IRON, BLOOD and PROFITS

Copyright, 1934, by George Seldes Printed in the United States of America THIRD PRINTING F-I

MAR FEIS ST

All rights in this book are reserved
No part of the text may be reproduced in any
manner whatsoever without written permission For information address
Harper & Brothers.

For Marian and Tim when they grow up

CONTENTS (continued)

H.N.

Mrs. Florence Brewer Boeckel of the National Council for Prevention of War.

Prof. Ralph H. Stimson of the University of Vermont.

Harold C. Washburn of the Navy League of the U. S.

Miss Mary A. Dingman, President of Disarmament Committee, Women's International Organizations.

Clarence Streit of the New York Times.

Miss Dorothy Woodman, Union of Democratic Control, London.

Mrs. Dorothy Bromley.

Foreign Policy Association.

William T. Stone.

William B. Shearer, for an interview.

Bernard M. Baruch.

Miss Dorothy Detzer.

IRON, BLOOD and PROFITS

_

Who Wants War?

OR giving aid or comfort to the enemy in time of war the penalty is death. Both civilians and soldiers share this punishment. If an American or a British or a French soldier in No Man's Land had ever been caught giving a rifle or a grenade to a German, he would have been shot on the battlefield. But the Allied armament-makers who not only before the war, but during the war, gave rifles and grenades and the comfort of food to the enemy, received baronetcies and the ribbons of the Legion of Honour while making a profit of millions of dollars.

In December, 1932, a German court sentenced Private Jaeger to death for deserting in April, 1915, and giving a French officer the primitive respirator he was to use in case the gas to be released on April 22nd came drifting back to his own trenches. But the Krupps, and their chief director, Hugenberg, who sold the British their patent hand-grenade fuse which killed thousands of German soldiers, received the highest decorations for patriotism from the Kaiser, and at the end of the war 123,000,000 shillings, one shilling royalty for each grenade fuse, from the British.

The Thyssens, who in 1916 sold cannon bucklers to the Allies (via a Dutch agent, of course) were found guilty when accused of treason. Today, Fritz Thyssen, the chief supporter of Adolf Hitler, is dictator of the iron, coal, steel, and armament district of Germany.

Although Abraham Lincoln saved the life of a boy who had fallen asleep on sentry duty, neither he nor the courts attempted to punish a business man who sold the Union army condemned rifles which exploded in the hands of Yankee soldiers and killed or maimed them for life.

The French before the World War sold hand grenades to Bulgaria, which within a few months killed Allied soldiers, and the secret of the marvelous French gun, the 75, was taken to the Putiloff works in Russia, where Krupp engineers worked by the side of British and French engineers. The British firm of Vickers helped arm the Turks, and the Turks used British armaments almost exclusively in killing the Australian and New Zealand troops in the Dardanelles. When the American marines went down to Nicaragua the Sandino rebels killed them with guns bearing the marks of Massachusetts and Connecticut companies.

Jaeger and Bolo Pasha and Mata Hari committed individual acts of treason and their punishment was death. The Kruppe who gave their fuses to Vickers for a royalty, the Americans who sold their superior guns and armour to friend and enemy alike, the French who shipped poison chemicals to Germany during the war and the Germans who shipped steel to France, were big business men, doing business as usual, and good business is good patriotism and never lacking in rewards. Neither death nor disgrace awaits the gentlemen who betray their country in a big way. Many of these gentlemen have founded or joined patriotic societies, navy and defence and security leagues, supported lobbies for national security through the medium of greater war preparations, and formed the great international of the armament-makers which, in the verdict of the Tsar of Russia, Sir Edward Grey, General Pershing, rulers, statesmen, and military leaders, was wholly or partly responsible for the World War.

This small but powerful group of arms-makers, which Colonel Carnegie, the British expert, figures as no more than fifty, which armed the world of 1914, which has been proven guilty of selling to the enemy in time of war, and which today is preparing the world for another war, can be called the most important of the

The merchants of death, the Krupps, the Zaharoffs of our time, are for war. Numerous patriotic associations which they finance are for expansion, imperialism, colonization—by means of war.

The oil, steel, coal, iron, and hacienda interests have paid for civil wars in Mexico, and on several great occasions openly declared for an American war of intervention.

The dictators of almost all European countries are for war. Their forerunners, the Napoleon III's, the Kaiser Wilhelm II's and the Theodore Roosevelts of the nineteenth century were for war and got war. The entire German philosophic school of militarism was honestly for war. The inheritors of Nietzsche's and von Bernhardi's Machtpolitik are for war.

The list of men and organizations who want war is not a long one, but it is apparently powerful enough to influence the governments of the world. Otherwise, quite obviously, there would be no war. Both sides cannot be on the defensive in a conflict.

In democratic countries no statesman, business man, or even general dares, in cold-blooded peace time, admit that he favours war in any form and with any nation. Euphemism and hypocrisy must govern the program which is therefore called "our national security" or "national defence." Few men are brave or honest enough to admit they are for war. Those few the world ever, along with its abuse, a certain reward for the bravest honesty. In Muscolini wanted war at the time he received the first included the first included the first included the first included the first included the first included the first included the first included the first included the first included the first included the first included the first included the first included the first included the first included the first included the first included the first included the first included the first included the first included the first included the first included the first included the first included the first included the first included the first included the first included the first included the first included the first included the first included the first included the first included the first included the first included the first included the first included the first included the first included the first included the first included the first included the first included the first included the first included the first included the first included the first included the first included the first included the first included the first included the first included the first included the first included the first included the first included the first included the first included the first included the first included the first included the first included the first included the first included the first included the first included the first included the first included the first included the first included the first included the first included the first included the first included the first included the first included the first included the first included the f

mentalist of the international arbitration type. Henry F. Pringle quotes Representative Thomas S. Butler of Pennsylvania (House Naval Committee) saying that when Roosevelt came to Washington as Assistant Secretary of the Navy: "Roosevelt came down here looking for war. He did not care whom we fought as long as there was a scrap."

"I most earnestly hope that our people won't weaken in any way in the Venezuela matter. The antics of the bankers, brokers, and Anglomaniacs generally are humiliating to a degree. . . . As for the editors of the Evening Post [then pacifists], it would give me the greatest pleasure to have them put in prison the minute hostilities began. . . . Personally I rather hope the fight will come soon. The clamour of the peace faction has convinced me that this country needs a war."

In 1897 General Weyler, the "Butcher," was recalled to Spain, but the jingo press drummed up Ambassador de Lôme's stupid letter insulting President McKinley. Then, February 15, 1898, the Maine was sunk and the press permitted no one in America to believe it was an internal explosion. The Spanish demand for an investigation was repulsed. Roosevelt's plan of war with Spain as part of his navy preparedness program triumphed. In a letter of November 18, 1897 he had written of the benefit that would be "done our military forces by trying both the army and navy in actual practice"; which he called a "great lesson," saying the nation would "profit much by it." He was not averse to the killing of men, he was not "in the least sensitive about killing any number of men if there is adequate reason."

Roosevelt went to Cuba accompanied by the press. He charged up San Juan Hill about an hour after it had been captured by other American troops. Among the "other" troops who had to fight for the objective were a great number of Negroes. The war correspondents accordingly gave the glory to the white, aristocratic Rough Riders and their fire-breathing Duce.

Modern history records the names of few men who wanted war and who really enjoyed killing. The millions who went through the World War rarely saw the enemy, fired only at black specks, and never boasted of individual slaughter. The Marquis de Sade had few followers in these millions. The four years of bloodshed were possible to men who otherwise might have revolted in horror or gone insane (as many did) because it was so damnably impersonal. It was a machine war, a long-distance war, and not one human being in hundreds stuck his bayonet into another human being. And of those who remember individual killing, few, if any, rejoiced in it.

Among the notable exceptions was the man whom Americans honour as another Theodore Roosevelt. One day, according to a friend and worshipper of Mussolini who was with him the few days the Duce spent in the front-line trenches, Mussolini saw some Austrians peacefully grouped in an opposite trench. It was a quiet sector; by unwritten agreement the enemies fired only at certain hours and refrained most of the time. As one Austrian struck a match to light a cigarette or a pipe, Mussolini, disregarding the agreement, threw a hand grenade. A captain happened to be in the Italian trench at the time.

"Why did you do that, my son?" the captain asked. "They were sitting peacefully and not doing us any harm. They were smoking their pipes in silence and perhaps talking of their brides. Have you no heart? Why was it necessary to send them to death?"

