statesmen to make a restatement of war aims " and " Colonel House joined with Maklakoff in this request," having already "impressed upon all leaders President Wilson's view that a joint, frank and full statement of exactly what the Allies are fighting for would be a military measure of supreme importance," but the Council adhered strictly to the limitation fixed by Secretary Lansing and "postponed the war aims discussion,"-a fortunate decision, to our mind, in view of the fact that since then the President himself has outlined the great purposes of the war so much better than the Council could possibly have done that comparison would be invidious.

Mr. Crosby, Secretary McAdoo's most capable assistant, we understand, is to remain in London, as he should, and as we wish Mr. Bainbridge Colby, the most observant and imaginative member of the Mission might; but the others will soon be home and we shall be glad to hear what they have to say to our suspicion of last month that our Allies propose to accept our essential aid without according us directive participation-a programme which, we declare flatly, as the Jacksonian Democrat of Tennessee remarked of infant damnation, “ the people won't stand for."

Pending their arrival, it is but fair to assume that, unless it should transpire that Colonel House, while in London, secretly connived at Lord Lansdowne's hurling of a monkey wrench into the political machinery at a most inopportune moment, no harm can result from the pilgrimage; and, of course, much good may ensue. Let us hope so.

Meanwhile, may not this beginning of our most crucial year be regarded as a fitting time to revive the famous shibboleth of the Democratic text-book of 1914:

"War in the East," our war now.

"Peace in the West,"-Mexico notwithstanding.

"Thank God for Wilson," with his Scotch-Irish, Amer

ican Presbyterian heel rooted in the ground.

Make it so!

ARE WE TO HAVE A BENEVOLENT

DESPOTISM?

THE question may be asked in all seriousness: Are we, as a by-product of the war, to have a benevolent despotism? .

There is a familiar saying, that that is the best possible form of government; the truth of which we do not concede, though we cite it for reminder's sake. There is also a strong tradition in favor of such a system in war, as Macaulay makes the Elder Consul," an aged man and wise," remind the Conscript Fathers; and it is upon that principle that we have invested the President, and under and through him various Boards and Commissioners, with extraordinary and autocratic powers, and that we have acquiesced in and even applauded such dictatorial acts as never before would have been tolerated for a moment. In the Civil War the National Government was charged-chiefly by Copperheads, the People's Council and Pacifists of that time with violating the constitutional rights of the people. But its most extreme measures were mild and trifling compared with what is now being done every day without demur, or comment— save from a few Bolshevik Pacifists, the Copperheads of this time. In the crucial days of John Adams's administration, Alien and Sedition laws were enacted which then were, and ever since have been, regarded as odiously oppressive and dangerous to liberty. Yet they were innocuous by the side of what is now in force; to which all the people, save the Bolsheviki, say, Amen!.

Now, we are not protesting against these things. On the contrary, we heartily approve them. We invoke the strictest enforcement of these laws, strenuous as they are; and if we were to offer any criticism it would probably be, that some of the laws are not strenuous enough, and that they were not enacted, or being enacted were not enforced, as promptly and as unsparingly as they should have been. We try to be cool and self-restrained, but we confess that it filled us with indignation to see enemy aliens left free to prowl at will around our docks and shipping and munitions plants and elsewhere, and then to hear of important information being betrayed to the enemy, and of fires on ships and explosions in factories. "A little more grape, Captain Bragg!" said a General who knew his business, at a decisive moment. A little "shooting at sunrise" would have rid us of a few German spies, and would have saved many good American lives.

We are not discussing, however, the propriety of dictatorial war measures. The question of interest, which it is by no means too early even now to raise, is the extent to which

the system thus established in war will be retained and perpetuated after the return of peace. We do not mean that there is any danger of its arbitrary and forcible retention, its imposition upon the people against their will. That is simply unthinkable. But will the results of this war-time dictatorship be so beneficient, and so manifestly applicable to times of peace, that the nation will desire its retention? Frankly, while we wish for the greatest possible success and beneficence of the war measures, as war measures, we most earnestly hope that there will be no desire, and no occasion for a desire, for their retention after the war. But we serve notice here and now that it rests with the American people to determine whether that shall be the case or not, and that if they do not want both a desire and a demand for the "benevolent despotism" to arise, they had better bestir themselves to head off such a calamity.

