commentary for the German people on the 'peace of violence,' in the form of question and answer, like the Catechism. Pupils are conducted through a quasi-ambulatory course illustrated by a mass of pictures, engravings, and diagrams showing the consequences of the Treaty of Versailles to Germany. One picture represents the Empire as a slave loaded with chains. Is it necessary to state that the statistics given are incorrect? This is so evident that Vorwärts itself had to demur, remarking: 'We protest against the continued scandalous distribution of the tract called Germany and the Treaty of Peace, which pupils in schools are expected to study in school hours that should be devoted to regular instruction. The figures of the statistics given in this pamphlet have been juggled in a very unfair manner. The League of Nations is represented as a band of brigands, and the addresses in the tract amount to a direct incitation to a new war.'

In all the schools may be found histories such as A German History for Schools, which declares, on page 230, that France is responsible for the war, and that French airplanes bombarded German railways before the declaration of war. And this in spite of the fact that the German ambassador at Paris himself asserted the falsity of this charge. The German school authorities know well that a lie, if repeated often enough, becomes the truth in the brain of a child.

Nearly all such manuals are full of this spirit. In a reader for the third grade by Lirman (Fourteenth edition, 1921), used in all the nonclassical schools, we find imaginative passages like the following:

1870

I hear a rushing and roaring out of the past, the voice of a lost grandeur, and I listen spellbound. Half a century has

passed since then. In the Vosges, crowned with forests, the German eagle spreads his wings, for our old Rhine has once more become a German stream. How everything is changed!

The Gallic hordes sully the sacred soil of Germany. They have not vanquished us ously disarmed by these foreign scoundrels. in knightly battle; we have been treacherThe Cathedral of Strassburg no longer belongs to the Germans, and the rascals of Frenchmen water their horses in the German stream. But what has been taken from us, what we have suffered, is of little import. Days will come like those of old when our glorious fathers, filled with noble courage, proudly bore the German standards into Paris itself, where they decked the monuments and walls with garlands and banners, and tore to shreds the tricolor of France!

WHAT WE LOST

We must engrave upon our hearts as upon marble these words: "That which we have lost is not lost for all time, for the soil is sacred over which the sweet and poetic German tongue has vibrated for thousands of years. Behold the forests that rise majestically to the blue sky of the Vosges; behold the fertile plains of Schleswig bounded by Königsau; behold the beautiful country of the Saar which bears in its womb the precious coal; behold the mole of Danzig lapped by the waters of the Vistula!

'Awake! Shake off thy shame and think of the day of vengeance! Let not the fire die out whose flames shall mount to heaven. Thou and thine heirs have a sacred duty to fulfill. Engrave these words in the heart of thy son: "That which we have lost must return to us again!"'

If more is needed, we may turn to another widely used school-manual by Ernst Niederhausen, whom his publisher characterizes as one of the best-known authorities in the field of education; and note the manner in which German school children learn the story of the destruction of Louvain. Under the title, "The Punishment of Louvain,' Niederhausen says:

Germany, attacked by France, England, and Russia, was obliged, in order to defend herself, to march through Belgium. She offered Belgium the incomparable advantages of her culture. But the Belgians acted toward the German soldiers in the most cruel and despicable manner. Cowering in ditches and hidden behind the trunks of trees, they shot down our soldiers without mercy. One of our unfortunate soldiers, overcome by fatigue, fell asleep in a Belgian house and was stabbed to death by the natives, either peasants or townspeople. Our wounded were mutilated or done to death with a refinement of cruelty unheard of. Influential men of this accursed country arranged ambuscades everywhere. After nightfall shots could be heard more massacres! To escape the dagger and the revolver, our men were obliged to take the houses of the town by assault, one by

one.

In all the streets of Louvain, houses where these scoundrels lived were given to the flames. The heavens, illuminated with the red light, announced to the universe how our brave soldiers, fighting for their assaulted Fatherland in an enemy country,

to fight the systematic military-like tactics of German propaganda is to oppose it with a series of counteroffenses of French facts, edited and disseminated through a well-organized

bureau.

The statements of our government officials, logical, clear, and concise as they are, are not sufficient, for the reason that may easily be called onesided. Have we in France this practical organization for the spread of propaganda, and, if not, can it be regarded as a national necessity? One may doubt it. In the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and in some of the others there are subdivisions that might have some claim to this title, but they would appear to be literary and philosophical rather than practical. The fancy of the international crowd is certainly not caught by polite arguments of this character.

against a horde of assassins.

