many lessons from the great war. She has, for example, found that cheapness and economy are not always identical, as for instance when we did not create a dyestuff industry of our own because it was cheaper to buy the German product, or did not develop our own supplies of potash because the German product could be for a time bought for less. There is such a thing, you see, as looking too closely at the figures on an immediate order and not considering sufficiently what will happen to the orders that are to follow in the coming days."

The American dyestuff industry was one of the few American industries not protected by Republican tariff legislation. The potash industry was another. Our attitude toward dyes and potash was that of the Democratic party, that it is best to buy where we can buy the cheapest.

In most other lines of production, we had insured the development of American manufactures by imposing an import duty high enough to constitute protection against importation of cheaper products from abroad. With regard to those other industries, we did not agree with Mr. Redfield that a tariff for protection is a logical and industrial absurdity. The result was that when the war broke out and every line of useful American industry was called upon to contribute its share toward the prosecution of the war we were ready in every important respect except in a supply of chemicals.

The fact that American industry

was ready to take up the task assigned it was due not to what Mr. Redfield referred to in 1912 as "brains, character, and energy," but to a protective tariff which made it impractical for American consumers to buy abroad and induced them to buy at home, thus building up prosperous and permanent industries. In his statement that we bought dyestuffs and potash in Germany because we could buy them for less, Mr. Redfield contradicts his statement of 1912 that a tariff based on differences in cost of production is a logical and industrial absurdity. The fact that they could be bought for less in Germany demonstrates that there was a difference in cost of production sufficient to induce the buyer to purchase the foreign product rather than that made in America.

It took Secretary of Commerce Redfield several years to awaken from the delusions under which he labored in 1912. In 1912 he was helping to elect Woodrow Wilson on a platform which called for lower import duties so that American producers would come into competition with cheap production in Europe and Asia, and which demanded legislation giving more effective force to the Sherman antitrust law. In 1919 he delivered an address before the U. S. Chamber of Commerce in which he said, “Is the reaction from combination to competition the sound and normal thing? It seems to me that it is not and we should not dare to restore or to attempt to restore by force of law a condition so threaten

ing to the community as unrestrained competition is." In 1912 Redfield and his cohorts were clamoring for full competition, not only among American American producers, but among the producers of the world, thus subjecting American production to the destroying force of Eu

ropean and Asiatic standards of wages and living. In 1919, Redfield sees the error of his way, in part at least, and he will be out on the stump in 1920 asking to continue the Democrats in power for four years longer so that they may experiment with more of their fallacious theories.

This is the question fairly put up to us by Mr. Wilson, himself an offspring of the cotton states and steeped in their worst traditions, so far, at least, that he has called himself an "unreconstructed rebel."

Measured in the value of men in their own market, reflected in the return for industrial activity received by them from day to day, roughly speaking, away from the lowest planes of humanity, American citizenship stands twice as far up on the mountainside of civic value as does the citizenship of Great Britain; three times as far up as the citizenship of Germany; four times as far up as the citizenship of France; five times as far up as the average citizenship in southeastern Europe; and from ten to twenty-five times as far up towards the extreme summit of human perfection as the citizenship of the Far East.

This immense difference between the life-levels, hopes and possibilities for American citizens and for those of the rest of the world, is the result of the industrial independence made possible by multi-industrialism, in direct opposition to the mono-industrialism of the cotton states which had its inception as long ago as 1820. The term "monoindustrialism" is appropriately used; because the cotton states aimed to influence conditions which had in view the welfare of but one industry, that of cotton-growing. They had no concern whatever as to what was happening to all the other industries of the country when, at their periods of supremacy in the national government, they introduced their internationalized market by "the removal, so far as possible, of all economic barriers" and brought starvation and utter wretchedness to all of the rest of

the country. Although the cries of the starving arose to the gates of heaven in an unremitting chorus, as they did in fact for years together, it was enough for the cotton people that they could buy provisions for their plantations in a world-market merged by their ruthless law-making into one with our own, and that the balance of trade was so thrown against this country as to cheapen American dollars in foreign markets so far as to offer a tempting premium to the foreign buyer of American cotton. Cotton was their Alpha and Omega of concern.

Multi-industrialism, promoted by the simple means of withholding the home market from the gamblings of international traders and shipping people, by adequate "economic barriers," has so multiplied and diversified industry as to keep the demand for human activity always abreast of the supply and so, through the purchasing power of his wages, has given the American worker in production five times as much of that which he has produced as the proportion of the produce received by the average worker abroad.