"If that is so, my captain," Mussolini, according to his worshipper, replied, "then perhaps we had all better go for a little promenade on the Milanese Corso, a more agreeable occupation, certainly."

The next day it was ascertained that Mussolini had killed two men and wounded five.

Roosevelt and Mussolini helped lead nations into wars. In both instances certain elements were opposed to war, the very elements, in fact, which the Marxians say axiomatically are the leading war-makers. Neither finance nor big business in Roosevelt's America or Mussolini's Italy wanted the war, and Norman Angell, who in 1912 denied the Marxian thesis and claimed that a European conflict would be ruinous to capital, could in 1933 point an I-told-you-so finger at not only the German but the collapsed British and American and French and Italian business systems.

American oil interests have been mentioned which have deliberately, in 1916, in 1920, in 1927, attempted to lead the United States into a war with Mexico. They were willing to sacrifice a hundred thousand American lives in order to make several hundred thousand dollars' profits a year. On March 26, 1916, this intrigue had gone so far in the press and in Congress that President Wilson was obliged to warn the nation that vested interests were spreading false and alarming stories for the purpose of starting a war. Said he:

"The object of this traffic in falsehood is obvious. It is to create intolerable friction between the government of the United States and the de facto government of Mexico for the purpose of bringing about intervention in the interests of certain American owners of Mexican properties.

"The people of the United States should know the sinister and unscrupulous influences that are afoot, and should be on their guard against crediting any story coming from the border, and those who disseminate the news should make it a matter of patriotism and of conscience to test the source and authenticity of every report they receive from that quarter."

Unfortunately, President Wilson did not name the oil, silver, copper, and plantation interests which wanted bloodshed in order to safeguard and increase their profits. But in 1920 Senator Albert B. Fall, demanding that the recognition of the Carranza government be withdrawn, alarmed the country by alleging a big Bolshevik plot between the Mexicans, the Russians, and the International Workers of the World, to restore Texas to Mexico. He openly preached war. (Later, convicted of accepting a \$100,000 bribe from American oil interests, he was sent to the penitentiary, but whoever it was gave the bribe was never convicted.)

Having made these charges in 1921, the League has remained silent. The vast amount of corroborative evidence, the documents, the sensational disclosures upon which the first sub-committee of the temporary mixed commission based report A.81,1921, have never been made public. On the contrary, the history of the disarmament movement at Geneva for the past thirteen years proves that in the League itself there are powerful elements which have succeeded in ameliorating, if not suppressing, important parts of the original declarations against the vast international conspiracy of the profiteers in violence, murder, and wars.

When an American munitions lobby fought President Hoover's proposal for an embargo on arms to Bolivia, Paraguay, Chile, Colombia, and sold airplanes, rifles, bullets, shells, and cannon to the nations of South America, it proved conclusively that numerous American manufacturers want war. If they are for peace at home, they want bloodshed in other lands. They have armed and are arming all nations. If the United States is ever engaged in war in Central or South America, in the Atlantic or the Pacific, the guns and planes which American manufacturers have sold since the Armistice will be used to kill American soldiers and sailors.

One hundred and twenty-one sessions of the Council, the commissions, and the sub-commissions of the League have been held on the subject of armaments, and 111 resolutions have been passed, but 1934 finds that none of the recommendations has succeeded. Lord Cecil, who presided at the League frequently, and many other statesmen, have found that an opposition to peace as well as to the control of the trade in armaments exists in Geneva.

While the League has been scorned by the nations, the armament-makers of the nations which compose the League have continued to subsidize wars in many places. The armament-makers of the United States, France, Britain, and Japan are largely responsible for the twenty years of civil war in China. Krupps, Vickers, Schneider officials, and representatives of the American airplane, powder, and rifle companies have armed the Chinese war lords. At times they have accepted payment based on the looting of cities and the necessary slaughter. The mercenary armies of China have been raised by financial backers in Hong-Kong, Paris, London, New York, and Yokohama, and even Moscow has taken a hand in arming and supporting the Communist faction, while Japan, after selling a large part of the arms which provoked the rebellions, which in turn caused chaos, used chaos as an excuse for its invasions and annexations.

The gun-makers are not in business for their health; the healthfulness of their business depends on slaughter, and business is business. The more wars the richer the profits. (How they helped cause the World War and made vast profits out of the death of 10,000,000 young men and a material loss of \$337,000,000,000, how during the war itself they continued to do business as usual, and how they have allied themselves since the war to do business in smaller wars and prepare for the great profits of the next world war, will be shown in other chapters.)

"Do you know anyone who wants war?" Secretary of War Hurley thundered at Representative Ross A. Collins during the War Policies Commission hearings in Washington.

"Only eight per cent of the people of the world want war," President Franklin D. Roosevelt said to Commissar Litvinoff during the recognition conversations.

The International of Blood

THE only big business in the world which bases its existence on patriotism is the one big business which lives by bloodshed. Although they raise the national flags over their endeavours, the armament-makers have never hesitated, for a commensurate profit, to sell their country to the enemy. They have betrayed the secrets of military inventions, given information on strength in munitions, and not only sold the cannon, the submarines, the warships, the powder, and the rifles to nations with whom they expected their governments to be at war, but they have established armament works in enemy countries, built whole navies, organized whole armies.

"I am a citizen of the world," said Alfred Nobel, whose dynamite international still supplies the armies of the world. "My country is where I work, and I work everywhere." The Nobels, the Krupps, the Zaharoffs, and their lesser-known comrades in America in the decade which ended the nineteenth century organized not only the dynamite but the rifle cartels, the warship armour-plate trust, and the gunpowder combine, partitioning the world, raising prices, and dividing the increased profits.

The First International of Karl Marx disappeared ingloriously; the Second International of Jean Juarez and Karl Lieb-knecht was wounded to death with the first bullet of the World War, and the Third International of Lenin and Trotsky succeeded in winning only one country. But the international of the merchants of death has had a glorious history, written in the ledgers of this warring world, on the right side of the page, in dollars and pounds and marks and francs.

Through fifty years of unparalleled growth and amalgamations

the armament-makers, all of whom are affiliated, interlocked, or bound by contract, at the beginning of the World War were reduced from several hundred to less than fifty corporations, and of these fifty only a few influenced world affairs:

Today the list is almost the same. Skoda has become Czecho-slovakian, and Krupp, allied with Thyssen and forbidden by the Allies to manufacture war materials in Germany, have moved that part of their business to foreign lands. Under the guidance of Zaharoff, Vickers and Armstrong have been united into the greatest of all armament enterprises, and the Imperial Chemicals Industries of Britain must be added to the list. It may be safely predicted that the booming airplane industry, already engaged in international competition, will soon join the allied and interrelated groups.

Working with the one inspiring ideal of profit, the pre-war unions of the gun-, armour-, and powder-makers not only eliminated competition, but engaged in fomenting war scares, encouraging military and naval races; they embroiled more than one country into a minor war, they grew rich in the Balkans and in China, grew still richer in promoting the World War, and despite the wholesale butchery in the name of patriotic nationalism, they continued to exist and function during at least a year of that conflict. They reorganized immediately after peace was rather suddenly declared, and in altered form, but with the same ideals, they are today engaged in arming the world again. The war trusts, combines, and cartels which flourished up to and during the World War, are:

The Harvey United Steel Company, Ltd. The Nobel Dynamite Trust The gunpowder cartel

The Harvey cartel is probably the best example of the blood brotherhood of the armament-makers. It was an international association of great nationalists, a union of patriots who subsidized navy leagues, who built dreadnoughts, who profited by every ton of warship armour bought—and by every ton of warship armour sunk. It cheered for both Russia and Japan in 1905 and after Togo's victory, divided the noblest naval order in history. For a decade it pointed with alarm and viewed with pride as Germany and Britain raced their fleet-building programs. It spurred Russia to build a fleet larger than Japan's, and spurred the Japanese to build a fleet as large as anyone's. It brought civilization to "backward" countries by selling battleships with the most modern armour plate, and it sat back and divided 15 per cent profits every year.

Like the machine gun, the Lewis gun, and the airplane, all of which have "revolutionized" warfare, the Harvey armour plate for warships was another revolutionary American invention. And similarly, instead of being kept for America, it was commercialized and internationalized. Like almost every invention which has promoted wholesale killing, it was immediately sold to known friends and potential enemies without discrimination.

