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 medieval 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 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 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

29

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 Putsch, 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.

From El Sol, Madrid

LUIS ARAQUISTAIN

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

C

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, laboratory experiment. There are still occasions when Western Europe is willing to bleed itself white for the sake

a

By Luis Araquistain

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 Chinese Kuomintang. Communism is working as a ferment, which may gradually transform the great Chinese Nationalist revolution against European imperialism into a social revolution, supported by students, farmers, and workmen.

Recently the world read with astonish

Achilles' heel of Imperial Europe in the latter's colonies and dependencies on other continents. The intense struggle between Communism and modern economic 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.

SPANIARDS can watch this

of Afghanistan to Moscow to confirm a solemn treaty of understanding between the Soviets and the Central Asian state through which Russian Communism must pass on its way to British India. England watched uneasily such mutual fawnings and flateasily such mutual fawnings and flatteries between the monarchy which borders on her Indian colony and the Machiavellian Soviets.

Certain purists in political etiquette were scandalized at diplomatic fraternization 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 international 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.

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

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 PropaOriental 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.

Russian Communism is seeking the

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 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 imperialistic continent.

F

OR ten years the Russian people

have been obscured from vision by

the Great Red Fog, a vapor compounded of the reekings of western prejudice and Marxian fanaticism. But if one approaches Moscow through its great Asiatic back yard, he gets a pretty clear view of the lineaments of Russian character before the fog thickens about him. He may even discover an opportunity to perform that minor revealing operation on the Russian soul made famous by the aphorism of Napoleon: 'Scratch a Russian and you find a Tartar.'

By 'Tartar' Napoleon probably meant 'barbarian'; but if he meant, rather, 'Asiatic' he spoke with that direct feminine intuition which has caused him to be quoted down through the ages. For 'scratch a Russian and you find an Asiatic' is the most fundamental truth about that people and their place in the world to-day. The hordes of Jenghiz Khan, sweeping over the Slavic people in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, left their mark on the faces as well as in the souls of the Russian people. Russians, of all the varied racial strains to be found in that great land save the Balto-Germanic, are Asiatic in mentality and lack those traits which characterize the EuroAmerican. The supplanting of the Germanic ruling caste by an Asiatic group sets the seal on Russia's ostracism from the West and reaffiliation with Asia.

By Upton Close

We get the lie of the land even before we enter the Soviet Union, at Harbin, Manchuria, the only great city of white men ruled over by yellow. (There are soon to be others the great settlements' of the China coast.) On the streets swarthy Russians in Chinese police uniform patrol alongside their more slender Mongoloid fellows. Up in the municipal offices the municipal offices ascetic-looking Russian clerks sit side by side with sleek Chinese, their working harmony apparently not even disturbed by the inevitable problems of division of the squeeze. Along cobble-paved China Street comes a peasant cart with the typical arched yoke over the horse's typical arched yoke over the horse's neck, and in it, going to market, ride John Chinaman and his full-breasted Russian wife. With no other white people could it be quite so.

As we roll leisurely the length of Siberia and on to the European plains, we are pleasantly surprised to find that we are still in the East. There is no Western rush or bustle. In Moscow it takes half an hour to negotiate the purchase of a bun in a bakery. What Western people would put up with such a system of double check and audit on every purchase? Queues of people wait with true Oriental patience to buy, to board busses, or to see governmental officials. At the Grand Hotel we wait an hour after we have finished eating for the

waiter to bring the bill. To present it too soon would have been inhospitable, savoring of doubt regarding our financial integrity. When we finally ask for it the head waiter must for courtesy's sake make us wait another hour to make it clear that he is not hurrying us. We go to the Alexander Station an hour early to purchase tickets to Poland. 'Tovarish,' exclaims the station master, 'you were not going to-day! Go to-morrow. Why rush us so?' Such things, more than color of skin or systems of government, determine a people's real place in the world.

Attitude toward time is, of course, a give-away. The Westerner, saying his prayers while he takes his setting-up exercises, could no more be contemptuous of time than the Asiatic of his sages. But other things are as telling. 'How can the Russians endure such material deprivation? How can they be kept from rising up and overthrowing their rulers, whether the latter be responsible or not?' are the recurring questions of Westerners. The answer is, 'Because they are Asiatic.' They look upon material comforts as do the Chinese or Indians, nice to have but not essential to life. Give three Russians a dirt floor, broken stools, and a samovar of tea and they will discuss philosophy through the night as happily as kings.

Then there is the attitude toward sex,

a reliable criterion. The European takes sex as a game. The Asiatic, using the term to include the Russian, takes sex as an appetite. With the average Westerner the idea of sex is always present and within the realm of consciousness. Could Western school girls, clerks, and factory girls bathe naked in the heart of a city without sex consciousness? We realize the difference as we look on. These flappers are bathing simply because they like to swim or need the bath. There isn't a sex magazine on the stands, not a bathing girl on the covers or in the advertising, and we see no girls reducing the visibility of their noses or heightening that of their lips in public places. When the men hunger, they eat and forget it. Russian women, being freed Asiatics, do likewise.

It dawns upon us that these people, being Asiatics, are not obsessed with the lust for accomplishment and exploitation of their resources which obsesses us. Although they occupied the six thousand miles of territory between Moscow and the Pacific in about the same time that it took our pioneers to spread across the three thousand miles of the American continent, it is evident to our eyes that in the matter of exploitation, or developing power out of what they have occupied, they do not rival us at all. And in spite

of the efficiency and 'Americanization' programme of the Soviet oligarchy, one

hundred and forty million of them will do less empire-building in the modern sense (which is different from overrunning) than forty million Anglo-Saxons or Germans.

Being Asiatics, these Russians receive us with the comfortable mixture of courtesy and contempt and curiosity and indifference to which we have become difference to which we have become accustomed in Japan and China. 'You never can tell what a crazy foreigner will do best just to let him go,' seems to express the mental attitude of the common people as we go about trying to 'rush' the East. Of course there is an official attitude which is much concerned about what we do, but we run into little of that until we cross those mountains composed of map-ink rather than earth and rocks which are the mythical dividing line from Europe. By that time word has gone on that we are Americans, and therefore to be treated well. Our luggage is not even examined, we are conscious of no spies, no listeners-in on our telephone calls. We even do what every official and unofficial adviser has told us is utterly impossible, carry a camera and a typewriter across Russia - and any number of uncensored issues of the New York Times!

ALONG the Lubyanka, making our way

toward the crenelated wall of the Tartar city which lures us in the dis

tance, we wander into the forbidden precincts of the Geypeyoo, dreaded secret police of the régime. With a courteous but firm reprimand a guard puts us under arrest. 'I'll have to trouble you to accompany me to the judge,' he says. 'German, are n't you?' Every European-looking foreigner is suspected first of being a German.

'No, American,' we reply in German our best medium of communication, we find.

'Oh Americanski? Um. Well, do you see that exit over there? Suppose, while I am looking at something else, you get out?' We do. It is with American money and skill that the régime expects to satisfy the demand of the peasant for boots and ploughs, and to crush the British Empire in Asia. One must be lenient with Americans.

We meet another American, Vice-President of one of New York's largest banks, who has been a guest for ten days in the Kremlin itself. For his delectation all the crown jewels were brought out, and the inspection took eight hours. The diadems, swords, and clusters are so valuable as to make them literally valueless. The only way of procuring sale would be to break them up, and thus far the artistic and sentimental feelings of the régime have overcome their financial needs.

It is the Armenian, Karakhan, huge, vigorous and suave, reminding us of an

From Byezbozhnik, Moscow