One is horrified at the thought of what terrible results must follow in the train of such a campaign of systematic mind-poisoning among a people quite destitute of the critical faculty.

What shall be done to combat such a campaign? Trust to the innate value of honesty and decency? Or say to these people what General Bonaparte said of the Republic in its heroic days? "The French Republic is like the sun: it blinds him who does not see it!' But the sun itself can be obscured by the fogs of continued and persistent calumny. And if one does not admit the truth of Bonaparte's mot, let him recall the couplet of Beaumarchais's Basile: 'Calumny, sir-you do not know how you underrate it!'

As a matter of fact it becomes more and more apparent that the best way

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proposed certain measures to be taken in regard to the matter- such, for example, as the necessity for the Government to have at its own immediate disposition a news agency like that of Reuter, which will enable it, without waiting for the usual declaration in the Chamber, to make known its opinions and to correct misstatements; and also the necessity for some system of wireless telegraphy at the Government's own command, in order to offset the messages from Nauen that cross the Atlantic in waves of perfidy.

But, it may be asked, is there not some supreme authority or tribunal to which questions of this kind may be taken? We refer to the League of Nations. Its Council has just finished its sessions in Paris, in the course of which it examined once more the subject of disarmament, now in the

hands of a special League Committee at Geneva. But just at this point one cannot forget the conclusion to which the last assembly of the League at Geneva came, after a flood of eloquence

namely, that no material disarmament is possible without having been preceded by a moral disarmament. How can this be brought about, however, if certain nations continue to put in practice an intensive campaign of hatred?

'If hate always follows hate,' says the Japanese proverb, 'hate will be eternal.'

Undoubtedly the League of Nations must carefully avoid any appearance of posing as a super-parliament in matters which touch the basic liberties of peoples most closely, a charge already brought against it. Undoubtedly it can never attempt to control in any manner the press of any individual nation; but could it not, in regard to the disarmament question, propose, for adoption by the nations, the holding of inquiries into certain questions and the ascertaining of authoritative statistics concerning them? And could not the same thing be done in regard to moral disarmament? Does not, for example, the responsibility for what is taught in German schools rest upon the German Government?

On this point France has nothing to fear. We are quite willing to submit our history manuals for examination, for it will be found that, if anything, they are more filled with the spirit of humanity than with patriotism itself.

From the legal point of view there can be no valid objection to this plan, if only because it would be but a corollary to the question of disarmament, and also because it is provided by Articles 3 and 4 of the Covenant of the League of Nations that every question relating to the activities of

the League or affecting the peace of the world may be dealt with by the Council of the League, and that every nation not represented in the Council itself possesses the right to be represented whenever a question comes up which particularly affects it.

Who will deny that this question of a campaign of hatred affects the peace of the world to a supreme degree?

M. André Fribourg closes his book with the following consideration: 'What tends to make us despair of humanity is to contemplate the dreadful ravages that this infernal Pan-German effort has made, and is still making, among the young people of Germany.' The German Government leaders have understood how to provide themselves with an inflammable, hot-headed public opinion, capable of being roused in a moment to the point of maximum excitement, so as to be used against the enemies of the Government, whether domestic or foreign.

This consideration was the subject of a very serious statement in the British House of Commons itself: 'One of the real dangers that menace Europe is the fact that the youth of Germany may be educated and may grow up with ideas of revenge. One of the dangers, I say, is that German youth may be educated and may grow up imbued with the hope of recovering the old possessions of Germany, with the idea of punishing the victor for the defeats inflicted upon the Empire, with the idea of satisfying in a general way Germany's national pride. Yes, gentlemen, this is one of the greatest dangers of the future.'

This was the prophecy of Mr. Lloyd George no longer ago than on the seventh of February, 1922. It is the duty of the whole world to do everything in its power to prove him a false prophet.

"THE Rhine is the natural boundary of France," declared Sully in the year 1600 and again in 1610. "The Rhine is the natural boundary of France," asserted Richelieu in the years 1625 and 1635. "The Rhine is the natural boundary of France," stated Count d'Avaux in 1640 at Münster, on the sacred spot where Hermann the Cheruscan once addressed the Romans to quite different effect. "The Rhine is the natural boundary of France," was the burden of the speeches of Louvois and Colbert in the Council of Louis XIV, and repeated in verse in the antichambers by the poets Boileau and Racine. "The Rhine is the natural boundary of France," shrieked the monster on the Seine from 1790 to 1800.'