The Harvey cartel was formed in 1901, incorporated in London, its list of stockholders and directors filed in Somerset House. "From a purely business point of view," read a contemporary report of the Stock Exchange Official Intelligence, "amalgamation of the companies and the firms offered many inducements. These firms must have been almost the sole users of those patents. But the moment when this international combination was promoted by the great armament firms, the tremendous step had been definitely taken of converting national defence into a huge international profit-making concern, taking full advantage of all the special opportunities which the nature of its market gave it, and bridled by none of the sentimental checks which ought to operate on that market."

Bettini, Raffaele, director-general Terni Steel Works (Italian) Clark, John Alfred, director, Chas. Cammell & Co., Ltd. (British) Ellis, Chas. Edward, managing director, John Brown & Co. (British) Falkner, John Meade, director, Armstrong, Whitworth & Co. (British)

Gathmann, August, director, Dillingen Steel Co. (German)

Geny, Maurice, director, Schneider & Cie. (French)

Hunsiker, Millard, representative Carnegie Steel Co. (American)

Kluepfeld, Ludwig, director, Fried. Krupp (German)

Lévy, Léon, director, Chatillon Steel Co. (French)

Montgolfier, J. de, director, St. Chamond Steel Co. (French)

Richards, Edw. Windsor, gentleman, ex-president Iron and Steel Institute (British)

William Beardmore, director of the armament firm of that name, joined in 1905. Edouard Saladin, director of Schneider-Creusot, appeared on the roll in 1907. Charles François Maurice Houdaille, director of the St. Chamond Steel Company, Fritz Saeftel, director of the Dillingen firm, and Heinrich Vielhaber, director of Fried. Krupp Aktiengesellschaft were added in 1908. The company functioned until just before the outbreak of the World War, when the patents were expiring and when new inventions made other combinations possible. The final list of stockholders and their participation, was:

Krupp, at this period, was part owner of the Skoda works in Austria and had an interest in the Putiloff works in Russia.

Among the banks controlling stock listed in their names or for their armament clients were Ernest Rugger, 6,169 shares; Bougères Frères of Paris, 300 shares; and the Deutsche Bank with its 1,350 shares.

The chairman was Albert Vickers, director of Vickers, Sons, and Maxim, Ltd., which had absorbed the Naval Construction and Armament Co., which in turn held the patents for the Nordenfeldt submarine torpedo boats in England and Spain, also the Maxim-Nordenfeldt Guns Co., Ltd., which had been organized to take over the Nordenfeldt Guns and Ammunition Co. and the Maxim Gun Co. The subsidiaries of Armstrong-Whitworth were Armstrong-Pozzuoli, Ltd., and Ansaldo-Armstrong, Ltd., in Italy. Henry Whitworth & Co., which had a torpedo plant in Hungary, was owned by both Armstrong and Vickers before their later union.

"I am informed upon authority which I believe to be good that there is at least a friendly understanding or agreement among the principal manufacturers of the world that prices shall be maintained at about the same level."

Several years later, Secretary Josephus Daniels, referring to the bids received for the dreadnought Pennsylvania, testified (Naval hearings 1914, page 621):

"When we came to the armour we rejected all the bids, and were then absolutely in a situation from which it appeared there was no relief. Though you cannot establish it in black and white, there is no doubt of an Armour Plate Trust all over the world. That is to say, the people abroad who make armour plate will not come here and submit bids, because they know if they do our manufacturers will go abroad and submit bids. They have divided the world, like Gaul, into three parts."

But shortly afterwards the American Congress was treated to a series of ultra-sensational reports on the international war industry. The speaker was Representative Clyde H. Tavenner of Illinois, who wanted the government to own all its gun, munitions, and armour plants, and who was accused by the preparedness advocates of the time of no less a crime than hoping the factories would be established in his own state.

"The armour ring is the Bethlehem Steel Co., the Midvale Steel Co., and the Carnegie Steel Co. These three firms, exclusive of their subsidiary war-trafficking auxiliaries, have drawn down since 1887 from the Navy Department alone for the single item of armour plate, contracts aggregating \$95,628,912. . . .

"There have been nine official estimates as to the actual cost of the manufacture of armour. The average estimate is \$247.17 per ton. . . . If all this armour had been manufactured in a

The Chilworth Gunpowder Co., Ltd., of Chilworth, England, was jointly operated by the British firm of Armstrong and the Germans Max and Karl Duttenhofer, managing directors of the United Rhenisch and the Duencherg Powder Mills. Krupps held about a million dollars' worth of stock in this and other British ammunition firms, according to testimony in the case of J. Wild vs. Krupps, heard in London October 2, 1914. The Chilworth was for international powder what Harvey was for armour plate. "The powder-makers of the world, like the armour makers," said Mr. Tavenner, "have been in an international combine for years. Here are two paragraphs in the world agreement entered into in 1897, which agreement was used by the [United States] Government in its suit against the Du Pont trust:

"Whenever the American factories receive an inquiry for any Government other than their own, either directly or indirectly, they are to communicate with the European factories through the chairman appointed, as hereinafter set forth, and by that means to ascertain the price at which the European factories are quoting or have fixed. Should the European factories receive an inquiry from the Government of the United States of North America or decide to quote for delivery for that Government, either directly or indirectly, they shall first in like manner ascertain the price quoted or fixed by the American factories and shall be bound not to quote or sell below that figure. . . .

"The American factories are to abstain from manufacturing, selling, or quoting, directly or indirectly, in or for consumption in any of the European territory, and the Europeans are to abstain in like manner from manufacturing, selling, or quoting, directly or indirectly, in or for consumption in any of the countries of the American territory. With regard to the syndicated territory, neither party is to erect works there, except by a mutual understanding, and the trade there is to be carried on for joint account in the manner hereinafter defined."

"Nor is this the worst: The Du Ponts and the Government.

have always been in the habit of exchanging all secrets in the manufacture of powder. Government chemists and Government officers are continually experimenting to improve the quality of powder, and whenever they make a discovery of any character, full information is furnished the Du Ponts.

"And the Du Ponts have been in an agreement with a German firm—the United Rhenisch Westphalian Gunpowder Mills—to keep it informed of all improvements in the processes of powder-making.

"Here is the actual wording of the contract:

"Here is the exact language:

The great rivalry between Krupps and numerous strong competitors, continued Liebknecht, was ending with Krupps absorbing them all. To the Krupp cartel, the Dillinger Huette had now been added, and the Erhardt concern, the Rhenische Metallwaren und Machinenfabrik, which held out longest, now had Krupp men on its board of directors. "There is no branch of the armament industry, however remotely connected, which the hand of Krupp does not reach."

"Customers," said Herr Liebknecht, "are welcome to the armament industry, wherever they come from. German arms have been exported to Ulster, and it is with German arms that the Abyssinians are giving such trouble to the British forces in Somaliland. The German Diesel Company have invented a submarine. Its Augsburg company has built submarines for France on this model. Is it not true that the new French gun has come from Germany by way of Italy?"

Replying to Liebknecht's charge that Krupps had sold naval armour to the United States at half the price for Germany, Staatssekretaer des Reichsmarineamts von Tirpitz declared: "There is truth only in the fact that American firms which have obtained the Krupp patents are delivering armour plate cheaper to the American government than Krupps deliver to the German government. This is explained by the fact the American government orders large quantities at a time, I believe 30,000 to 40,000 tons."

In the summer of 1914 Krupp von Bohlen and his wife, the Baroness Bertha, accompanied by their chief technical expert, Dr. Ehrensberger, visited England, inspected all the armament plants, compared methods of production, were received with all hospitality, and came back to report to their chief stockholder, Kaiser Wilhelm II.

The Nobel Dynamite Trust Co Itd arganized in Inda-

The capital stock was \$20,000,000 and the annual dividends 10 per cent, an extraordinarily high dividend for a European corporation. The Trust held all the shares of the British South African Explosives Co., and was connected with Birmingham metal and munitions companies, and with the Chilworth Gunpowder Co. It was affiliated with the Dynamit Aktiengesellschaft (successor to A. Nobel and Co. of Hamburg), the Dresdner Dynamit Fabrik, the Rhenische Dynamit Fabrik, Cologne, and the Deutsche Sprengetoff A. G., Hamburg. The Trust had a plant in Japan, and through its relations with the Cologne-Rottweiler Shell Works, the Nobel Trust was related with British, Spanish, and Russian armament firms. Four Germans and one Frenchman were also directors of the South African enterprise.

