practical one. Girls no longer have any sympathy with the haughty heroine of Le Maître des Forges, who treated her engineer husband so shabbily. Today the most popular candidate for the position of husband is the industrial. Out of the twenty thousand votes more than nine thousand went to him, leaving far behind his chief rival, the scientist. A poor third was the banker. Next came the moving-picture actor, followed by the playwright and the musician. A scattering fifty yearned for singers. Verily the romantic aura of the tenor has faded, whereas the lawyers registered a thousand votes. A reaction is evidently taking place, for the gallant aviator, once the cynosure of all feminine eyes, cuts a poor figure; and it may be said in general that the glamour of the military uniform is in the descendant. No doubt the mourning-veils of innumerable widows and mothers cannot help impressing the young girls.

"The answers to the second question are no less interesting. The American woman scores a triumph, winning a vast majority of the votes cast. Is this to be interpreted as homage to the men of America who recently fought on French soil and formed many sentimental attachments, or simply as meaning that all the women of the glorious republic are supposed to be rich, even unto millions? In any case it is very likely that the American ladies chosen for imitation are those who spend large sums in the shops of Paris and pay such expensive homage to the elegance of our capital.

'After the transatlantic ladies, though at a respectful distance, it must be confessed, come the sympathetic Italians, the British being in third place. A knowledge of French women precludes any suspicion that any votes were influenced by political considerations, for these charming beings give

evidence of such profound indifference toward politics that they are the despair of the small group of French feminists. There is therefore no reason to believe that the second largest vote went to Italy in consideration of the economic agreement just entered into by the two countries!

"It is evident that the male ideal of li French women to-day is the business man who works hard and takes chances, and is ready to spend his money freely.'

WALK ON THE LEFT

WE hear little to-day of the discussion carried on in England immediately after the close of the war concerning the 'drive to the right' question. The ancient force of tradition has again prevailed. In some cities, however, notably Manchester, the attempt is being made to be consistent, and to walk, as well as drive, to the left. The experiment does not seem to be an immediate success, according to the Manchester Guardian, which says:

"Heedless of the "Safety first" warnings to walk on the left of the pavement, Manchester people are still walking on the right. Here and there you may see a policeman slowly beating up against a powerful stream of pedestrians, the only man in all those preoccupied crowds who is, so to speak, in step; but the force of his example is altogether insufficient to influence the man who is taking the same flurried way to his train that he has taken ever since he chose Prestwich or Heaton Mersey for his home.

'Yesterday Corporation workmen were still hopefully busy clamping further warnings to the lamp-posts and electric standards. All the trams were supplied with an abbreviated form of the same notice. Later in this rather leisurely campaign will come the issue

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of posters. If they also fail of their effect, an official at the Manchester = Town Hall yesterday supposed that à some more clamant form of appeal would be undertaken. He hoped, however, that the notices already hung would slowly impinge upon the public consciousness; and it is a point for those interested in crowd psychology to observe if and when, and for what precise reason, this impingement will take place.

'Will everybody suddenly and wonderfully rise one morning determined to honor the modest white-and-red notices, or will there be a day in the course of which the change will slowly work itself out, by imperceptible gradations, so that a man who leaves his house walking on the right will be surprised to find himself going home on the left? It is to be feared that the change, when it does come, will be a slow business and that there will be a stage at which the opposing streams will mingle somewhat turbulently.

"The sooner this brief turbulent period is arrived at and passed through the better, unless, as at Leicester, the Boy Scouts are to be requisitioned to march with their banners the way all good citizens should go. At Birmingham, it will be remembered, the Corporation found that warnings painted on the pavements were effectual. It would seem that it is more difficult to walk against arrows on the ground than merely to ignore a notice. Evidently some sort of example is needed before the sensible rule of the footpath is adopted in Manchester.'

'BUDGET HYSTERICS'

WISE men in Great Britain, which the Sunday Times lately described as an 'economic Bedlam,' are warning against an excess of joy over the British revenue surplus of over one hundred million

pounds, surprising though it be when it is considered that the year, judged by every commercial test, was a bad one. But the saving has been on account of underspending, and leaves little room for reduced taxation, so much desired. On this general subject the Westminster Gazette of April 5 says, under the heading 'Budget Hysterics':

'In his task of preparing the Budget Mr. Stanley Baldwin is being bombarded by the press hysterics with which we are made familiar at this time of year. His advisers seldom know the difference between the realized surplus of last year and the prospective surplus of this. They will grasp the truth when they see the actual figures. The crudest suggestion is that the surplus of last year shall be used as if it were a sum of a hundred millions in hand and could be applied to reducing taxation next year.

