tion. The experience of the first year of government control did not realize his dreams, and his views have undergone considerable revision. He may accept it as a permanent good, but he has not yet done so.

Probably no one subject is so near to his heart as the price of land. His business ideals have been based on the soil. With decreased income there may be a falling off in the market for the homestead. In the opinion of financial experts in the West, this is unlikely. With the growing population and the virtual limitation of fertile soil, they see a constant figure for the producing farm. They recall that Illinois and Indiana land-values rose steadily long before the war, and the farther plains states are not yet at a point where they are likely to be injured materially by such change in crop-values as is probable in the next few years. Except for the possibility of a continued series of short crops, or a panic, land is to-day the most staple article in America.

If the government develops a plan for colonization of returned soldiers on semi-arid or yet unploughed lands, as a method of starting hundreds of thousands in home-making, it will add to productivity; but that process is certain to require several years before any material results are accomplished. The Western states, however, welcome the movement, realizing that great results are possible provided the plan is carefully and scientifically systematized.

In a broader sense, the Middle West is facing some matters that must be settled calmly when the war-exaltation has passed. In education the decision as to military training must be made. Already the Western commonwealths are discussing it as a matter of the immediate future. Primarily the farming classes are unimpressed with the arguments for anything that may be twisted toward militarism. They are no less so

now than before we entered the war. The experiences of the past two years have by no means convinced them. Admitting the physical advantages, they hold yet a fundamental objection to the idea. Indications are that the support for the idea must come from other than the rural communities and it is not beyond probability that these will make their opinion felt strongly when the matter comes to a test.

The direction of legislation is certain to be affected by the history of the past four years. The acceptance of the big way of doing things, the awakening of ability to finance great charities, bond issues, and community efforts, have given impetus to plans for the future. On the one hand will be a hesitant note coming out of the decreased income probable; and on the other, the recognition of needs before the growing states. Equal suffrage will be universal in the West in a short time, and the women are by no means sitting idly by where they have the new privilege. They are demanding laws that make for social justice, and will obtain them. Prohibition is bringing new taxation programmes, and the inequalities of taxation methods are being recognized. The Non-Partisan League, with North Dakota firmly in hand, is planning to bond the state for state-owned flouring mills, packing-houses, storage-plants, warehouses, and other industrial concerns a socialistic programme that is a marked feature of its propaganda. It has adopted the single tax. If the farmer sees his own products bringing less in the market, is it not possible that he will visit the cause on economic inequalities, and seek through some system of communism to correct what he conceives as injustice? This is not a mere hazard it is to-day a very real factor in the peace programme of legislation. The war taught the lesson of thinking in large figures, and of doing

things in a colossal way, and the idea that the same process will apply to peace is likely to bring experiments that would not have been considered a half-decade ago.

In many ways a rural community is exceedingly sensitive to financial changes. The country merchant sees his trade vary from month to month as weather, road-conditions, or public interest in a crisis may dictate. So business in the West will feel sharply the first modification of price-levels, and their start on the down grade to a normal status. It will require some careful guiding to negotiate the road, on the part both of the banks and of the merchants. Undoubtedly, too, many producers have reached the mental attitude that assures them that present values are needed for successful business operations. They are going to be disappointed when changes occur, and may for a time, until the readjustment is complete, find much over which to become anxious. As they pass through this period, those whose task it is to finance them and wait on their needs, will have plenty to do making plans that will fit the altered situation.

That a widespread dissatisfaction with the basic law of many commonwealths exists is evident from the agitation for new constitutions. In a number of states constitutional conventions will be held within the year; others are preparing to secure such. Better financial systems especially are demanded, because of the steadily increased taxes without proportionate advantages. The application of the commission form of government to counties is advocated widely as one needed reform; budget systems, a greater solidarity of manage

ment, and fewer boards and commissions are asked. With the return of the men who have been seeing what the world beyond our shores is like, and have gained a cosmopolitan experience in their army life, systematic government will receive a strong backing.

In other words, the Middle West is in a mood to 'clean house' at the end of the uprooting of conventions by the exigencies of war, and it need not be surprising if it is done thoroughly. The idea has been slumbering for two decades; it had an evanescent outcropping in the nineties; it showed itself again in the Progressive Party movement. Now the new order may easily come into its own, because so much that was accepted as established has been swept away.

