constantine lessened French indignation slightly by his tribute to the utility of the reorganization his army underwent by virtue of the visit paid to Athens in 1910 by General Eydoux and other French officers, a tribute which in no way lessened the forceful completeness of the king's previous statement.

Constantine's admiration for the German war-machine is admitted. He knows that machine, recognizes its efficacy, and feels that what the French gain by élan they lose by inferior organization; but to extend this admitted admiration into a declaration that the king is fully German. in sympathy as far as the present struggle is concerned is misleading and, if you will, unjust.

"But," your traditional Missourian remarks, "the queen?" Precisely, the queen. Your diplomat, who has lived in Athens through troublous days, receives the query with that patient and deprecatory smile that disposes of all things uninformed. To those who know Constantine and his consort the question has its risible aspect, for of late years the king and queen's existence together has been little lightened by any term of affectionate agreement.