There is no wonder that the cotton states, through their great representative, Woodrow Wilson, stand solidly back of this League of Nations idea and its internationalizing of our market; because they must sell abroad the far larger portion of their product in competition with other cotton-raising countries; and they would naturally aim at an internationalized and broadly equalized cost of production. And they do not hesitate now any more than

a hundred years ago to level down American citizenship to reach the plane of their largest profit in cotton sales. The overwhelming majority of the national interest is against their mono-industrialism and this internationalizing of American wealth, their only allies being the Northern political tail of the Southern political dog which tried to break the Union in the middle of the last century; the international trading interests, many of which own producing plants abroad and struggle to substitute great blocks of foreign activity in the place of domestic activity for our home market; and the international bankers -all promoting a speculation in the leveling down of American citizenship, in order that their brokerages and commissions scooped up from the flooding of our domestic market with foreign products may make them prodigiously rich before America awakens and defies the League of Nations to continue its process of enslaving nearly the whole of the American people for the enrichment of the cotton states and these Northern allies of theirs.

handicapped in the foreign market by an expensive American citizenship. From a comparison of his campaign speeches, printed as “The New Freedom; A Call for the Emancipation of the Generous Energies of a People," with "Philip Dru; Administrator" one is persuaded that the writer of the one was deeply concerned in the writing of the other. According to the New York Tribune of Sunday, December 15, 1918, in an article by Woodman Morrison, Senator Sherman said on the floor of the United States Senate that he had positive proof that Colonel House wrote this book, "Philip Dru." But while it was being written, in the latter part of 1911 and early 1912 (it was published in 1912, before Mr. Wilson had any idea he could be elected President), Mr. Wilson and Colonel House were very intimate indeed and spent a great deal of time in each other's company.

The book reflects Mr. Wilson's well-known sentiments and puts forward policies since materialized into the workings of his administration. Philip Dru, the hero, foments a great revolution in the United States, like an "unreconstructed rebel," and with the help of five hundred thousand men, the exact number of the German reservists with whose vengeance Zimmerman threatened Ambassador Gerard (see "My Four Years in Germany" by Jas. W. Gerard, p. 237), overturns our government between presidential elections, tramples our Constitution in the dust and sets himself up as absolute ruler and law-giver,

backed by his army, with which, if only by intimidation, he subdues Canada, Mexico and Central America and then turns the whole of South America over to the Kaiser, apparently in compensation for the use of his five hundred thousand reservists from Western Ohio, Wisconsin, Minnesota and Missouri.

And then what does he do? Exactly what Mr. Wilson has struggled for in the League of Nations and what he effected in an ephemeral way by his Underwood-Simmons Law: removes "all economic barriers" forever between his great plantation extending from the Arctic Seas to the Panama Canal (see "Philip Dru: Administrator" ed. of 1919, p. 293), thus effecting the thing which the cotton states have struggled for since 1820 and freezing it into perpetual shape by an alliance with the Kaiser, apparently in expectation of the latter's conquering the world and remaining absolute ruler of the earth. The League of Nations is merely a substitute for unsuccessful Kaiserism.

U. S. A., INC.

If the head of any large business corporation should mismanage its affairs, waste its funds, neglect its interests, and propose the destruction of its separate corporate identity, he would be instantly removed by the board of directors. Some time a President of the United States may be held to the same high standards that are required of the head of a business concern.

Thomas Mott Osborne, who is everywhere known for his spectacular work in behalf of prison inmates rather than for the permanent reforms he has secured, has laid aside his commission in the Navy and donned the uniform of the common sailor in order to see at first hand the conditions under which the enlisted man works and to get his viewpoint. This astonishing adventure could not have been. undertaken without the consent of the Navy Department and we may well believe met with the disfavor of the officers the moment it was learned of.

It was this same Mr. Osborne who as Tom Browne incarcerated himself in Sing Sing prison for the purpose of ascertaining the viewpoint of the convict. The experiment was doomed to failure at the start for the obvious reason that a voluntary imprisonment enlists none of the emotions which characterize an enforced imprisonment. There was no natural point at which contact between the one and the other could be established and therefore no current of communication that could prove of the slightest value. Upon his self release from imprisonment it was found that his revelations were of no value whatever to the cause of prison reform or to a better understanding of the convict problem. They simply gave

him the necessary data of a personal nature with which to make several unilluminating public addresses. The effect upon prison populations for a long time was most unfortunate, since ideas were set afloat which ran counter to the discipline which must always be maintained if the best results to the inmates are to be registered.

The task which Mr. Osborne has now set himself with the aid of the

even more

Navy Department is even questionable. The American sailor is a free man. He loses none of his political liberties when he enlists in the service of his country. He has every opportunity to complain of his treatment and it is of the greatest significance that honorably discharged sailors invariably testify to the high character of their experience. What the viewpoint is, then, which Mr. Osborne is to inquire into we cannot imagine, and we have found no "gob" who could inform us. That he will issue forth from his brief experience with his emotions all astir we have no doubt; that he will bring back to daily life an understanding that has escaped the attention and consideration of American naval officers is manifestly absurd. That he will improve a situation which exists in his own mind only, there is no reason to believe. That he will have a spectacular time of it, sooner or later, goes without saying.