In the summer of 1914, when all Europeans and almost no Americans knew the war was imminent, the financial press reported the directors' meeting of the Nobel Dynamite Trust as "very satisfactory for the shareholders. . . . Following on years of steadily advancing revenue, this result enables the company to maintain the 10-per-cent dividend which has been paid for the last decade as well as to put by to reserve £100,000, as in the two previous years. The working results have been so uniformly good, and have made such steady advances with the exception of the depression years of 1908 and 1909, that it is unnecessary to reproduce the figures in detail. The loans to subsidiaries, which are more than a million larger than last year, show that the manufacturing companies are going in for very large extensions. Holders have no reason to complain of their investment. The future of an international dynamite trust may, however, be very different, and the reserve policy of the directors is no doubt partly prompted by the possibility that public opinion will not much longer tolerate unrestricted competition in armaments."

report which may be found in the Economist, London, for April 11, 1914:

"The company was founded in 1889 by the Loewe concern, which, in 1896, united with its daughter company. Today it has an ammunition factory in Karlsruhe and an armament works in Martinikenfelde. It is further associated with the armament factory 'Mauser,' in Oberndorf, with the 'Fabrique National d'Armes de Guerre,' in Herstal, Belgium, with the 'Dueren Metallwerke,' with the 'Societa Metallurgica Bresciana' in Brescia, and with the 'Comp. anonyme Française pour la fabrication des Roulments à Billes,' in Paris.

"From the Belgian factory it has in recent years been receiving a dividend of 30 per cent, from the Dueren works, since 1907, a steady 12 per cent. Originally the 'Deutsche Waffen' had a capital of £300,000. In 1896 the capital was doubled; in 1899 raised to £750,000; as early as 1890 its dividends were 7½ per cent; three years later they were 15 per cent, and from then on they have risen steadily to 32 per cent in 1912. The dividends, however, can give little indication of the companies' profits; reserves and writings off are disproportionately high, and the directors seem to have found it almost difficult to dispose of their surpluses. The chief shareholders in the concern are the Rottweiler Powder Factory, Herr Louis Hagen, the Ludwig Loewe Company, Prince Henckel von Donnersmarck, and the Nationalbank fuer Deutschland.

"Over 80 per cent of the company's products go abroad. . . . Dividends this year were declared at 32 per cent, the same rate as for 1912. . . . As the existing shares last week were quoted at the rate of 624 per cent, the profit for the shareholders is, it will be seen, enormous. In conclusion, it may be mentioned that it was this same firm which some time ago earned unenviable notoriety through the story of an attempt to get printed in a French newspaper false rumours of a further increase in armaments. It is this same firm, too, which is said to have placed its materials and inventions at the disposal of the Russian government, another instance, together with its associated companies.

The original contract of the German-French-Italian-Belgian rifle combine contained the following stipulations:

Another paragraph provided for the exchange of designs for rifles among all nations.

Paragraph 3 concluded: "Prices for delivery of weapons and bids to be made will naturally be set by the group."

The founder of the Waffenfabrik, Herr S. Loewe, became a director of the Maxim and Nordenfeldt Gun and Ammunition Co. of London in the first years of that concern, and when Vickers, Sons, & Maxim, Ltd., was formed by merger, Loewe became an associate of Basil Zaharoff. He thereby made profits out of all the wars until 1903, when he died. But the relationship of British and German gun men did not end. Vickers continued as British agents for the Waffenfabrik when Paul von Gontard became its head.

Another important director of the Waffenfabrik was Baron Oppenheim of Cologne, who also helped direct the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits. In this latter company Baron Oppenheim had as a colleague M. Lannes of Montebello, author of the French three-year military-service plan. "Is it not a singular association?" asked Professor Delaisi at the time. "The grandson of Marshal Lannes—a French deputy and vice-president of the Committee for Military Affairs—sitting upon the same administrative board as Baron Oppenheim of Cologne, one of the heads of the principal German ordnance factory.

were the two leading war enterprises before the war. Today they are one. Amalgamation in England began as early as 1862 with the Elswick Ordnance Co., of which W. G. Armstrong was the head. He joined with others to form Sir W. G. Armstrong, Mitchell & Co., Ltd., and added warships to his wares. The London Ordnance Works was absorbed, and later the Chilworth Gunpowder Co. was entered. Armstrong-Pozzuoli was founded before the war. In 1914 Sir Andrew Noble, bart. K.C.B., F.R.S., late captain Royal Artillery, was chairman, and among the directors was Sir Charles Ottley, former British naval attaché in the United States.

Just before the war, at a meeting of a World Peace Conference in The Hague, George H. Perris of London, one of the first if not the first to call attention to the war-traders' international, said of this company:

Of the part the armour ring played in political intrigue during the naval race, which generals and admirals and statesmen now join in naming the chief cause of the World War, more will be said later. Vickers, Armstrong, Beardmore, Cammell, Maxim, in short all the British leading armament makers, were also joined in a great cartel formed in 1901 and known as the Steel Manufacturers' Nickel Syndicate, Ltd. In 1903 it became international when Schneider-Creusot, Krupps, and Dillingen joined, and in 1905 still more so with the addition of Terni in Italy, and Witzkowitzer of Austria.

A final instance of the international coöperation of the war trusts: In 1905 ore was discovered at Ouenza in North Africa—one of the richest beds of hematite, suitable for making cannon. Almost immediately France, England, and Germany were brought to the verge of war by the commercial patriots who wanted these minerals for themselves. But while the governments prepared to fight, France's armourer, Schneider, organized the Union des Mines Marocaines, and sold stock to an international consortium of which Krupp was a leading member.

The Harveys, Zaharoffs, Schneiders, Krupps, Vickers and Armstrongs, it is all too evident, had no thought but profit when they coöperated in arming the world, when they exchanged patents and secrets, when they spurred nations, including their own, into the armaments race. With the aid of navy leagues and similar patriotic societies, the armament international created the dreadnought competition—and dreadnought competition, then as today, inevitably leads to war.

OT content with the slow profits of arming the world for wars, the gun-makers, by playing upon the fears and hates of nations, the inferiority and superiority complexes which exist in countries as well as in individuals, brought on the periods of quick profits—i.e., actual warfare. They armed both sides of most conflicts and they armed the enemies of their own countries. The World War was a climax, not necessarily the greatest, in the history of armament races, and the Zaharoff war against Kemal Pasha the most conclusive proof in history that armament salesmen want wars and lead them. But before 1914 the most brilliant achievements of the gun international had been:

The Balkan Wars
The militarization of Japan
The first Sino-Japanese war
The Russo-Japanese armament race and war
The rearmament of Russia for a revenge war
The distribution of arms to warring tribesmen
The South American armaments race and wars

Of these inspired armament races and the wars which were the prelude to 1914, the most important is probably the creation of Japanese militarism.

The entry of Japan into naval competition dates from 1894, when, owing to a depression in England, British war firms persuaded the Japanese admiralty to include in a great expansion

Today Japan is an aggressive power. All the charges against German imperialistic militarism of 1914 are now made against the Japan of 1934. Japan is called a menace to the peace of the world. Military leaders among themselves say the next great war will be the war in the Pacific. The United States, Russia, and England may be involved, as well as China. It may result in a world catastrophe. And its origin will be the desire for business and profits of British and other armament-makers who in time of depression and with the blessings of their governments and the aid of "missions," built up a foreign navy and army with which national imperialism has flourished.

The moment the armament-makers succeeded in creating the nucleus of the Japanese navy, they turned to China and to Russia, warning them as old friends that national safety could be assured only by larger navies. The road to disaster was open for China and Russia. Then, after 1905, the American warshipmakers had no difficulty in persuading the American government to replace Russia in a naval race in the Pacific. The United States became the inheritor of the British depression armament salesmen's brilliant plan of 1894.

The creating of South American navies, Professor Stimson shows, was also due to a depression in England during the years the government eased its dreadnought competition with Germany and the slips and ways and docks were empty or idle. Salesmen and missions were sent to the A.B.C. powers; with an order from Brazil it was easy to persuade Chile to buy a battleship, and with either order in one hand, the other could not fail to get one from Argentine. The Far East, the Balkan, the Pacific, the North Sea, and the South American naval manœuvres of the armament companies have always been played with the same rules.

Unequalled in history for its casual bloodiness is the method

of salesmanship employed by an early American armament firm, the Gatling Gun Co. of Chicago.

During the Civil War there was a great patriotic howl over the arrival of the French in Mexico. It was obviously a flagrant breach of the Monroe Doctrine which called for war. But Mr. Lincoln was too busily engaged. Yet, at a time when the Northern troops needed rifles and bullets desperately, other American patriots in the New England states shipped large quantities to that same Emperor Maximilian whom they might at any moment be called upon to fight. And Mr. Lincoln's Secretary of State, Mr. Seward, replying to Mexican protests over the shipment of arms, asserted American commercial rights, otherwise "com-

In April, 1866, the Prussian Minister of War wrote to the Krupps "out of regard to the present political conditions, to undertake not to supply any guns to Austria."

