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Persons and Personages

Interesting Figures Who Have Achieved Prominence in World News

HALIDÉ EDIB HANOUM

HERE was anger and consterna

tion in the palace of Sultan Abdul-Hamid, known to his foes as Abdul the Damned. For his majesty had learned that the eight-year-old daughter of one of his secretaries was studying at the College for Girls at Constantinople, the school of the accursed American infidels. That was dangerous. The thing was little better than a scandal, and an imperial iradé speedily put an end to it.

All this happened some thirty years ago, but almost every one of those thirty years has brought new evidence that Abdul was right. It was dangerous dangerous, that is, for the old order in Turkey. Little Turkish girls belonged in the harem where their mothers could take care of them so said the holy men of Islam. Little Turkish girls belonged in school and college where they could fit themselves for a share in the new life of the Turkey that was to so said a few thoughtful Turks who could look imaginatively into the future.

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The little girl whom Abdul-Hamid forced to leave school and go home to study with private tutors was Halidé

Edib Hanoum, who has since become leader in the political and intellectual life of modern Turkey and, now that she is in exile, one of America's guests at the Williamstown Conference on International Relations.

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So, in spite of Abdul, she had her own way, as she has been having it, with intermittent periods of adversity, ever since. A few years after the SultanCaliph forced her to leave the College for Girls, she entered again, graduating in 1901. In the same year she married Salih Zeki Bey, renowned as the foremost mathematician of Turkey. In a few years there was something new in Islam a woman intellectual, a woman journalist, a woman advocate of liberalism. A celebrity while she was still in her early twenties, Halidé Edib became one of the chief journalistic supporters of the Young Turk movement in 1908, and, when the reaction against the Young Turks began the following year, she had to flee in disguise, finding refuge in London. Not until after Abdul-Hamid had been dethroned and exiled was it safe for her to return to Constantinople.

But new troubles were in store. In the monogamous Occident, allegedly 'advanced' thinkers frequently speculate on, and occasionally experiment with,

HALIDÉ EDIB HANOUM

THIS VERY MODERN Turkish lady has bobbed hair and wears European clothes

the advantages and practice of polygamy. In the polygamous Orient, the prospect of monogamy has charms, particularly for wives; and when Salih Zeki Bey announced that he had married again, the progressive Halidé Edib promptly divorced him, in spite of his flattering desire that she should remain as his principal wife.

In 1916 she was married again, this time to Dr. Adnan Bey, Director-General of the Health Department, and the next year she became professor of Western Literature at the University of Istamboul. Then came the armistice, the Allied plan to partition Turkey, the landing of the Greek Army at Smyrna, and the defiant beginning of the new Turkish nationalist movement by Kemal Pasha's little group, who fled to sun-baked Angora to establish a new government and a new army of their own.

Among their sympathizers who remained in Constantinople (where, under the guns of British battleships, Sultan Mohammed V still nominally reigned) was Halidé Edib. Knowing very well that they could control the Sultan with their fleet but that far inland at Angora the Nationalists were beyond any foreign control, the British decided to round up the leading Nationalist plotters who still remained in Constantinople. Seeking to strengthen themselves by strengthening the Sultan, they made a sudden raid; but when they counted prisoners it was discovered that Halidé Edib and her husband had, just in time, fled to Angora.

One dramatic incident of the flight was the mysterious appearance of a flashlight moving through the garden of the house where the refugees were hidden, which was supposed to indicate the presence of a government spy, but turned out to be in the hands of Halidé Edib's divorced husband, taking his evening stroll quite unconscious that the lady who had refused to be head of his harem was hidden close at hand.

At the new capital she threw herself into the work of the nationalist organization, occupying her one period of leisure by writing the Memoirs, now in course of publication by the Century Company, which tell in detail the story of her earlier years. Under Allied auspices, the Greeks landed at Smyrna, and presently began their march inland toward Angora. At Constantinople, Halidé Edib, her husband Dr. Adnan Bey, Kemal Pasha, and other Nationalist leaders had been condemned to death and the sentence confirmed by a decree of the Sheikh-ul-Islam, which authorized any good Mohammedan to kill them on sight. As the little group of leaders sat safely in Angora reading their death sentences, Dr. Adnan Bey observed seriously, 'I hate to be condemned to death.'