'What has actually happened to that surplus is that from week to week as it came to the Treasury it was used to reduce floating indebtedness. It is not in the coffers of the Treasury, but has gone into the market. The only means by which the Chancellor of the Exchequer could again recover the money is by borrowing a hundred millions. To that extent he would be guilty of inflation, with all the evil effects upon prices, wages, and the whole round of commercial transactions which inflation has. Whatever may be assumed of Mr. Stanley Baldwin, it is safe to say that he will avoid a colossal blunder of that kind.

'The two factors in creating the surplus of last year are (1) the reductions made in the expenditure that was anticipated and (2) the squeezing of the income-tax payer who was in arrears. Ninety-six millions of overdue incometax was collected. Had it not been for the pressure exercised by Somerset House the yield of the income-tax,

instead of being fifty millions more than the Budget calculation, would have been fifty millions less than that figure. That means of obtaining revenue has dried The arrears have been so up. reduced that there is practically none left to collect.

"That fact reduces enormously the amount of income-tax that can be gathered in this year, apart altogether from the fact that the tax will be collected on an average of three years two of which have been bad years. Sir Robert Horne may well be right in his calculation that eighty millions less will be received in income-tax in the next twelve months. If that is the case the prospect of any considerable surplus disappears at once.

'Sir Robert Horne and others are quite entitled to urge that a surplus should be used in cutting down taxation rather than reducing debt, but there must be a surplus before either of these courses can be taken. We believe that the Chancellor of the Exchequer will feel justified in taking the optimistic view of trade through 1923 and will budget for a surplus. That surplus, however, will be comparatively small in amount. It will certainly not allow of a tenth part of the reductions in taxation to which he is being urged.

'In these matters a Chancellor is bound to be a realist. He cannot afford to reduce taxation and find himself with a deficit at the end of the year. To do that would be to make increased taxation again necessary, and nothing could be more disastrous to the popularity of any Government. Our advice to those who are concerned about the Budget is to keep the rein upon their hopes. While the expenditure of the country remains at eight hundred millions or more, only an immense development of

our trade and industry can bring taxation down in any substantial measure.'

MINOR NOTES

THE tempo of the modern German political music may be appreciated by a study of the statistics given in the last edition of Reclam's Universum. For thirty years the course of German history was practically directed by one man - Bismarck. In the four years of the existence of the new German Republic there have been successively in office two hundred and ninety-four ministers of various kinds in the several states. Of these seventy-three were originally editors or writers, sixty-two commercial managers and secretaries, sixty-two lawyers, twenty-one merchants, sixteen metal-workers, thirteen farmers, eleven professors, six teachers, six woodworkers, six manufacturers, five innkeepers, five printers; the rest belonging to a number of other trades and professions.

This would not seem to predicate remarkable efficiency. It is interesting to remember that Spain, in the hundred years immediately preceding her war with the United States, had an average of more than one Minister of Marine every year.

THE tiny republic of San Marino has followed the example of its big brother, Italy, and become Fascist. The two new Captains Regent, elected on March 15, who will hold office for six months from April 1, are both Fascisti, and a friend of theirs, Signor Bottai, prominent among the Roman elect, pronounced the inaugural address. It will be remembered that Signor Mussolini is a Romagnole, and the politics of the Romagna have generally influenced those of San Marino.

SOLOMON Complained of all things, but if he had mentioned instances he might have dwelt upon the vanity of argument. In public and private the usual futility of abstract discussion may be observed. It arises from one weakness which does not cease to be singular because it is prevalent. Good argument is a sharp process of investigation, leading by mutual criticism to some nearer ascertainment of truth. In practice this method is as rare as it is searching. Nearly all verbal dispute, whether vocal or printed, becomes a sterile combat of assertion and counterassertion, leaving each opponent more tightly fixed in a preconceived opinion. It is a clash of flint and steel that gives the sparks without the light.

Nothing is much harder than to bring men in general to an honest comparison of relative merits and defects when they beat up their contentions. Each disputant magnifies the mote in his neighbor's eye and ignores the beam in his own. Each contrasts the best that can be said on his own side with the worst that can be said against the opposite. One puts on green spectacles, the other blue, and they hold forth about the color of life in terms of incurable contradiction.