But Krupp patriotism is seen at its best in the famous letter addressed two years late (and just two years before the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War) to the Emperor of France, Napoleon III:

Paris, January 23, 1868

Sir:

Encouraged by the interest which Your Gracious Majesty has shown in a simple industrialist and the fortunate results of his endeavours and his unheard-of sacrifices, I venture once more to approach Your Majesty with the request that Your Majesty will condescend to accept the accompanying album. It contains a collection of drawings of various articles manufactured in my workshops. . . . I humbly beg Your Majesty to receive the enclosed report of a series of firing tests which have just taken place . . . in Essen under the direction of Major-General Majewsky by order of the Emperor of Russia and of others. . . . I venture to hope that the last four pages, which show the steel cannon which I have manufactured for various High Powers of Europe, will be worthy of Your Majesty's attention for a moment, and will be an excuse for my boldness.

. . . I venture to submit these tests, the equal of which have never been made and which will revolutionize artillery. . . .

With the deepest respect and the greatest admiration, Your Majesty's most humble obedient servant.

Napoleon was interested. He might have gotten a fine lot of Krupp guns for the coming war, but patriotism in the person of General Lebœuf intervened. A Frenchman must make the guns for France. The third Napoleon capitulated. The order went to Schneider in Creusot. M. Schneider was a relative of General Lebœuf's.

As a compensation for a fellow armourer, Lebœuf sent Krupp the following letter:

The Emperor has received the album with much interest and has commanded that you shall be thanked for it and given to know that his Majesty has a lively desire for the success and expansion of an industry designed to render such important services to humanity.

All the wars which came out of the Balkans were deplored in the public speeches of premiers and chancellors who knew only too well that the armament companies which were affiliated with their own governments were largely responsible for those very wars. In 1912 it was generally known that the war then waging was in many respects a competition between Essen and Creusot. But it was not a competition between these firms and Zaharoff, because Zaharoff, being wiser than his colleagues, had done business with all the nations involved before the outbreak of hostilities.

British, French, and German manufacturers not only outfitted the armies and navies of the belligerents, but inaugurated the competitive armaments system. There are historical proofs that they encouraged the enmity which led to wars and helped finance the result. At the time the Serbians fought the Albanians in 1913, quarrelled with Bulgaria and began to involve Montenegro and Greece, "an unedifying scramble" was going on between the French, German, British, and Austrian gun-makers "as to which shall be allowed to complete the ruin of these unfortunate states."

off. . . . If tomorrow the Great Powers, instead of competing in supplying cannon and dreadnoughts to Greece, Serbia, Bulgaria and Turkey, were to provide them with bridges, roads, rails, canals, schools, machinery, etc., the revival of industrial activity thus created would bring security in its train. . . . The salvation of the Balkan population constitutes, for the Great Powers, a business proposition. . . . Meanwhile, philanthropic agencies should endeavour to persuade the Greeks, the Bulgars, and the Serbs to see that their animosities have been, and still are being, exploited by foreign armament firms. . . ."

The wars between Turkey and Greece were among the richest achievements of the armament-makers. No man was more responsible for the arming of Turkey than the Greek Zaharoff. This was his ingenious little plan: when submarines practical enough for warfare were developed, Zaharoff returned to his native land and presented his country with the first. (Timeo Danaos et dona ferentis.) Immediately the submarines arrived at Piræus the great salesman called on the Turks and persuaded them their safety lay in two submarines. It was then a simple task to persuade the Greeks to order two more, then the Turks. . . . So it went with all weapons.

At the same time the dreadnought Rio de Janeiro ordered by Brazil was put on the market. The Turks and the Greeks bid. But Armstrongs preferred the cash from the Périer Bank to Greek promissory notes, and thanks to French money British warships were provided for a country which in less than a year was at war with both these allies.

foreign navies," asked the Economist, "be reconciled by a Cabinet which contains the names of Morley and Harcourt—we will not say with Liberalism—but with any moral ideals? It was bad enough that our French neighbours . . . should have supplied the arms and money for the Balkan War, which has produced such unspeakable miseries and atrocities in southeastern Europe. . . . The traffic in armaments must be regulated like the traffic in alcohol or the traffic in opium. A civilized government cannot complete their political and economic ruin. . . .

In December, 1913, British industry and patriotism reaped the first fruits of its mission. The Armstrong-Vickers group and the Ottoman Minister of Marine signed a contract which the Daily Telegraph called "a brilliant success for British industry and English influence in Turkey." Rear-admiral Sir Charles Ottley in the name of Messrs. Armstrong and Sir Vincent Caillard, long-time president of the Ottoman Public Debt, in the name of Messrs. Vickers, agreed to reorganize the arsenals and dockyards of Turkey, build a naval base at Ismid, install floating docks capable of holding the largest ships, and, in short, put Turkey on a war basis at sea. The semi-official Reuter Agency thought "the importance of the concessions from a political standpoint is very considerable, taken in conjunction with the British Naval Mission. Turkey practically commits herself entirely to the hands of Great Britain in the matter of naval development, and the British proposals have won the day, in spite of strong opposition from other foreign groups."

But while Britain was rehabilitating Turkey at sea, Mr. Churchill was also resuscitating the Greek navy, and thanks to this manœuvre, orders for British armaments were also arriving from the rival. In July, 1914, it was reported that "another war between Greece and Turkey has become imminent," and on the 25th of that month—more than three weeks after the assassination of the Archduke at Sarajevo, and less than a week before war broke throughout Europe, it was reported that "diplomatic

intervention has temporarily voided" a new Balkan conflict, but that "naval armament expenditure in both countries is now in full swing and the only difficulty is the provision of ready money. . . ."

The financial press, which opposed war at that time, made some bitter disclosures. It pointed out, for example, that the British-built Reshad, a dreadnought of the King George class, was in reality a more powerful ship than any ever built for the British navy; it told the public that the real object of the Kerr mission to Greece was "to stimulate the Greek navy for the purpose of a future war with Turkey," and to obtain loans in London which provided that the money was to be spent with the armament firms; it warned Mr. Asquith that the financial condition of the Balkan countries was already desperate, and finally it warned the British public against investing in the new Armstrong-Vickers "Imperial Ottoman Docks." A political opponent charged that "Behind Admiral Kerr and his mission stand some as yet unrevealed group of British warship-builders, armourplate rollers, gun and projectile manufacturers." The Turkish works were to have been completed in the spring of 1914. British guns had been delivered and installed. When war was declared the Armstrong-Vickers combine refunded the investment of the British shareholders. But it could not take back its ships and its shells. The tragic aftermath was recorded in the House of Commons:

Mr. Chamberlain: I am not contemplating a new war with Turkey. . . .

T. WILLIAMS: Is it not a fact that there is in Bedford Park a large gun captured from Germany which was made in Great Britain to kill British people?

THE SPEAKER: That question is irrelevant.

(Parliamentary Debates, Aug. 2, 1926)

Speaking on the naval estimates on March 11th of the same year, Mr. Hugh Dalton, a former soldier and under-secretary in the Labour Government, more dramatically described the result of British armament enterprise in Turkey. He said:

"Vickers had been supplying the Turkish artillery with shells which were fired into the Australian, New Zealand, and British troops as they were scrambling up Anzac Cove and Cape Helles. Did it matter to the directors of these armament firms, so long as they did business and expanded the defence expenditure of Turkey, that their weapons mashed up into bloody pulp all the morning glory that was the flower of Anzac, the youth of Australia and New Zealand, yes, and of the youth of our own country? These men, these directors of armament firms, are the highest and completest embodiment of capitalist morality."

"Great armament firms," says the biography, "have no national or political prejudices; they are concerned not with the ulterior object of war, but with the immediate means by which victory may be secured; and the value of such abstract ideas as justice or liberty they leave for the discussion of idle and metaphysical minds, or employ the terms as convenient euphemisms by which the real objects of statesmen may be cloaked and the energies of a people directed. White was not unwilling to play the part of honnête courtier by pointing out the growth of the Japanese navy to his Chinese clients, or of the Chinese to their indomitable rivals. In doing this he was careful to insist on the confidential nature of his designs, and the daily progress of our scientific knowledge. By such means he was able to increase the profits of the great company which employed him, and to extend what is, perhaps, the most important of our national industries, and to kindle in the hearts of two Asiatic peoples the flames of an enlightened and sacred patriotism."

