country and gained victory after victory over their employers. Today they are among the most fortunately situated of our laborers, both as to wages and as to hours. Mainly middle-class folk at home, their hard lot here has made them Socialists. Their programme, as indicated by Messrs. J. H. Budish and George Soule in The New Unionism, is throughout inspired by the Guild idea. Specifically, as their Constitution states, it is "to put the organized working class in actual control of the system of production" to the end that they shall "be ready to take possession of it." They have long made overtures to workers in the textile industries and have given them financial assistance. They are irreconcilably at odds with the conservative element in the American Federation of Labor, which abhors their Socialism and their "industrial" unionism; but when the radical element in the Federation organized the great steel strike, bringing tens and hundreds of thousands of ignorant aliens into the Federation, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers saw a fruitful field for the new Socialism and contributed $100,000 to the strikers-more than any single organization within the Federation.

This is only half the story, perhaps the less significant half. The idea of the democratization of industry is rapidly permeating the intellectual leaders of the nation-school teachers, college professors, clergymen, and even the heads of theological seminaries. In "progressive" journals of the type of The New Republic it is the sum and substance of opinion. Recent books, not only sociologic but historic, teem with it. Together with the cause of the League of Nations, it comprises most of the idealism, the aspiration and the hope that has resulted from the war; and, prominent as the League has become thanks to its involvement in politics, it is quite likely that Guild Socialism will prove the more permanent and powerful ferment.

It is indeed an attractive programme to every lover of his fellow men and of his nation, to every lover of democracy and freedom. Yet let us not be precipitate. It is possible that somewhere and somehow there is a fly in the amber. What is it that is forgotten-if anything? Curious phenomenon, is it not the very people who have conceived the new Socialism and most conspicuously championed it, the middle class? The phenome

non is indeed curious; yet to the unimpassioned observer it would perhaps seem more strange if those who exercise their brains upon the problems of Sociology had remembered the brain worker.

One incident of the great year of unrest throws this middleclass Socialism into dramatic relief. The Interchurch World movement, which started as a drive to increase the wretchedly insufficient salaries of our clergymen, stepped aside to investigate the Steel strike. In its Report the Interchurch Committee appears to have been, to say the least, strangely abused-one hesitates to use common parlance with regard to a committee of nine prominent clergymen including three bishops. The character of the leaders of the strike was notorious: they were both "borers from within." The committee had before it W. Z. Foster's "red book" on Syndicalism in which with passionate eloquence he incites "the militant minority" to robbery and bloodshed. His refusal specifically to recant these opinions before the Senate Committee is passed over in the Report with an apparently disingenuous shift. With regard to Foster's coworker, John Fitzpatrick, the Report says nothing definite, attempting only to picture his burly leadership in a sympathetic light. There was nothing definite to say, from the point of view of apology. Fitzpatrick has always been a revolutionary. At the organization of the Farmer-Labor party he called upon the "workers" to "concentrate their efforts and do such a job as Russia has done" and to "take over the operation of their own country and their own government."

In its investigation the Interchurch Committee accepted the aid of certain New York Socialists of the stripe of the leaders of the Garment Workers. The Report gives a stirring picture of the hardship of the lives of the common laborers and of the prevalence of the twelve-hour day. But of the welfare work of the Steel Company, and of the fact that the men manifestly prefer their life here to that of their homes in Europe, the Report says nothing. Nor is there any mention of the deepest evil in the situation-the fact that leaders in the world of capital, in order to swell their profits, have abetted the importation of brutal and ignorant aliens and have employed them under a régime which makes them raw material for the most dangerous propaganda

that has ever risen among us. The Report ends with a declaration in favor of the "democratization of the industry." It is a delicate question whether the Committee were conscious propagandists of the new Socialism or merely bamboozled by their "technical assistants" from "The Bureau of Social Research, New York." Fortunately it is a question that we are under no obligation to decide.

The story of those nine clergymen including three bishops is indeed symbolic. The average salary of the spiritual leaders of our nation is something less than $1,000 a year. After the ruin of the Interchurch drive one denomination started a separate movement the slogan of which was: "A Parsonage and $1,500!" Yet the average wage of the steel workers in 1919 was $1,950. Such facts, of course, the Interchurch Report ignores. What is to be the limit, if any, to this self-prostration of the brains and of the racial integrity of the nation before the ignorant, passiondriven proletariat; of this self-immolation of its spiritual forces in behalf of "an American standard of living" for the offscourings of Europe?