'I also dislike it,' said Kemal Pasha. But Halidé Edib took a more cheerful view. 'Nothing could make us more popular,' she said, for already the people were realizing how completely the Sultan, whose court had passed the sentence, was controlled by foreigners.

Halidé Edib enlisted in the army, became a corporal, then a sergeant. At last the armies of the New Turkey were ready. They swept forward and drove the Greeks into the sea. Smyrna went

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up in an agony of flame and smoke, Mohammed V stepped on board a British battleship, and Turkey was a republic. Abdul-Hamid's worst fears of long ago were fulfilled.

Then came dissension among the Turkish leaders. Even at Angora there had been friction with Kemal Pasha. Now Kemal's faction suspected plots, and in a single day hanged fourteen of its own former partisans on the beach at Smyrna. They had earnestly desired that Adnan Bey should be among those present on this auspicious occasion, and would have given him a high place if they could have found him. But again he and Halidé Edib escaped opportunely.

Since then she has lived in London the somewhat interesting life of a political exile, reading, writing, studying the effervescent politics of the Near East, in which she has played the most remarkable feminine rôle, yet finding time for a trip to America to direct a round table at the Williamstown Conference.

The little girl whose own education was halted by the Sultan has at the present time two sons in college- one at Cornell, U. S. A., the other at the London School of Economics. There is no Sultan to say them nay. But if Abdul-Hamid's ghost, now sporting amid the houris of that Paradise which Mohammed promised to all true believers, has any least inkling of the things she says at Williamstown, for this particular shade, the Moslem Paradise has lost a little of its charm.

A

MR. SPEAKER FITZROY

T ELEVEN o'clock on a warm evening this past June, the Right Honorable John Henry Whitley stepped up to the Speaker's Chair in the House of Commons for the last time. The members filed by to bid him farewell. When the slow procession had passed, Mr. Whitley silently left the building. The House of Commons was without a Speaker for the first time in seven years, and forty-eight hours of the pomp and ceremony of electing a new one would elapse before Britain's legislators could again proceed with the business of Empire.

Commons met next afternoon with the Chair empty and the mace, symbol of authority, placed beneath, instead of on, the table, to indicate that the House was not fully constituted. The Clerk rose to make known the King's permission to proceed with the election of a new Speaker. Who would be chosen? As in the case of many other traditional ceremonies more picturesque than prac tical, the outcome had been decided in advance. The name of Captain the

PERSONS AND PERSONAGES

Right Honorable Edward Algernon FitzRoy, member for the Daventry Division of Northamptonshire for twenty-two years, was proposed and seconded. There was no opposition. Captain FitzRoy rose and 'submitted himself to the will of the House,' in accordance with tradition. Proposer and seconder, again in accordance with tradition, moved down the aisles to the nominee's place to fetch him, simulating mild protest in the traditional manner, to the Chair.

Mr. Whitley, who retired at sixty-two after serving for seven years, was a Liberal and a business man. Captain FitzRoy, who succeeds him at fifty-nine, is a Conservative and the first soldier to hold the Speakership in many centuries. Educated at Eton and the Royal Military College at Sandhurst, he served, although fifty years old, as Reserve Lieutenant in the First Life Guards during the World War and was wounded at the First Battle of Ypres. Both retiring Speaker and Speakerelect have by their occupations broken a long tradition, since for many years the office has alternated between representatives of the law and the land alone.

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MR. SPEAKER FITZROY

IN THE FULL TRADITIONAL COURT COSTUME with the wig and gown which constitute the costume of the Speaker when presiding over the House of Commons

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The new Speaker, while better known outside Westminster, strangely enough, outside Westminster, strangely enough, as a breeder of shorthorn cattle than as a public speaker, has served as Deputy Chairman of Committees for six years, a post which no parliamentarian can hold without marked ability in guiding hold without marked ability in guiding men. Like his predecessor in the Speaker's Chair, he also has a reputation for gentleness. His manner is leisurely and gentleness. His manner is leisurely and deferential, his voice in conversation soft and persuasive. One hundred and forty-seventh in a line of Speakers that

stretches back six centuries to the reign of Edward III, he promises to be the mildest of them all. Again like his predecessor, he is decidedly handsome, an attribute, says the Liberal Daily News ironically, 'regarded as highly important in a Speaker.' He is called the most distinguished looking man in the House of Commons; and is often mistaken for that other model of fashion in British politics, Sir Austen Chamberlain, though lacking the supreme advantage of a monocle.