In the construction of the Japanese battle cruiser Kongo another brilliant feature of the gun international was disclosed—the sale of a country's secrets to foreign nations. When the Kongo was completing at Devenport it was equipped with forty torpedoes "of a new and secret design which has been made by Messrs. Whitehead & Co. . . . officially known as the V.L. 21-inch weapon, a great improvement upon the British Admiralty's Hardcastle torpedo; . . . The secret lies entirely in the motive power. . . ."

This torpedo, it was at first announced, was to be used only by the allied powers, Britain and Japan. But shortly afterwards it became known that the firm was selling the V.L. 21 to the United States also.

The reward for the war-makers was the greatest windfall in armament history: after the 1905 disaster the Tsar's government invited Vickers, Armstrong, Krupps, Blohm und Voss, Schneider, Skoda, and others to divide 1,300,000,000 rubles, about \$650,000,000 or £130,000,000—for the military and naval rehabilitation of Russia. The Duma authorized the amount in 1912 and loans were floated. The money came largely from Paris—it was the Bolshevik default on these armament loans which made France the enemy of Russia.

In the construction of shipbuilding, cannon, rifle, and powder plants throughout Russia, the French and the Germans and the British and the Austrians worked side by side. The Schneiders brought the plans and specifications of the famous French 75 to Russia. Whether the Germans copied the plans there or bought them elsewhere has not been established. It is a fact that while the French boasted that their gun was the finest of that calibre, the German 77, about which little was said, was quite as murderous a weapon. And this fact can be stated without qualification: thousands of German and Austrian soldiers were killed with the guns which German Krupp and Austrian Skoda workmen built for their enemy at Putiloff and other plants in Russia.

That was one of the secrets of the World War. Vaguely, many soldiers, including the Americans who came into the conflict at a time barrage fire had been mathematically perfected, felt that at times they were being shelled and killed by their own guns. American generals admitted later that this had occurred. In all armies there were and will be times when the artillery will slaughter its own infantry. But not a soldier in any army suspected that the guns of the enemy and the shells of the enemy were delivered to that enemy by the international munitions-makers before the war.

It has happened in many wars and must happen again. The Boer War became a test for British arms because the enemy used the same Vickers machine guns which Lord Roberts brought with his men to South Africa. During the years the British fought the tribesmen on the Northwest Frontier, the British riflemakers were shipping arms destined for the enemy. The Northwest tribes possessed between 150,000 and 200,000 rifles which

patriotic Englishmen had sold to Muscat. Muscat, it was known, armed the Near East, India, and Persia. The Japanese, England's ally, in 1910 sold 60,000 rifles and 6,000,000 cartridges, seized from the Russians in Port Arthur, to representatives from Abyssinia, who shipped them to Djibouta and sold them into the interior. Eventually these rifles were used to kill French and British soldiers in the East.

One of the most astounding examples of the rewards of the international arms traffic is told by Rear-Admiral Murray F. Seuter of the British navy, who records that he received permission from the Admiralty in 1913 "to conclude an agreement with the Parseval Company in Bitterfeld for a new airship, size 300,000-cubic-feet hydrogen-gas capacity, 279 feet long, diameter 47.8 feet. . . When the German U-boats began to grow menacing, it was seen that small airships like the Parseval were extraordinarily effective in countering the U-boat danger. A contract was immediately drawn up which called for the quick construction of such airships." Thanks to the Parseval Company's business deal of 1913, German submarines were sunk the next year and German sailors perished. The Parseval was also sold to two other enemies of Germany, Japan and Russia.

There are not ten, but a hundred, more instances which can be cited. They involve a thousand, ten thousand, perhaps a hundred thousand deaths. But they are the minor incidents of the vast international armaments race which some seven large armament firms have sponsored and which have caused not ten thousand or a hundred thousand deaths, but ten million and more.

Naval Race: Inevitable War

HE most abysmal stupidity in modern times, many military experts and political leaders who have the advantages of historical distance, now agree, was the Kaiser-Krupp-Tirpitz naval race with Great Britain. The money for ships, expended on land, would have won the war for the Central Empires. The money invested in submarines and airplanes instead of dread-noughts, another group of naval students say, would have paid better dividends, perhaps victory. The dreadnoughts, students of politics agree, were a threat to England, an invitation to battle for the rule of the seas. England had to honour its undertaking to revenge Belgium in order to rule the future waves.

world, is the present puzzle of all the big-navy boys.)

Germany's campaign for world power required unlimited armaments. It passed through four stages, according to Viscount Bryce: "the working out of a fundamental philosophic basis, chiefly concerned with the conception of the state; secondly, the elaboration in detail of the hopes and ambitions of the nation; thirdly, the exploitation of these theories and plans, diplomatic and military, for carrying out these plans, theories, and ideas and aims among the people; and lastly, the working out of definite plans, diplomatic and military, for carrying out these plans and attaining these aims." The German people were inoculated with the doctrine that the German state was the German armed strength. The Moltkes and Bernhardis and Nietzsches philosophized on the will to power; the Krupps and the Tirpitzes translated it into guns.

No sooner had the armament race begun than many Europeans

realized it was meant to end in war. French economists declared it would lead vers l'abîme. From the French gun race after the Franco-Prussian war until the end of the century, armaments became not only excessively expensive, but an unbearable burden because they outdistanced national wealth in growth. On August 24, 1898, the Tsar of Russia (of all men) took a great step to halt the race and preserve the peace. He addressed a note to all governments saying "a universal peace and a reduction of the intolerable burdens imposed on all nations by the excessive armaments of today is the ideal towards which every government should strive. . . The unceasing increase in financial burdens is threatening the very roots of public prosperity. To set a final term, therefore, to these armaments and discover a means of preventing calamities that threaten the entire world, is the supreme duty of the modern state."

To which the generals of Germany, the Krupps, and their largest individual stockholder, the Kaiser, pleaded that armament expenditure, instead of being a burden, was a sacred and patriotic duty. The first Hague peace conference ended in failure. In the second meeting the Krupps were successful in passing a resolution preventing the nations from interfering with the international shipment of guns and ammunitions. Both peace conferences were followed by extraordinarily increased army and navy rivalry. Especially navy.

From 1870 to 1875 France engaged in an artillery race with Germany, completing 494 batteries each of six guns. In 1871 the Brothers Mauser, mechanics at the German state factory at Oberndorf, Wuerttemberg, perfected a new rifle and obtained the right of private manufacture. But because the Mausers joined the rifle international, the German government in 1875, when it had reequipped its army with Mausers, found that some were made in German plants, others in Liège, Belgium, and still others in Birmingham. Ludwig Loewe, a German-born resident of the United States, having "borrowed" the designs of the Pratt and Whitney Martini-Henry rifle, made in Providence, R. I., returned to Germany and went into the gun and machine-tool trade. Before going into business privately he helped the government establish the state armament works and in the Reichstag joined the National Liberals in supporting increased armament expenditures.

In the 1880's, when Britain was superior to France and Germany in every naval way, an unfounded series of rumours led to a race between these countries. British big-navy propagandists proved that France had as many ships as Britain—but did not state that most of the French ones were obsolete or worthless. Cammell and Brown made new armour plate; Schneider invented all-steel armour; Armstrong in England, Krupp in Germany, improved their powder and their breech-loaders, and proved by test they could smash anything the armour-makers could invent. Armstrong then produced unarmed ships, the speediest afloat, which they claimed would doom any armoured but slow navy. The

French began making torpedo-boats they claimed would doom all existing types.

The year 1884 was a great one in the European naval race. Thornycroft of Chiswick and Alexander Fernandez Yarrow designed still superior torpedo-boats. The battleship was considered as dead. All the nations went in for torpedo-boats. Yarrow built 110 for Russia at a time war between Russia and Britain threatened—in fact, the last of these boats was taken over by the British government because the situation was so tense. With Lord Charles Beresford presiding, Yarrow in 1884 made a rousing armament speech, warning England of the danger the Russian navy had become now that it had 115 torpedo-boats. The downfall of England was predicted—unless torpedo-boats. . . .

But the French held manœuvres and found the new torpedoboats were swamped easily. France changed its plans, and all the world did likewise. The torpedo-boat was abandoned and the race began in torpedo-boat-catchers of 1,000 tons, which now became the bulwark of the fleets. But not for long. They proved difficult to manœuvre and offered too great a target. Moreover, Armstrong, indefatigable in his own field, came forth with smokeless powder and new quick-firing guns. Again Armstrong announced the doom of the navy—the navy of unarmoured ships, this time, and especially of the new-fangled torpedo-chasers.