The House of Commons in these grave times has amused itself by a debate on Socialism versus Capital. It was a stimulating exercise in itself, but threw not a particle of light on any practical problem before the country. Our difficulties threaten the common foundations of all interests alike. We

can only recover by a common national effort definitely enlisting the coöperation of all classes. Abstract talk upon the maintenance or overturn of the existing system of society is like the quarreling of men on a raft about rival theories of salvation.

The international crisis, political and economic, is still there with all its dislocation, its peril, its menace to the security of this country, and to the commercial conditions on which labor depends as much for work and wages as capital for profit. Mr. Snowden's motion on behalf of Socialism against Capital was as irrelevant to these circumstances as if it had been an argument for hymn-books against fire-engines. When we look at home, we see an epidemic of strikes threatening to paralyze the very beginnings of commercial recovery and to breed a social bitterness which will throw back trade again and again at every later sign of revival. Sir Alfred Mond's refutation of Socialism at large in its turn has no more power to allay the class struggle than have pills to cure earthquakes.

The Government was assisted by this academic diversion. The House was refreshed by a momentary relief from all those more irksome matters, urgent questions, and practical remedies with which it was elected to deal. Unionists and the Liberal groups alike were delighted to see the Labor Party- which owes so much of its fortune to that inaccurately exclusive name name-fitting the tall cap of Socialism to its own head. Ministers were delighted to give

another day, and we do not blame them. But in face of the immediate state of the country and of Europe, Parliament never presented a nearer resemblance to the Pickwick Club.

Eloquent, impressive as always, and moderate in terms, Mr. Snowden denounced the existing condition of society but offered not the vestige of a constructive suggestion for improving it. He evaded the real question which Socrates put to the young man, 'What would you do?' Any critic can indict any system. There never was a perfect system, and there never will be. There never was a method of government but it was accused of filling the butchers' shops with large blue flies. The different schools of Socialism were never so hopelessly at variance, and, in their domestic disputes, nothing could be more destructive than the criticisms they pass upon each other.

Pointing to unemployment, housing, agriculture, Mr. Snowden attributed to the fault of capitalism every evil that happens to coexist with it. He might as well maintain that the fall of Tenterden steeple was the cause of Goodwin Sands. The world was ravaged by the war and is disintegrated by the peace. All civilization has been thrown back on this side of the Atlantic by a mighty catastrophe with consequences which reduce Socialism to a puny panacea.

Capitalism was no cause of the war. What caused the war and ruined the peace were partly the ambitions of exaggerated nationalism, partly the explosions of suppressed racialism. Pride and fear, tradition and dreams, worked together to create a mass of passion and delusion. A universal disease, worst in Germany under the Hohenzollerns and in the vanished Hapsburg Empire, possessed and corrupted the imagination of whole peoples.

Nothing is falser than that materialistic interpretation of history by Karl

Marx from which modern Socialism chiefly derives. You might as well accuse capitalism of being the cause of Mohammed or the Crusades or of the hundred years and more of war which followed the Reformation, or of the Napoleonic Wars.

True or false, the spiritual and imaginative ideals sway the world. Look at Ireland. What has capitalism got to do with it? Look at the wide wreck in Bolshevist Russia. Did capitalism do that? The cause of causes before all men, now, is that of the reconciliation of peoples, the political settlement of the world, and its peace. Until the world's politics go better its economy will never go right.

Sir Alfred Mond, replying for Capital, was brilliant in the speech of his life. He, too, like Mr. Snowden, made easy work for himself. He pushed Socialism to the extreme absurdity of its theories. He pictured State-made dresses for women and State-made hats for men, controlled newspapers and the extinction of free criticism; no real freedom of enterprise; an allocation of labor that would amount to conscription the slave-system of a rigidly standardized community, ticketed, labeled, classified, and supervised from birth to death. All this is implied by any real universal Socialist régime. It would be not an advance to the millennium, but a return to the Pharaohs. Whatever the world comes to, it will never come to that. A hundred years will not bring it.

Socialism of that type is already the most old-fashioned garment in the whole wardrobe of political theories. Mr. Snowden seemed to lean toward the original dogma of 'centralized' Socialism — though he would ‘gradually' approach it by careful steps through indefinite time. This idea is moribund. It is regarded as hopelessly obsolete by the younger schools, Guilds

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