Some limit there must be-and is. The most resolute dreamer, when he sees his vision wrought out in action, has a way of coming to. Local denominations, forced into their own little drives for a parsonage and $1,500 a year, now know what they think of the grandiose Interchurch World committee. It is even possible that the nine clergymen, including three bishops, know what they think of themselves.

In Europe, where revolutions have a way of advancing faster and farther, the awakening from the folly of deifying the proletariat has been proportionately sudden and dramatic. The Bolshevists "expropriated the expropriators"-that was the work of a few days. According to their schedule, which was as precisely thought out in the master mind of Lenin as the German advance upon Paris, only a brief transitional dictatorship separated them from realizing the truly democratic state. But time only hardened the dictatorship, solidified it to a crushing weight of lead, while the mirage of industrial democracy sped before, into an ever more distant and hazy future. Where was the miscalculation, the gap in the programme?

Was it not in Lenin's estimate of the middle class? At first he regarded them merely as the despised and hated bourgeoisiethe bête noir of all the tribe of Karl Marx; and as such he wreaked the class struggle upon them-robbed, starved, imprisoned, enslaved and foully murdered them. "Democracy," say the Guild Socialists, "is the inexhaustible well from which the nation draws its resources, human, economic, social, spiritual. All these are comprehended in democracy, and only in democracy. It is the ground out of which fructifies the seed of national life. But in Russia, as weeks and months went by, the seed did not fructify. Far from being able to adapt industry to the changing needs of the time, organized labor in control was powerless even to keep the wheels turning. Very soon Lenin was obliged to seek out the old managerial and technical forces-such of them as had not already been starved or shot-and employed them at advanced wages. They took up their posts and presumably did what they could, for if they had held back or "struck on the job" they and those dear to them would have had short shrift. But they made no headway. The Soviet workmen, even at their old familiar tasks, shirked and malingered.

The truth in the well is easily read today, even in the mud of its bottom. In the realm of industry there is more than labor, more than capital-more than the two combined and eager to work in harmony. The belly and the members are powerless without the brain that is strong and clear-free to lead and, where need is, to rule. And so, in this third decade of the century, even the still "revolutionary" Socialists are coming to suspect, in all countries, that each class has its rights; that the old world cannot be changed for a better one except through the coöperation of all its elements; that true freedom and efficiency are to be attained only by the interplay of all the infinitely varied forces of the modern industrial state.

This is the lesson that the English Guildsmen are learning, though reluctantly and with a wry face. When they have mastered it, or when we have mastered it before them, we shall all be thinking of a reconstruction of the nation in which the National Guild will supplant the territorial State.

JOHN CORBIN.

INTERNATIONAL PUBLIC HEALTH

PROBLEMS

BY RICHARD P. STRONG, M.D.

A STUDY of the different statistics of the actual and potential loss of life due to the recent war reveals the fact that about 43 million lives have been lost to the world either directly from the war or from causes induced by it. These losses are made up of, first, approximately 13 million deaths which occurred in the military services; secondly, a surplus mortality above that which occurred in normal times in the civilian populations amounting to approximately 10 million, due to epidemic and other diseases, privation, hardship, physical exhaustion, and similar causes; and thirdly, a potential loss of 20 million lives due to the decreased birth frequency below that which occurred under normal conditions before the war. The adult male population in many European countries has been reduced by from 14 to 20 per cent. The figures of Alonzo Taylor show us that there are between 50 to 60 million people in Europe who have lost their pre-war occupations owing to the fact that the markets for their products no longer exist, having been changed or taken away from them by other countries. Many of these people have or soon will become refugees in Europe, among which class of people not only poverty and hardship, but also disease always reigns, resulting in a high increase in death rate and decrease in birth rate.

These figures and facts serve to emphasize the statement that there is perhaps no problem of an international character confronting the world today and having greater importance and magnitude in connection with the restoration of economic conditions in Europe, than that of the prevention of disease and the improvement of health in Central and Eastern Europe. Also there is perhaps no important subject concerning the League of Red Cross Societies and the League of Nations having a more