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ceeds eight hundred millions of dollars, and the disbursements for materials, taxes, transportation, wages, and other objects during one year amount to nearly the same sum. All this is exclusive of the retail trade, the sum of whose capital and outlay for wages, rent, and supplies other than liquors, exceeds a billion dollars per year. These figures far transcend ordinary comprehension, and the sudden extinction of the property and employment they represent would plainly cause financial disturbances on a scale rarely witnessed, affecting agriculture, commerce, industry, and banking throughout the land.

But even if it could be shown that this industry and the trade under it comprehend the sum total of the social and political ills from which we suffer, the confiscation of its property without compensation would lack all justification. The expropriation of the entire retail business could, of course, not be contemplated. It is a commonplace to state that the traffic in intoxicants has not only enjoyed the same legal sanction and protection as other business, but has been utilized liberally for purposes of taxation benefiting all citizens alike. No public murmur is raised against participation in this 'blood money,' and an instance is probably yet to be recorded of a prohibitionist who has refunded to the local, state, or national government his pro-rata share of the taxes levied on the trade, in order that he may not profit in any sense from the iniquitous traffic. Notwithstanding all this, the ruthless destruction of all the property involved is demanded as an act of justice—or is there a motive of retribution?

In other countries ethical principles in similar cases are followed also when there is no direct legal requirement of compensation. So far as the liquor industries themselves are concerned, there seems to be no question. France

even granted the manufacturers of absinthe compensation, and Switzerland reimbursed the growers of the plant from which the poison is distilled; Russia compensated the producers of vodka upon the abolition of the state monopoly; England expropriates ancient rights to sell liquor for a reasonable consideration; and in countries where the underlying principle has recently come up for discussion, as in Norway and Sweden, there appears to be no disagreement about the equity of compensation, even for old selling privileges. The United States stands alone, and, may we not say, in the unenviable position of being willing to derive a large part of its revenue for state and Federal purposes from the liquor traffic, in long years representing billions of dollars, but ready to destroy by vote the creature of its own protection and profit without a cent in return. The might is there, also the 'legal' right, but where the justice? If the principle of confiscation without compensation be generally defensible, we might, as the next step, at the behest of Anti-Tobacco leagues prohibit the growing, manufacture, and sale of tobacco, which also form an important item of revenue to the Federal government, and let those made to suffer bear their own losses.

V

The final element in considering the relation of prohibition to government is how its non-enforcement affects the public mind. The introduction to the first volume published by the Committee of Fifty sketches this aspect of the situation as follows:

"There have been concomitant evils of prohibitory legislation. The efforts to enforce it during forty years past have had some unlooked-for effects on public respect for courts, judicial procedure, oaths, and law in general, and

for officers of the law, legislators, and public servants. The public have seen law defied, a whole generation of habitual law-breakers schooled in evasion and shamelessness, courts ineffective through fluctuations of policy, delays, perjuries, negligences, and other miscarriages of justice, officers of the law double-faced and mercenary, legislators timid and insincere, candidates for office hypocritical and truckling, and office-holders unfaithful to pledges and to reasonable public expectation. Through an agitation which has always had a moral end, these immoralities have been developed and made conspicuous.'

The day before Christmas of 1915, a news dispatch was sent broadcast over the country, stating that the saloons of Portland, Maine, had been closed by the chief of police. No surprise was expressed that such institutions should still exist after sixty years of prohibition; nor was it intimated that they would be suppressed for good and all. Only two questions were asked: first, when will the dealers open again? and second, the more significant of the two, what is the political move behind the order to close? This instance is commonplace enough, but it illustrates abundantly the demoralization that seizes upon society at large when it tolerates such conditions.

A community whose public policy centres about the question whether prohibition shall be enforced loses its political sanity. The sense of right becomes warped when habitually in elections the fitness of a candidate is measured by his stand in relation to enforcement; and schooling in evasion and hypocrisy becomes an equipment for public affairs. Disrespect for public service, all too frequent in American life, augments ten-fold, and low standards are taken for granted.

High-minded individuals may writhe

helplessly under such a condition; the political parties do not heed it as they jockey for position. But a party creed declaring absolute loyalty to a law while totally indifferent to its violation in letter as well as in spirit, is no choicer than the party creed definitely opposed to the same law or actively aiding its evasion. When enforcement is made a constant issue, the influence upon the public is bad enough; but when complete apathy settles upon a community, or the patrol wagon makes an occasional trip in search of revenue merely, decent respect for the government has ceased. A prominent publicist and investigator said to the writer that he had remained a steadfast prohibitionist for many years until he lived for a while in a prohibition state and observed the corroding effect on the public mind that is dominated in all its relations to government by the consideration whether fundamental and statutory laws shall be honored.