As the Middle West feels its way back to a settled state, it acts with a self-confidence never before felt. Not only has it, during the past four years, accumulated a financial basis for its progress, a reserve that will carry it over temporary reverses, but it has learned lessons of organization most valuable to its progress.

As the hilarious celebration of the signing of the armistice was filling the air of a Mid-Western town with shouts and cheers and music, a group of farmers stood watching the parades.

'Now what will happen to our farm prosperity?' asked one.

'Look over there,' was the answer from an old-timer. A long freight train was puffing its way across the prairie eastward. "That is the answer. We are the granary and the meat market of the world. While the sun shines and the rain falls, the West will always prosper.'

I. THE MARTYRED LANDS

THE evolution of mankind toward a régime of justice and liberty could be accomplished only at the cost of much bloodshed. It was inevitable that men who were devoted to the principle of respect for individuals, creeds, and property, should clash with those elements of force and violence which assumed to impose their domination, with the sole aim of gratifying their desires and instincts.

The age-long struggle between the peoples devoted to these opposed doctrines has thrice been fought out in Northeastern France. Was it not on the banks of the Marne, between the cities to-day known as Sens and Troyes, that the battles took place, in which the Roman general Aëtius, aided by Theodoric King of the Visigoths, by Merwig and his Franks, by Gondicaire and his Burgundians, fought against the devastator Attila, who heaped up ruins under his horse's hoofs?

The Allies delivered Western Europe from this scourge, who claimed to be the messenger of God, on the Catalonian Fields, where 160,000 men lost their lives in a terrible battle. It was on this same ground, united in the same spirit of independence and liberty of the peoples, in July and August, 1918, that Americans, English, Belgians, Italians, and French, united in a common cult of independence and liberty, put to rout the red-handed Kaiser and his son, who prided themselves on spreading terror and creating havoc wherever they pass

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ed. Once more, hundreds of thousands of men have purchased with their lives their liberation; once more, thousands of villages have been plundered and burned down, and women, young girls, and children have died of hunger, terror, and shame, because of one cruel man's dream of establishing his domination by might in defiance of right.

When, in 1793 and 1794, Republican France had to defend herself against the coalition of European monarchies, it was in the north, at Wattignies, and again, beyond Charleroi, at Fleurus and at Tourcoing, that the Republican armies delivered France and completed the work of the conquerors of Valmy and Jemmappes.

The contests of 1792, 1793, and 1794, which were fought in the Argonne and in the north of France, left much ruin behind. But the devastation was not systematic. The country suffered because it was the main theatre of the struggle in defense of liberty and republican principles; but it had no experience of the complete destruction of dwellings and factories, the carrying off by force of young girls and men in contravention of all the precepts of the law of nations.

It was in 1914, and during the following years, that the soil which had witnessed heroic struggles sustained for centuries against the partisans of force organized to oppress the free peoples, suffered the worst outrages, and the maximum of cruelty.

It is hard for those who do not know the rôle which the north and the east played in the material existence of

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France to understand why the Germans devoted themselves to this business of unnecessary destruction and massacre. On the other hand, the motive of the destruction is manifest when one learns by statistics the importance in the national economy of the occupied and devastated territories.

To blot out those prosperous and productive districts of the north and east of France was in the eyes of the Germans, in 1914, to make all resistance impossible, because the principal centres of production of metals and coal, indispensable for carrying on the war, were in the departments of the Nord, of the Ardennes, and of Meurthe-et-Moselle. They were protected by no defensive works, for Belgium, whose neutrality had been guaranteed by treaties signed by Germany, seemed to shelter the northern frontier from invasion from that direction.

When Germany saw that, despite the occupation of Northern France, the military resistance continued, and that the ingenuity of the national character, supplemented by importations of raw materials, especially from the United States, was prolonging the war, she decided to destroy systematically the agriculture and industry of Flanders and of Eastern France. She knew that by carrying out this barbarous plan, she would deprive France of all possibility of exportation for many years. Whatever the military result of the conflict, she would have won an economic victory. And that was the thing which was important to her.

