and there will be so many of these bonds in the country as to render negotiating them at anything like face value out of the question.

Many proprietors claim that there are not peasant buyers for all their land, and that the tracts taken away from them will not be used for some time. Moreover, they claim that the supply of available labor will be entirely dissipated by giving the peasants lands of their own, so that the large holders will not be able to plant even the small fraction remaining. There is the usual argument that the peasants are shiftless and lazy, and the much sounder one that the absolutely necessary animals and machinery can only be brought in with financial credits which would be well-nigh impossible to handle in small driblets.

Meanwhile, the peasants have their own grievances and complaints. It is obvious to them that there is an insufficiency of seed, of food and clothing, of animals and machinery. The government sent many horses out into the country districts during the winter to be cared for, since they would have starved in the cities (to see dead horses, mere heaps of bones through lack of nourishment, on the streets of the city of Bucarest is an everyday occurrence). The peasants supposed they were to be allowed the use of these army horses for the spring planting. Whether because of the threatening military situation, I do not know, but the government has recently ordered the return of all these horses by the peasants to the army. There is much muttering of the industrial populations of the town. Officials must grant exorbitant wage demands and wink at all sorts of thefts. The price of unloading cargoes from ships before the war was four or five lei per ton. At Galatz the workers recently went on strike for eighty.

The present government is the victim of the hopeless economic conditions as well as of its own corruption and inefficiency. With prices and conditions as they are, the present incumbents would have no hope of reelection. Marghiloman, the Anti-Russian who forboded all the

disasters of the war, was minister during the German occupation. A temporary government under General Coanda succeeded him, giving way in turn to the present "Liberal" party government. A new election was to have taken place in January, under the new universal suffrage act for old Roumania and Bessarabia. This was put off by the government until March, now until May, and will doubtless then be postponed at least until July, when the new harvest will make the situation more tolerable and the present government will have some chance of reelection. The question is, will the lid stay down that long? With wars and rumors of war, with an uncertain international situation, and the perennial possibility that the settlement will not be all that might be desired, will not some one of a dozen likely events set off the fireworks?

One well-known American traveler already rather facetiously remarked that our present American Red Cross expedition was to bolster up a rotten government and prevent a much-needed revolution. There is always the likelihood that a disturbance will be started on such a large scale that the government will disappear like a soap bubble-something like Charles the Tenth's Government of 1830, which died, to quote the old pun "of no complaint at all-everybody satisfied." Certain it is that many government people who are supporting us are doing so only because it strengthens their own hands—and will do so only in proportion as it does strengthen their hands. They wish us to place our relief stations in the politically rather than economically critical spots.

As a strenuous democrat (no party affiliation is intended), I personally object to in any way impeding the final disappearance of the feudal baron in whatever form. Yet

I recognize that some people are to be helped, in spite of the general economic situation, and the condition of the working classes which makes destitution faster than any human agency can relieve it. This is Roumania today. Every cargo of supplies which comes into the country does relieve the situation somewhat-even what is stolen. takes buyers out of the market and thus reduces prices

by reducing demand. With a grand total of about 3000 tons of supplies, we must first feed probably a hundred mouths (counting our total personnel, American and otherwise) for several months, and we shall buy much scarce merchandise in the local markets. Yet with the remainder we shall do some good. Not much, perhaps, compared with a Food Commission which can bring in 24,000 tons in a single day, but some.

The most hopeful thing I have yet seen as concerns our work is the campaign for second-hand clothing, now in progress in America, to be gathered by the Red Cross and transported by the Food Commission. This will be a truly great thing, if a few thousands of tons can be brought in. If you could only see the barefooted people in the city and in the country this raw March day, with nothing but tatters to protect them from the wet wind, you would understand what I mean.

Has this disjointed tale a moral? We Americans and Rudyard Kipling differ from Voltaire and Anatole France in supposing that there must always be a moral. If such indeed there be, it must be this: European civilization looks more like ours on the surface than it does under the shell.

AMERICANIZATION FROM THE VIEWPOINT OF

YOUNG ASIA

By Professor Benoy Kumar Sarkar, Member of National Council of Education, Bengal, India

I. THE RACE-PROBLEM OF THE NEW WORLD

To the student of economic history and sociology the immigration problem of North and South America is of profound scientific interest. For, the peopling of the New Hemisphere by the children of the Old World since the days of Columbus and the Pilgrim Fathers is but the latest stage of the same world-movement of which the previous phases are embodied in the settlement of Celtic and Roman Europe by the Franks, Goths, Vandals, Huns, Angles, and Saxons, or the still earlier colonizing of ancient Eur-Asia by the members of the Indo-Germanic (Aryan) family, viz., Greeks, Romans, Persians, Hindus, etc., or the valley of the Hwang-ho by the Scythians (Tartars) of Central Asia, the Mesopotamian Doab by the Dravidians of Southern India, and the "gift of the Nile" by the pharaonic invaders from the hills of Nubia and Eastern Africa.

The problem of race-fusion in present-day America is essentially identical with the race-problems in other ages and climes. There are, however, two significant differences. In the first place, what has been accomplished in Asia and Europe through centuries and even millenniums is being effected in America in generations, if not in decades. And in the second place, the solution of the problem is being attempted in the New World much more consciously than in the Old, thanks to the cumulative experience of humanity, and thanks to the marvelous power with which modern science has endowed mankind to conduct experiments, to forecast the future, to select the desirables, to reject the undesirables. It is this conscious and deliberate creation of new men

and women out of the old human material within the shortest possible time that imparts to the American phase of the age-long process of race-mobilizations a distinctive character; and this is the function of Americanization.

The problem may be easily stated. The New World must derive its raw flesh and blood from the Old. The object, however, is neither to relieve Europe and Asia of their over-population and poverty, nor as the idealists would assert, to afford the scum of humanity a chance to rise in the scale of civilization. These, no doubt, are the "by-products" of immigration. But first and last, the aim must be national, i.e., to serve "America first." The considerations that should count most are: first, to have an adequate supply of hands for the farms, factories, forests and mines of America; secondly, to build up communities of men and women who could enrich in diverse ways the social and intellectual make-up of American life, and last but not least, to create a body of citizens with whom loyalty to America in times of distress and war would be but a second nature. These are the foundations of the minimum program of Americanization that lies before the educators, social workers and political leaders of the United States.

II. AMERICA'S ULTIMATUM TO ASIA

So far as the Americanization of immigrants from Asia is concerned the problem has ceased to exist. The New Worlders do not want to Americanize the Asian laborers. The men, women and children of the Orient have been postulated to be "unassimilable" before anything was attempted in the way of "adopting," naturalizing, assimilating or amalgamating them.

The question has now practically been closed by treaties and legislation. To a certain extent the attitude of the employers of labor was different from that of the laborers. But, on the whole, the verdict of the United States as of Canada was the exclusion of Asian labor-force from the right of setting foot on the soil of the New Hemisphere. And so America has finally declared herself to be a forbidden land to the Oriental peoples.