These words Ernst Moritz Arndt placed at the beginning of that famous work, The Rhine, the German Stream but Not the German Frontier, a title which speedily became the political creed of a whole people.

Very seldom has it been possible to draw so clear a historical line through the centuries as in the case of the continental policy of France, the latest expression of which we see to-day on the Rhine and in the Ruhr. The motive force that was at work a hundred, three hundred, yes, four hundred years ago, is still alive in France. New forces, especially of an economic nature, may have arisen, and the old ideas often remain buried more or less in the people's subconsciousness; but there are enough Frenchmen who openly

confess to being advocates of the 'School of the Peace of Westphalia.'

A desire for annexations is always denied by the French. As a matter of fact, French leaders have never regarded as an object of prime importance the annexation of German soil or of people of German blood, laying stress rather on the importance of strengthening their position in Europe, in which effort they would be greatly assisted by the possession of the left bank of the Rhine. Political strength, hegemony that has been the object of France's foreign policy ever since the consolidation of the French tribes into a nation. This was the policy to be served by the shibboleth of the 'Rhine frontier,' as well as the traditional encouragement of decentralizing tendencies in Germany, the small-state 'liberties,' the libertés germaniques, of particularism and federalism, of every element in fact that tended to weaken the central power and the real federalization of Germany.

When, some eighty years ago, the Rhine question brought the two peoples to such a state of excitement, resulting incidentally in Becker's famous 'Wacht am Rhein,' there were many voices raised on the French side, among them that of the Socialist Louis Blanc, who said: "The question of the Rhine for France is not one of extending her territory, but one of national defense.'

As to-day, so in those days doubtless such words rang with a semblance of plausibility in the ears of many peaceloving Frenchmen. But from the

national standpoint the defense plea was nothing but hypocrisy. In the year of grace 1843, the French monarchy certainly needed no defensive frontier against the wretched German Confederation.

As a matter of fact, as every serious statesman must know, a stream cannot be regarded as a defensive boundary, like a mountain range for example, the Vosges. The Rhine offers hardly more than advanced bases for attack, and even this advantage is more political than military.

In speaking of the Rhine in French hands, Arndt, in the book we have mentioned above, very pointedly says, 'It is a knee bent forward so that, whenever France wills, it can set upon Germany's neck to strangle her.'

Was it really only for defensive purposes that the French conquered and annexed Metz in the sixteenth century, Alsace with Strassburg in the seventeenth, Lorraine and Landau in the eighteenth, and all the rest of the left bank of the Rhine at the time of the Revolution? Their own historian, Camille Rousset, probably came nearer the truth when he pronounced the following indictment in his book about the Minister Louvois:

...

'No people on earth since the Romans has given proof of such lust for conquest as ours. Right or wrong, reasonable or foolish, fruitful or wasteful, it made little difference. . . . The opinion of the inhabitants of the countries to be conquered concerning the conqueror and his intentions worried us very little, because we had no doubt that people would be proud to belong to the French nation.'

The French 'School of the Peace of Westphalia' was in so far a modest title, as the historical line of its policy might have been followed somewhat further back. However, the occupation of the Lorraine cities that took place a

hundred years earlier was expressly confirmed by the treaty of 1648, round which cluster historically the Lorraine annexations, not only those that occurred during the long war, but also the later ones that came about by means of the notorious 'reunion chambers.'

The title of this 'school' is, therefore, after all well chosen, though the idea it expresses may not appear very clearly to many Frenchmen. All the more important for us Germans to establish the fact that this idea, consciously or unconsciously, is still a factor in French foreign politics. Poincaré and Millerand tread so exactly in the footsteps of their fathers that every glance backward over the highway of French continental policy discloses a whole series of parallels with the present. A retrospect of this character was published last year by Hermann Oncken, until lately professor of history at Heidelberg, entitled The Historical Rhine Policy of the French, and the parallels in the book with the conditions existing at the present are becoming more and more startling every day.

One of the most interesting of them is seen by a consideration of how the whole Rhine policy of France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was so shaped as to push back the House of Hapsburg from the German marches of the West, from the very same motives that actuate her to-day in doing her utmost to keep Prussia away from the Rhine. Not only were the Hapsburgs of that period European rivals of the French kings, but Austria was the only powerful state in the whole Teutonic swarm of nations.

Were the Hapsburgs singled out as enemies because they threatened the security of France? Surely the good old Hapsburgs were never as dangerous as all that! They did, however, — as well as the German Empire of which