During the afternoon of the day of his official confirmation in office, traditionalists gloried in the most colorful ceremonies of all. Commons had assembled, with the Speaker-elect waiting before them in bobbed wig and court. dress-knee breeches and buckled shoes. A distant cry sounded down the corridors. It was the Gentleman Usher of the Black Rod, coming from the House of Lords to summon Commons before the peers. As the approaching step was heard, the Sergeant-at-Arms slammed and locked the door through which the

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messenger must enter. Black Rod knocked three times, was admitted, and delivered his message. Thereupon the whole House, led by the Sergeant-atArms with the mace of authority clutched under his arm, proceeded to the Upper Chamber.

Before the empty Throne sat the King's Commission of five peers dressed in scarlet and wearing mediaval hats. FitzRoy, tall and graceful, with a perfect leg for Court dress, stepped up to them and announced in resonant tones his election to the Speakership. After the accepted ritualistic words by which the royal assent to his choice was made known, the new Speaker bowed to the King's Commissioners. They raised their hats to him; and the whole procession, dignified but perspiring, filed back to the House of Commons, headed by the Sergeant-at-Arms, who this time carried the mace on his shoulder.

Then, while the members settled a trifle wearily in their seats, FitzRoy, looking neither to right nor left, passed straight through the Chamber to the Speaker's House to don the full-length wig and long gown of his office. He returned in full regalia amid a burst of cheers, and climbed to the Speaker's chair. Someone rose to address a question to the Minister of Pensions; the ponderous parliamentary machine of the British Empire began to move again just as it had been moving forty-eight hours before and has moved for centuries; and Mr. Speaker FitzRoy entered upon his unique and powerful office as the only man in British politics without a colleague and without a party.

P

FELIPE ESPIL

ANAMA is the bottle neck between North and South America which within the next few years will be the focal point for an intricate system of air routes linking the two continents. Here air mail from Brazil and Argentina will be transferred for California and the Orient. Here mail from New York and Europe will be transferred for Chile and Peru. This crossroads of the air the United States supremely desires to monopolize.

If she fails to get the monopoly she wants, the man responsible will be Felipe Espil, chargé d'affaires of the Argentine Embassy in Washington. Nine years ago Tomás A. Le Breton, newly appointed Argentine Ambassador to the United States, was looking around for a diplomatic secretary who knew the country to which he was going. Someone recommended a young expert on American constitutional law. Thus Espil came to Washington.

Most foreign diplomats, being distant from their own governments and in constant personal touch with American officials, tend to become somewhat subservient to the State Department. Latin-Americans are especially susceptible to this influence; and the longer their stay the greater their desire to please. Not so Señor Espil. During eight rather gay years of social and diplomatic activity in Washington, he has won recognition as the friendly enemy of the United States. He has opposed the State Department on almost every question affecting the two countries; his opposition has been vigorous. able, usually successful; yet he has kept his friends.

His deadliest opposition came during the Pan-American Aviation Conference, which Secretary Kellogg had called to further aviation among the LatinAmerican states and to give North American air firms a privileged position in the vast potential market to the south. A treaty was proposed regulating air pilots, licenses, cross-boundary flights, and many other important technicalities.

The United States had drawn up in advance a draft treaty which it wanted adopted. Most of the Latin-American diplomats came to the conference inclined to favor American views, knowing little about the technical questions involved. Señor Espil was an exception. Two months earlier, he had begun to read every law or regulation that touched aviation in the United States and Europe. He found two articles in the proposed American treaty which he vigorously opposed. One would have permitted the United States to carry munitions of war by air over the Central American Republics to Panama or Nicaragua. The other would have permitted the United States to monopolize commercial aviation in the Panama Canal Zone. Espil argued that the 'Open Door,' which the United States championed so consistently throughout the world, should swing both ways. He held that while the United States had every right to bar all aviators from the Canal Zone, yet, if it gave North American Zone, yet, if it gave North American commercial companies privileges there, it must give the same privileges to LatinAmerican companies. He won his point. Both articles were changed.