The big battleship, heavily armoured (to be escorted by smaller, fleeter craft) returned to power.

The naval race was now spurred along by four big interests:

(Armstrong for heavy mountings and quick-firers.)

Vickers, Maxim, Nordenfeldt, Hotchkiss, for machine guns.

Yarrow, Thornycroft, Palmer, etc., for torpedo craft, and

Thompson, Fairfield, Palmer, etc., for cruisers.

esident manager at Pozzuoli. France replied by encouraging its rmament firms to engage in foreign trade, and in 1886 sent M. Bertin as naval adviser to Japan. From 1887 to 1890 Japanese varship orders were diverted from Britain to France. Schneider nade the torpedo-boats.

The failure of the French manœuvres of 1886 brought Italian orders to Armstrong, who built the Italia, the Lepanto and three more battleships which Newbold calls monstrosities. In 1888 the British press inflamed the public: France was the enemy, Italy the ally, and only £20,000,000 for national defence could save England from an attack. In the spring of 1889, says Newbold, "Lord George Hamilton capitulated to the scaremongers and brought in his Naval Defence Act which should really be described as an Act for the endowment of the armament firms." It called for eight first-class battleships, four to be built in private yards, two smaller ones, nine first-class cruisers, five to be built privately, thirty-three smaller cruisers of which seventeen were for private firms, and eighteen gunboats, one-third to be privately built. Ten million pounds for war craft and eleven and a half million for dockyard work. "We have so framed our scheme," said Lord George Hamilton to Parliament, "as to bring into world-wide prominence the incomparable power of this country and its enormous resources . . . and if there are any nations abroad who do wish to compete with us in naval armaments, the mere enunciation of this scheme will show them the utter futility of their desire."

Russia authorized a 50 per cent increase in armaments, and Germany intensified its preparations.

In 1890 Britain ousted France as Japan's naval adviser and supplier of warships, while Germany got the job of outfitting the Japanese army and training it. In 1893 the naval race was accentuated by the success of Augustus Harvey, the American who had invented a cementation armour-plate process which completely reëstablished the prestige of armour. The shipbuilders now had a reply to the Armstrong quick-firing naval guns. All the nations of the world shared the American secret. A fine prosperous era of heavily-armoured warships began. Then in 1896 Emil Ehrensberger of Krupps invented cementation superior to Harvey's. Instead of keeping this secret for the booming German navy and giving the Kaiser's ships superiority, the Krupps did exactly what Harvey did, they sold their patent to friends and enemies alike. In fact, Krupp and Harvey shared the new secret inventions and thereby increased the prosperity of the armourplate international.

In the battle of the Yalu River in the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-95 the unarmoured cruisers had failed, and swift armoured cruiser programs were written by all nations in the naval race. Krupps got control of the Germania shippards at Kiel, and Schneider joined the Chantiers de la Méditerranée and other works on the Gironde. The cannon-makers and the armour-platemakers who had been explosive rivals for decades, amalgamated and coöperated at home and abroad.

he stepfather of the German navy. His book, Influence of Sea Power upon History, went to the heads of the Kaiser and Captain von Tirpitz. The Kaiser cabled his American admirer, Poultney Bigelow, thanking him for sending the book, using the phrase, "Our future lies upon the sea." The book was translated and given to every German naval officer.

The first warships for Germany—for Prussia, to be exact—were built on the Thames by British yards. In 1873 the Deutschland and the Kaiser were added to the German fleet, the latter built in England, and in 1874 with great cheers the first German warship was launched at Kiel.

In 1895, when the Kaiser sent his telegram to Oom Paul Kruger, the British navy mobilized a special cruiser squadron.

In 1898, when two missionaries were murdered in China, all the powers striving for world supremacy found a grand opportunity for strengthening their fleets. Tirpitz was most successful. Seven battleships and nine cruisers and numerous small craft were voted in a seven-year program of 400,000,000 marks.

In 1900, despite Britain's apology for seizing the Bundesrat, Germany made it a pretext for its second navy law. Two big battleships, one armoured cruiser, and numerous torpedo-craft and a proportionate number of light cruisers were to be built each year for seventeen years.

The armament-makers of Germany were in this manner provided with steady work which Count zu Reventlow, one of the Kaiser's first fire-eaters and the chief unsinkable monarchist of the Republic, called "the necessary assurances for the future." Navalism, moreover, was taken out of the control of the Reichstag.

The Kaiser and Herr Krupp triumphed. England called the naval program a provocation for war. In Germany only a few voices were raised against it. The Socialist Bebel told the government the program meant a naval race with England which would end in war. The patriots drowned the voice of the pacifists. Only

America heard no rumbles from the cannon foundries, no clatter from the shippards, no perorations from the Reichstag. But everyone in Europe knew that war between Germany and England was now inevitable.

Britain looked first to its political defences. Having given signs of friendship to the United States during the war with Spain, it came to an agreement with France in 1904 which relieved the burden of naval expenditures somewhat and provided funds for a stronger army. Then an imaginative man named Philip Watts, and a naval officer with not only imagination and intelligence, but with cold-blooded military philosophy and colossal ruthlessness, arrived on the naval scene—and changed it forever. In 1901 Sir John Fisher, First Lord of the Admiralty, gave Chief-Constructor Watts, former draughtsman, then understudy, then successor to Sir William White, a free hand, and Watts produced the Dreadnought.

On this ship Watts placed five pairs of 12-inch guns instead of two; each of the five turrets carrying two 56-ton guns was plated with about 150 tons of armour costing from £108 to £175 a ton, and the total cost of each mounting was about £100,000. The ship was built by the Vickers-Armstrong monopoly. Although officially laid down October, 1905, the gun mountings had already been completed at Armstrong's. The Dreadnought was launched in February, 1906, with "loudly advertised secrecy." It startled the world. Every nation halted its naval construction to watch the making of this new type, and Germany discontinued its battleship-building temporarily.

The launching of the Drcadnought, more than any other event in the first decade of the new century, was responsible for the attenuation of the naval-armaments race which resulted in the war and which has been called the main cause of the war.

Canal, and that our adoption of big battleships would constantly ay our rival under the obligation of widening and deepening that canal at colossal expense. Fisher therefore determined to render the entire German fleet obsolete as soon as possible," and ne succeeded with the Watt dreadnoughts.

In 1905 the Kaiser, who had provoked England with his Kruger telegram, caused the first Moroccan crisis by landing in Tangiers and speaking.

In 1908 Austro-Hungary seized Bosnia and Herzegovina and Europe again passed through a war crisis. Germany, France, Russia, and Great Britain, all knowing war was coming, all engaged in the naval race, were in a panic of fear, suspicion, and hate. It was at this moment that Lord Fisher proposed an action which, insane or brilliant as it must seem, was intended to end the naval race and prevent the now impending World War. In 1908, when Germany had only four submarines, which was not a third the strength of the British fleet, Admiral Lord Fisher records in his Memorics: "I approached His Majesty [King Edward] and quoted certain apposite sayings of Mr. Pitt about dealing with the probable enemy before he got too strong. . . . Therefore, in view of the known steadfast German purpose . . . Germany's set intention to make even England's mighty navy hesitate at sea, it seemed to me simply a sagacious act on England's part to seize the German fleet when it was so very easy of accomplishment in the manner I sketched to His Majesty, and probably without bloodshed. But, alas! even the very whisper of it excited exasperation. . . ."

Thanks to a campaign of lies and intrigue in all the states preparing for war, the armament race entered a new phase in 1909, when Germany built three battleships (and the same number each year up to the war). Britain voted four in 1910 and one battle-cruiser. In 1911 four more and the battle-cruiser Tiger. In 1912 four fast battleships and an extra one for the Malay States! Germany built a dozen destroyers a year, Britain sixteen. In submarines Britain outnumbered Germany two to one, year after year. Britain, moreover, built numerous war-craft for foreign governments to British navy specifications, and delayed delivery when the ships were sold, notably in the case of the Rio de Janeiro, which went into battle as the Agincourt, and the Reshadieh, which became the Erin.

Agadir, in 1911, was the last pre-war sensation which spurred on the naval race. The Imperial Blunderer of the Kruger telegram and Tangiers again threatened the peace of Europe. Mineral wealth in Morocco again was the cause of German action. The Kaiser sent a warship to protect German ore companies—although no German ore companies were in actual operation. For a few days the war scare quickened and paralyzed Europe, and when it subsided the knowledge remained that a new crisis would soon arrive and would result in the war for which the ships and the men were ready.