Gravely we are told to make light of such disquieting symptoms, to discount the aberrations of the zealots who really mean to vindicate pure government although their actions may seem to belie it. For when the sun of national prohibition rises it will melt away all the impure ice that encrusts sumptuary law unenforced; its rays will make virtue spring up in the habitation of vice, dissolve all hostile opposition, and cause personal and civic morality to flourish in barren places. Does the picture allure by its verisimilitude, or shall we face the pitiless facts?

What the future may hold in store we can only forecast from the present, and so far, unfortunately, the promises of prohibition have far outstripped performance. Some day, no doubt, society will be ready for measurement by new standards; but until then progress is not made by adding new evils to those that now burden us.

GERMAN PROPAGANDA IN THE UNITED STATES

I

BY GUSTAVUS OHLINGER

"THE power of the Parthians was not so formidable as German liberty,' exclaims the greatest of Roman historians in concluding his description of the Teutonic nations. A semi-nomadic people, organized by tribes and communities under leaders chosen for their birth, popularity, and military prowess; living in scattered dwellings, for they despised cities and would not allow a continuity of houses; honoring the virtue of their women; recognizing as law their inherited customs, which were binding upon kings and freemen alike; trying offenders before members of the tribe; deciding important matters and enacting laws for their princes in the public assembly where not even kings were permitted to command, but only to persuade; jealous of their personal independence to the extent of laxity in their attendance, for too great punctuality might savor of servility; carrying their weapons wherever they went, for arms were the badge of liberty and citizenship; accompanied in their wars by their women and children, the darling witnesses of their conduct and the applauders of their valor - such were the people who, even when defeated, shook the Roman power. 'We have triumphed,' says Tacitus, 'and Germany is still unconquered.'

The successive bands of Jutes, Saxons, and Angles, who overwhelmed Britain in the fifth and sixth centuries, brought with them this Germanic inheritance. Nowhere else was the bar

barian conquest so thorough. The Roman provincials were all but exterminated, Roman civilization obliterated. Nor did Rome ever succeed, as on the continent, in casting the spell of her political, religious, or intellectual empire over these conquerors. English history - which in its broad aspects includes the history of the American people—begins with the Anglo-Saxon conquest, and throughout its course is essentially the record of the struggle, at times against foreign or reactionary kings, at other times against particular interests, for the preservation and development of the institutions and ideals which so profoundly impressed the Roman historians. The Germanic assembly became the prototype of the Witenagemot; the Witenagemot, after a long struggle with the Norman kings, emerged as the Parliament, and on this side of the Atlantic came to be known as Congress and State Legislature. The right of the people to choose the sovereign was vindicated by the Bill of Rights, and again by the Act of Settlement which brought the Hanoverian kings to England. From the conception of law as the growth of the free customs of the people developed the great body of the English Common Law, a law supreme over sovereign as well as subject, which Anglo-Saxons have carried as a treasured inheritance into every part of the world, and which they have made the basic law of most of the American commonwealths. The self-reliant warriors of Tacitus are reflected in the constitutional amend

ment declaring that the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed; the intense individualism which he described finds expression in the guaranties of religious freedom, or freedom of speech and of the press, of the right to assemble and petition, of security of life, liberty and property, and of many other rights, which have been claimed, reaffirmed, and emphasized in a long line of charters and declarations extending from Magna Carta to the Fifteenth Amendment. While repudiating the divine right of kings, the Anglo-Saxon people have steadily aimed to realize the divine right of man.