At the Sixth Pan-American Conference at Havana last winter, Señor Espil again opposed the United States. His most vitriolic arguments concerned the question of trade-marks. LatinAmerican countries, which export practically no manufactured goods, are not particularly interested in trade-marks. They are producers of raw materials

copper, wheat, rubber, coffee, nitrates which cannot well be branded; and, as Señor Espil pointed out with vigorous bluntness, they have no reason to favor the additional complexity of trade-mark machinery which a great manufacturing nation like the United States naturally desires. He pointed out that it was foolish for Pan-American nations to have their own trade-mark bureau when South Americans buy as many goods from Europe as from the United States. Why should they not all join the International Trade-Mark Bureau at Berne. he asked, and avoid duplication? The American delegates looked daggers, but Espil won his point.

Señor Espil has opposed the United States in many matters which are less spectacular, but perhaps even more important to his own government. When the Department of Agriculture proposed that all alfalfa seed imported from Argentina should be colored red, Espil prepared the brief which won Argentina the right to color her seed orange. This is more than a matter of artistic preference. It makes a vast difference in the sales of Argentine seed. For the red hue indicates alfalfa that cannot survive even the mildest winter anywhere in the United States, whereas orange indicates seed that will winterkill' only in the colder northern states. It can, in consequence, be sold throughout the South.

But although Espil is the most vigorous and consistent opposer in the Washington diplomatic corps, he can be upon occasion just as vigorous and consistent a friend. He proved to be such at the International Radiotelegraphic Conference last fall, where he won the famous fight on 'votes.' Japan, Great Britain, and France, having extensive colonies, demanded six votes each. Germany, being shorn of her colonies, opposed them. So did the United States, but being conference host she could not be as emphatic as the occasion demanded. Espil bore the brunt of the fight in her stead. It was a strenuous one. The Japanese, British, and French forces actually promised Argentina all the votes she wanted if Espil would support their claims. He refused, and the matter was finally compromised - favorably to the American-Argentine position.

On three other major issues at the Radio Conference, Espil coöperated with the United States. When Europe wanted to change broadcasting wave lengths, the United States argued that this would cause the scrapping of all the receiving sets in the country. Since Argentina buys her receiving sets from the United States, Espil backed the Americans.

Such is Espil, alert, handsome, the Beau Brummel of Washington, champion of the United States when that is to his country's interest, otherwise our vehement and sometimes successful opponent. His appointment, soon to take effect, as Argentine Minister to the Netherlands is evidence that while in Washington he has served his own country well. The many letters of good wishes sent him by Americans who regret his departure, among them a warm one from Secretary of State Kellogg, is equally strong proof that at the same time he has won this country's friendship and esteem.

I

HERMANN MÜLLER

F HERMANN MÜLLER had not

been discharged from his first job

when he asked for higher wages, he might never have become a Socialist; and, if he had not faced hard work and duty to Party so courageously, he would surely never have become Chancellor of the German Reich. Whenever German Social Democracy has found itself in a difficult situation, it has looked to Hermann Müller for help and has counted upon him to shoulder the gigantic and thankless tasks that no one else would undertake.

In Mannheim the Müllers had successfully conducted a small brewery, and it was the wish of Hermann's father that the industrious lad should make a place for himself in business. The father of Dr. Gustav Stresemann, Herr Müller's distinguished colleague, also conducted a brewery in Berlin. But Dr. Stresemann attended the University and wrote his doctor's dissertation on "The Bottled Beer Industry in Berlin.' Hermann Müller, on the other hand, was sent to Breslau to learn business in the harsh but practical school of experience. When several of his fellow workers felt that they deserved higher wages, Hermann undertook to interview their employer. He was rewarded for his trouble by being discharged. Simultaneously he was convinced that there was no place for an industrious, ambitious, and honest worker in the world of commerce. As a result, he set out to work wholeheartedly for the Socialist Party.

As managing editor of the Görlitzer Zeitung, an insignificant sheet published by the Socialists, he proved himself a better worker than writer. But his efforts attracted the attention of August Bebel, the grand old man of German Socialism, who made him a member of the Executive Committee of the Socialist Party. At this time Herr Müller was only thirty years old and was the youngest member of the Committee. In his

PERSONS AND PERSONAGES

working hours, he collected statistical material and wrote those peculiarly lifeless reports in which statisticians delight; in his spare time he studied French and political economy.