II. THE IMPORTANCE OF THE OCCUPIED TERRITORIES IN THE ECONOMIC STATUS OF FRANCE

The departments of the Nord, of the Pas de Calais, of the Aisne, of the Ardennes, of the Marne, and of Meurtheet-Moselle, which suffered most from

the German occupation and from the fighting, are among the most productive, because of the variety and extent of their products. In these districts the earth beneath the surface is no less rich than the soil itself. In the departments of the Nord and of the Pas de Calais alone there were, in the former 22 concessions, in the latter 27, for coal-mines; and of a total production of 41,000,000 tons, in 1913, the Pas de Calais alone supplied 20,000,000. Paris received a great part of the coal required for its industrial and domestic needs from the Department of the Nord, which produced, annually, 27,000,000 tons.

Seventy-eight per cent of the total output of coke came also from these two departments.

The great centres of production of iron ore also were occupied by the enemy. The veins of the Moselle represented 90.6 per cent of the whole of the French output; and 85 per cent of all the cast-iron produced in France came from the departments of Meurthe-etMoselle, the Nord, and the Pas de Calais. These same departments sold yearly 62 per cent of the pig iron manufactured in the whole country and 56 per cent of the finished products of the same material.

By hammering to pieces the blastfurnaces within range of their artillery, and by carrying away the tool-making machinery from the factories of the Lille district, the occupying forces deprived French industry of almost the whole of its means of large-scale production.

Indeed, to whatever branches, either of agriculture or of industry, we turn our attention, we find that these northern and eastern districts stood in the very front rank in production, in cultivation, and in a very great variety of manufactures.

For instance, 59.26 per cent of the hops crop was gathered in the Department of the Nord. The beets for distill

ing raised in that department, and in the Pas de Calais and the Oise, made up 62 per cent of the whole French crop, and their distilleries produced more than 65 per cent of the industrial alcohol used in France.

The departments of the Aisne, the Pas de Calais, the Somme, the Nord, the Oise, and the Marne furnished 80 per cent of the crop of sugar-beets.

The greatest yield of wheat and oats was obtained from the fields of Santerre and in the Department of the Nord. Grazing land also was very abundant there. The two departments of the Pas de Calais and the Nord supplied one tenth of all the butter sold in France. There were 297,000 head of cattle in the Nord, and 245,000 in the Pas de Calais.

It would be easy to give more figures, which would place the Nord in the foremost rank in the production of flax, and also of coffee-chicory, which grew only in the districts occupied by the enemy.

This exceptional fertility of the soil helps us to understand how, in ordinary times, before the war, a population of three millions was able to live comfortably in the two departments of the Nord and the Pas de Calais. Large families were not rare. They found remunerative occupation in agricultural labor, in the mines, and in the many different industries of the region. No other depart ment was nearly so densely populated as the Nord. While in the whole of France the average density to the square kilometre was 73, there it was 339.

The preparation of wool used for weaving, its transformation, and the same processes with flax, kept thousands of people employed. Roubaix had become the first town in the world for wool-combing.

III. THE SYSTEMATIC DEVASTATION

The absence of any military protection, in a region bordering on a neutral

country, made it possible for the Germans to occupy the Department of the Nord, a part of the Pas de Calais, the Department of the Ardennes, and a large part of the Marne. From the last months of the year 1914, down to the glorious days following the second victory of the Marne, in 1918, the Germans remained in the most fertile and busiest districts of France.

Farther to the east they occupied part of the Department of Meurtheet-Moselle, and had the most important factories within the range of their artillery.

How did they treat persons and property? The story has been told, and with abundant evidence to support it. They scorned all the rules of the law of nations which mankind prided itself upon having adopted. The doctrine of force, and its consequences, were the only rule of conduct of the conquerors.

The population was subjected to the most cruel harassments. Numerous summary executions on the most absurd pretexts, arrests and deportations of individuals, either to Germany, there to work in munition factories, or to the battle-lines, where they compelled children and young men to dig and construct offensive works against their brethren these have been perpetrated so often and to such an extent that it can fairly be said that these barbarities have done woeful injury to all mankind.

But their most brutal crime was when they deported women and young girls from the cities of the north to Belgium and Germany. We may well wonder how it is possible that a people which called itself civilized could commit such a crime. It would continue to be incomprehensible were it not part of the deliberate scheme of devastation of the industrial districts of the north.

Economists know that certain industries, like weaving and mining, can be