To this history the kindred people who remained in the ancestral home on the banks of the Rhine, the Elbe, and in Schleswig offer no parallel. In fact, the direction of their development diverged sharply from the time when the progenitors of the modern AngloSaxons took their departure. They settled largely among the Roman provincials. The invaders brought with them their native law, the Romans remained subject, as before, to the Corpus Juris. The influence of the Church was such as gradually to efface the memory of Germanic institutions. Charlemagne, whom Germans to-day are proud to hail as the first Kaiser, well-nigh exterminated the Saxon tribes who dwelt between the Rhine and the Elbe, and overthrew the Irmensäule said by some to commemorate the victory of Arminius over Varus. The Holy Roman Empire drew the Germanic races more and more under the spell of the ancient civilization. During the Hohenstaufen rule Roman law gained the ascendancy. In making the sovereign the source of law, and in placing him above the law, in inculcating an attitude of subjection and respect for prerogative, it offered advantages which the princes were glad to appropriate,

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and in 1495 it was formally adopted as the law of the Empire. Long before this the tribal organization had given way to the feudal system, and, as the power of the Emperors grew weaker in the struggle with the Papacy, the nobles seized upon every prerogative which the successors of the Cæsars lost. By the Peace of Westphalia most of them gained the formal recognition of their territorial independence and sovereignty, and to these were added a swarm of knights of the Empire who exercised a more or less capricious lordship over the peasantry, the villagers, and the despised Jews. In the twelfth century the Germans pushed across the Elbe, and farther to the East the Teutonic Order established its military supremacy over the heathen, nonGerman Prussians.

In all this territory, comprising two fifths of modern Germany, there was a mingling of Germanic and Slavic blood which may account, partly, for the special apathy of Prussians toward Germanic ideals of freedom. By the end of the eighteenth century the habit of subjection had become fixed. The lords of Hesse-Cassel, Brunswick, and HesseHanau complacently drove a bargain in human chattels with George IIIhimself by descent, inheritance, and every instinct a German princeling and sent twenty-nine thousand of their subjects to subjugate the American colonies. The work of the Peoples' Parliament in Prussia was frustrated by the refusal of the King to recognize his subjects in the preamble of the proposed constitution, and the members were forcibly dispersed. The Frankfurt Parliament drafted an imperial constitution, including in it a Bill of Rights, offered the German crown to the Prussian King, and as a reward was hounded into obloquy. In ignominy ended these feeble efforts of the German people to accomplish something

politically for themselves. The future developments were the work of the princes, and resulted in giving to Prussia a sham constitution, and in bestowing upon the Empire an organic law which, while it carefully prescribed the model for military uniforms, overlooked rights of person and of property, and provided an appointive federal council which, under the scheme arranged, can nullify every act of the lower house.

Under this régime the Germanic birth-right of independence and individual initiative has been contentedly bartered away for workmen's pensions

d insurance, and for petty employment in a widely ramified bureaucracy, until the ancient spirit of the race finds only a hollow mockery in the action of the Social Democrats, who leave the Reichstag in a body when the cheers for the Emperor are announced. The rights of man have vanished before the divine right of the State, and the divine right of the State is personified in the King and Emperor.

Let this not be understood as a glorification of Anglo-Saxon democracy, for that is still in the making. Though we have liberty, we have not yet learned to curb the abuse of liberty by the cunning, nor the misuse of it by the incompetent. Nor is it the intention of this article to disparage the great work of German philosophers, poets, artists, scientists, and musicians, or even the products of present-day German materialism. The outstanding fact is that, having from a common origin reached these opposite extremes of political development, no nations had more to learn from each other than had the Anglo-Saxon nations-England and the United States-and Germany.

The dying Faust sees his highest ideals realized on a free soil and among a free people:

Freedom alone he earns as well as life
Who day by day must conquer them anew.

The political apostasy of the German people and the eclectic attitude of the American mind made sympathetic intercourse mutually desirable, and in no way could American citizens of German birth have better served both their native and their adoptive lands than by mediating between the distinctive habits of thought which they presented. To do this required complete sympathy with our institutions, an understanding of American history, and an appreciation of the political inheritance which came to us through England. As natural heirs to the best that the Fatherland has produced in culture and in human character, and as the legatees of Anglo-Saxon freedom, it was their high privilege to reunite through mutual understanding the long-separated branches of the Germanic family. This was the mission of the German element in the United States.

II

The incentive which brought the Pilgrims to New England also inspired the German immigrations of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In 1677 William Penn visited the Pietists of Frankfurt-on-the-Main. The desire to escape the persecutions of the state church led to the settlement by members of this sect of Germantown, Pennsylvania, in 1683. Other sects the Moravians, Mennonites, Lutherans, Dunkers - followed. The same ideal was the impelling motive for allfreedom to worship after the dictates of their own consciences. They were quickly converted to the political thinking of their Anglo-Saxon neighbors and bore an honorable part in the Revolutionary War. They and their descendants became Americans in every sense of the word.

The high tides of German immigration during the first seventy years of

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