Like the young man in the advertisements, when opportunity knocked, he was able to step forward and advance himself through his knowledge of a foreign tongue. He proved invaluable in making speeches before international congresses, and in 1914, when the Socialists throughout Europe sought to avert war by joint action, it was Her

From Die Rote Fahne, Berlin

HERMANN MÜLLER

AN INFORMAL VIEW of the New German Chancellor, coatless and hard at work. His formal portrait appears on page 4

mann Müller who went to their Paris gathering to represent the Germans. If we are to believe the Belgian representatives, he was none too expert in the Gallic tongue, and the discussions were protracted and arduous. The congress ended when Jaurès, the French Socialist leader, was murdered. War was declared a few days later, and Herr Müller was left to his own resources to travel homeward through enemy territory. In Maubeuge this missionary of peace was almost lynched by the hostile Belgians, but he succeeded in getting through the lines and returning to Berlin and to his drab office on the fourth floor of the Socialist Building on Lindenstrasse.

He was elected to the Reichstag in 1916. This was against his desires, but he was the only person the Socialists could find who would accept the nomination in the Reichenbach by-election. Later he represented Franconia and was called Müller-Franken, for it is the custom in the Reichstag to distinguish between members of the same surname by adding the name of their constituency. When Vorwärts, the official Social Demo

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cratic newspaper, began to swing to the Left, Müller became the pilot who brought it back to a straighter course.

With the revolution, there was a wild scramble among the Social Democrats for important government posts, and no one remained to hold the Party together but Herr Müller. He became President of the Social Democratic Party and Chairman of its Executive Committee. These high-sounding titles meant sixteen hours of inconspicuous but important work every day; and while his colleagues made speeches and gave out interviews at Weimar, Herr Müller in Berlin worked into the wee small hours bringing order out of chaos.

He could always be relied upon to fill an important breach when no one else was available. That is why he was willing to sign the Treaty of Versailles for Germany. Men like Philip Scheidemann resigned their office in order to avoid signing the 'infamous document' which, they said, would disgrace the nation and bring eternal shame upon the heads of the signers. Hermann Müller, with a keen sense of reality, recognized that the treaty must be signed by somebody, and that efforts for its revision should be postponed; and he consequently made a second trip to Paris in the interests of peace. In the Hall of Mirrors he conducted himself with dignity and poise as the Foreign Minister of Germany. Quietly refusing the historic gold pen with which the treaty was being signed, he took from his pocket the battered fountain pen he used in his daily work and wrote his simple bourgeois name.

Upon his return to Berlin, he was attacked as a traitor, but he continued in office, chiefly because no one else wanted the humiliating task of dealing with the victors and answering the queries of foreign military commissions. When he was first made Chancellor, after the Kapp Pulsch, it was largely because other politicians realized that the Government would end in failure and did not wish to jeopardize their prospects by heading it. Müller was an awkward figure indeed when he donned his Prince Albert coat to appear before the Reichstag. He looked as if he had rented the costume for the occasion.

This summer for a second time Hermann Müller has been chosen Chancellor of Germany, mainly because no other prominent Socialist could be found for the task. And for a second time Hermann Müller must appear before the Reichstag in his ill-fitting Prince Albert coat, which he promptly sheds when he returns to his desk to work as diligently as ever over tedious reports.

Communism in the Orient

A Startling Suggestion that Red Propaganda Has Found the Achilles' Heel of Imperial Europe By Luis Araquistain

From El Sol, Madrid

LUIS ARAQUISTAIN WITH CHERUBIC WINGS and a lily sprouting from a hand-grenade

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ROMWELL'S maxim, which was also Shakespeare's, to the effect that 'when you don't know where you are going, then you go furthest,' does not apply to the Occidental European, at least in modern times. Communism has been defeated in Europe not only because European nations are strong nations, but also because the Western European, even when he calls himself a Communist, wants to know where he is going, whereas true Communism is a leap in the dark. After three centuries of leaping into darkness, life in Europe has ceased to be a vivid adventure and has become, instead, a laboratory experiment. There are still occasions when Western Europe is willing to bleed itself white for the sake of European equilibrium, or some other ancient ideal. It did that as recently as 1914-1918. And such things as revolutions can still happen. Modern Italy threw off constitutional monarchy and came under the absolute rule of a dictator overnight. But Europe no longer feels justified in spilling a single drop of her blood for any ideal merely because it happens to be new.