The whole question turns upon the point of efficiency. We have learned, or we are learning quite rapidly, the need of such efficiency as before the war we never so much as dreamed of. We are attaining such efficiency, and are going to attain it in a very high degree. And having attained it, we shall, let us devoutly trust, insist upon retaining it. But how? Must it be kept by the same methods by which it was won? If the dictatorship teaches us efficiency, must we retain the teacher in order to keep up the practice of the lesson?

Here is an example: Before the war we did a tremendous lot of talking about rehabilitation of the American commercial marine, but we did very little actual rehabilitating. The war-our entry into it-brought things to a crisis, and the Government jumped in as the autocrat, dictator, despot, of the shipping world. The result is that our commercial marine is being rehabilitated by the proverbial leaps and bounds, and at the end of the war may be the biggest in the world. Now, in order to maintain that marine, will it be necessary for the Government to continue in ownership and control, or will private enterprise prove sufficient to keep it going at the standard which the Government shall have set?

Another case: The railroads. They have been so monkeyed with and whipsawed that we don't wonder at their not having exhibited a super-millennial degree of perfection; though in the circumstances we think that they have done amazingly well. But, see: A little while ago, for the sup

positious sake of efficiency, the Government insisted upon unscrambling" them. All" pools" and combinations were broken up. Systems were dissolved. No two roads within a hundred and eighty degrees of latitude or longitude of each other were permitted to be under the same management or to be managed in concert. The result was—well, never mind. But, anyway, under the stress of war and its requirements of the most efficient transportation, the Government was quickly led to contemplate the very extensive scrambling" of the roads, and the "pooling" of them on a scale never before attempted by even the most daring Napoleon of Finance." Of course, the Government purposed itself to be the boss of the "pool." Now, suppose that the pooling of the railroads proves to be undeniably in the interest of efficiency and economy, as we have no doubt it will, what next? After the war, are we going back to the old futile methods and inefficiency? If not, and we don't think we are, how will the war-time efficiency be maintained? By perpetuating the Government-controlled pool? Or by letting private management maintain a rational degree of pooling?

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We might raise similar questions concerning other matters the control of the wheat market, food conservation, the coal supply, and what not. The Government is taking hold of them all, like a benevolent despot, for our good. More power to it! What we want now is to win this war, no matter how many pet theories of political economy are laid upon the shelf. It is to be hoped that the people will not only acquiesce in but also will loyally and energetically co-operate in the new system, until that end is gained. But it is with equal earnestness to be hoped that both Government and people will regard these extraordinary measures as war measures, which ought to lapse with the war and to be replaced with a private control which will be just as honest, just as economical and just as efficient as that of the Government. We should regard it as stultifying to say that that is impossible. We do not believe that there is any such virtue in a name or a system as to make it possible for men associated in a "government" to do things which it is impossible for men associated in "business" to do.

Two things are necessary to relieve us of the necessity of continuing a benevolent despotism. One is, for business men to recognize, to accept and to practice the lessons which the

Government is presenting to them. They must act upon the principle that whatever the Government can do, they can do; and that in the new era which we are entering it is necessary for them to do it, if they are to remain in business at all. The other is, for the Government to give them a fair chance to do this. It would be intolerable for the Government to handicap any industry with vexatious conditions until its efficiency was badly impaired, and then take control of it itself and, by abolishing those vexatious conditions, make easy its restoration to efficiency, and then make that a pretext for perpetuating its control. Men and corporations must have the same chance to succeed that the Government has; the same freedom from hampering and oppressive conditions.

We confess to cherishing old-fashioned individualistic notions to so great a degree that we prefer a Government which confines itself to governing, to one which undertakes to run all the businesses of the land. It is, in our view, the province of the Government to see to it that businesses are conducted honestly, and in a way compatible with good morals and the public welfare. Within such limits and under such control, business is best left to private initiative. But the Government must set bounds and fix rules within which business success will be possible, and business men must learn that success is possible within those bounds. It will be one of the greatest of all the by-products of the war to have both those lessons so fully learned that with the return of peace we shall return from Government administration to private management without the slightest impairment of efficiency or integrity. It can be done, of course.

RODIN

So dizzying is the speed with which new conceptions in art, new æsthetic movements, succeed each other in our febrile age, that he who today makes kindling-wood of the sacrosanct structure of tradition, tomorrow finds himself sorrowfully collecting the disrupted timbers of his own once revolutionary edifice, whilst the younger generation contemptuously turns its back upon him as a mere architect of reaction. Thus today the young lions of art dismiss Claude Monet, that once distrusted iconoclast, as what our French allies call "old hat "; even among the Ladies' ArtStudy Clubs of Ohio and Nebraska, Monet is doubtless