Is this old age? Is it wisdom? Sometimes they are the same thing.

Since revolutionary Communism has found no opportunity for effective action in the West, where it serves merely as a motivating force in election struggles, it has gone off with giant strides into the shadowy Orient. The Third Inter

From El Sol (Madrid Independent Liberal Daily)

national, which is a political group and
nothing more in the West, is a real flag
of battle and armed revolution in the
East. On one day Communism arouses
the natives of the Dutch colonies in the
Pacific Java and Bali- to revolt. The
next day the Communists come to an
agreement with the Left Wing of the Chi-
nese Kuomintang. Communism is work-
ing as a ferment, which may gradually
transform the great Chinese Nationalist
revolution against European imperial-
ism into a social revolution, supported
by students, farmers, and workmen.

Achilles' heel of Imperial Europe in
the latter's colonies and dependencies on
other continents. The intense struggle
between Communism and modern eco-
nomic imperialism has given rise to a
tremendous development of nationalism
throughout all the Orient. Many of these
nationalist movements of a colonial
type preceded the Russian Revolution;
but it was the Russian Revolution that
provided them with plans and the means
for organized combat. Never were the
colonial empires of European nations
in greater danger than they are to-day.
E

Recently the world read with astonishof of SPANIARDS can watch this of Afghanistan to Moscow to confirm

ment of the visit of the King and Queen Wemesis of the great European

a solemn treaty of understanding be-
tween the Soviets and the Central
Asian state through which Russian
Communism must pass on its way to
British India. England watched un-
easily such mutual fawnings and flat-
teries between the monarchy which
borders on her Indian colony and the
Machiavellian Soviets.

Certain purists in political etiquette
were scandalized at diplomatic fraterni-
zation between a government which
pretends to be the most radical in the
world and a semi-feudal monarchy. But
the Western powers, themselves past
masters in the art of pursuing an inter-
national policy quite contrary to their
domestic policy, can hardly protest at
this sort of relationship, in which
idealistic principles are sacrificed to
reasons of state.

T IS well known that Russia's policy,

since her attempted frontal attack upon England proved of no avail, is to strike the British on their flank, in China, in India, and in Egypt. A short time ago a number of young Egyptians, who in 1922 had gone to Moscow at the expense of the Soviet to study at the Oriental College of Communist Propaganda, reappeared in Cairo. Every day, throughout almost all Asia and Oceania, Russian Communist vessels are coming and going with students trained in revolutionary doctrines. The study of revolution as a variation of the art of war is a new departure in education, and it is beginning to interest the great European empires.

powers without undue anxiety. Our own Nemesis was the French Revolution, which stimulated and finally drove to the point of action a series of nationalistic movements in the Americas that eventually deprived Spain of her colonies. The death blow of the Spanish Empire was struck by the French Revolution when it fired to white heat the desire for liberty and independence of the people of the Americas. With the Bastille fell not only feudal France but Imperial Spain.

With certain variations, history is repeating itself. A revolution, in Russia, is shaking the colonies of Asia, of Africa, and of the Pacific to their foundations, initiating another cycle of nationalist movements. The Orient is aping the America of a century ago, and like America, will soon succeed in shaking herself free from Europe. The parallel seems inevitable. The future of European economic imperialism is measured by a few by a few years, if not by days. Why should we mourn its fall? There were no lamentations when Spain lost the Americas, not even from the Spaniards. To-day we realize that it was a good thing for all concerned. The existence of her colonial empire was one of the basic reasons for Spanish decadence; and the loss of her last colonies, though snapping the strongest bonds of patriotic feeling, was the salvation of Spain. Perhaps the loss of the Orient will likewise save Europe, which is to-day so spiritually decadent, so fearful of the unknown.

And if this happens we may thank the Russian Revolution, the arrow which found the vulnerable heel of an imRussian Communism is seeking the perialistic continent.

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