After Agadir the British Admiralty placed a chart on its wall

on which the position of the German fleet in the North Sea was marked each day, and the Germans placed charts in the corridor of the Reichstag showing the proportionate strength of the German and British fleets, the comparative weakness of Germany, and the two building programs. There was no pretence of preserving peace now. Europe knew it was war, a war which would be the worst in history. Admiral Lord Fisher, says Newbold, "made no more pretence of civilizing war than civilizing hell."

Britain's ally, Russia, which had voted 87,700,000 rubles for its navy in 1907, voted 250,000,000 rubles in 1914 and adopted a program for a further expenditure of 600,000,000. France in 1910 had a program of twenty-eight battleships and cruisers. Delcassé, who in 1912 decided to complete this program in 1919 instead of 1922, was, in 1913, succeeded by M. Baudin as Minister of Marine. Baudin, president of the French Navy League, put through amendments for more ships and more speed in construction. He provided for a fleet of fifty-four battleships. France now engaged in a naval race with Germany.

In 1914 France voted about \$53,650,000 for its fleet. Germany voted \$53,370,000. France was planning a greater fleet than Germany's.

In 1912 the Reichstag passed the army bill for two additional army corps, one in the east, one in the west, and voted more than \$100,000,000 for the strengthening of the German army. The reason given was the weakening of Turkey in the Balkan Wars.

Germany in April ordered out an additional 136,000 men. Bethmann-Hollweg blamed the French three-year plan and the Russian army reorganization for this action.

These moves were war moves, and all Europe knew it. They were the logical end of the army and navy race of the four great powers. "From 1912 to 1914," concludes Newbold, "Europe's forges and machine-shops roared and shrilled with the growing pace of armament preparations. Woolwich arsenal was working day and night on shells, and Vickers, Ltd., had enough orders in July, 1914, to keep them on full time for two years. The presses of Sheffield groaned with work on projectiles for Italy, Turkey, Russia, and Britain. Russia was rearming her artillery, adding

new army corps, and considering the expenditure of £260,000,000 on strategical railways on the Polish frontiers. In June, 1914, she set aside £100,000,000 for the year's needs of her army alone. Belgium was introducing universal service in the winter of 1912-13 and increasing her peace strength from 35,000 to 57,000 men in 1914-15. Her 1913 contingent was increased from 19,000 to 32,000 and her war strength to 330,000 men. Austria was calling up 31,300 more recruits, had kept half her army mobilized during much of 1912-13. . . . Everywhere the drums of Armageddon were rolling. . . ."

The Intrigues which Made the World War

HE Dreadnought, designed in 1905, was launched in 1906. Breathlessly the imperialist nations and the armament world declared all existent battleships obsolete, and that every ountry, in order to insure its life and health, must build a new avy at once. And dreadnoughts were built. When the great fleets were ready they met at Jutland-Skagerrak and decided nothing tall except that submarines could scare them back to their home ports. But in 1906 no naval expert propounded such questions as, sig ships or little ships, dreadnoughts or submarines, and no remament-maker doubted the advisability of building craft requiring thousands of additional tons of armour plate.

But when the Liberal Campbell-Bannerman government's polcy of economy was extended to the navy, and the slips and ways of Armstrong and Vickers were empty of ships and dividends lropped suddenly, the armament-makers, who had previously nerely encouraged the naval race by exaggerated claims and hreats, went a dangerous step forward. On May 13, 1906, Mr. H. Mulliner, general director of the Coventry Ordnance Co., noted in his Diary of the Great Surrender, which the Times published on January 3, 1910: "Mr. Mulliner first informs the Admiralty of preparations for enormously increasing the German Navy (This information was concealed from the nations until March 1909)."

many was in reality planning for twenty-five and would have, at the lowest estimate, twenty-one dreadnoughts by March, 1912. In his diary Mr. Mulliner noted:

The Mulliner démarche was timed with a press campaign against Krupps (and, it must be added, Krupp activities of a similar nature in other countries). It was launched against Germany by Robert Blatchford in Northcliffe's Daily Mail. The information given Asquith and Balfour by Mr. Mulliner and related to Parliament by them, "swept the country off its feet," as a contemporary recorded. It was the greatest and most potential war scare in modern history. Frightened, the British government went in for a dreadnought building campaign to meet a war threat from Germany which did not exist—and thereby created a war threat to Germany which had its logical result.

Ten days after Mr. Mulliner appeared before the Cabinet the new navy estimates of £35,142,700 for 1909-10 were published. It meant an increase of £2,823,200, four dreadnoughts, and many extra other ships. In addition the government asked for powers to build an additional four dreadnoughts on its fears of German acceleration being justified. "The estimates themselves, the discussion of them on March 16th, and subsequent days, the attitude of the Opposition leaders, and the after action of the Government," says Perris, "all bear strong marks of the secret campaign on which Mr. Mulliner and his friends had been engaged for three years."

Thanks to the jingo press, the public was aroused to its danger of invasion from Germany. In a by-election the question of national security was uppermost, the candidate of the big navy having popular support. The mob shouted:

"We want eight; We won't wait."

Dividends increased, the warship-makers of Britain made millions of pounds; eventually March, 1912, arrived, and it was found that the German scare was unfounded. Despite his trying to increase his fleet, now that Britain had added four extra dreadnoughts, Tirpitz could produce only the contracted nine dreadnoughts, battleships, and cruisers. It was not until March 31, 1913, that the German fleet reached the total of fourteen.

But on July 1, 1913, at the annual meeting of John Brown & Co. (which, with Cammell Laird and other warship-builders, was a large stockholder in Coventry), the chairman, Lord Aberconway, said: "Coventry is improving . . . the place is now fully recognized by the government as an essential part of the national armament works. Last autumn I went over the Scotson works, where they made the heavy naval mountings, with Mr. Winston Churchill, who gave me an assurance, which has been carried out, that Coventry would now be regarded as one of the most important supplying firms of the government. . . ."

Coventry, John Brown, Cammell Laird, Armstrong, Vickers and their colleagues made a fine profit from Mr. Mulliner and the alarms in the jingo press. Early in 1914 Philip (now Viscount) Snowden told Parliament that "Lord Welby, who has held the highest and most responsible position as permanent civil servant in this country, who was at the head of the Treasury, who is a man of world-wide reputation in matters of financial knowledge and a man of sterling probity, was speaking on this question (the armament-makers) a few weeks ago, and said:

This camarilla referred to by Viscount Snowden and Lord

Welby had succeeded in making war with Germany a certainty. About six months after these declarations it was a fact.

In the Argentine, in Sweden, in Russia, and at home the house of Krupp was involved in a series of scandals which had one common purpose: the stimulation of sales of war materials. When in the spring of 1913 Kaiser Wilhelm proposed a peace footing of 900,000 men, Karl Liebknecht, who ironically enough had been elected a Reichstag member by the munitions workers of Potsdam-Spandau in 1912, made his famous charges against the intrigues of German armament firms whom he accused of promoting international war scares by bribery, corrupting French and German newspapers for war purposes, corrupting War Office officials, starting the machine-gun race by spreading false reports, paying German patriots, army and navy officials, and others to sound the warning, "The Fatherland is in danger!"

Schneider had taken over the Putiloff works in 1905, and in 1910 had obtained a French loan of 25,000,000 francs for it. In 1913 Skoda bought an interest. Krupps was affiliated with Skoda, and Sir Basil Zaharoff with Schneider. In other words, the Putiloff works was the common meeting-grounds for all the great armament firms of Europe.

On January 27, 1914, the Echo de Paris, a French patriotic jingo newspaper, published the following disputch dated St. Petersburg and supposedly from its own correspondent:

"The rumour that the Putiloff Works in St. Petersburg have been bought by Krupp has been confirmed. If correct, this piece of news should arouse the highest excitement in France. For, as is well known, Russia has adopted French types of guns and munitions for her coast artillery. Hitherto the largest part of this material used by the Putiloff Works was manufactured with the coöperation of the French Creusot Company and with the aid of a French personnel sent to Russia."

The effect in France was terrific. France saw itself betrayed. For years it had counted on Russia as an ally and had divulged

But no one told France that that famous secret was already in the hands of the enemy, thanks to the splendid coöperation of the international armament ring. The gun was then part of the regular equipment of Italy, then an ally of Germany, of Bulgaria, which used it effectively against the Allies, and of Germany itself. When the Union Parisienne Bank lent its francs to the Putiloff works, Schneider took the 75 to Russia and Krupps took their designs for heavy cannon to Russia. In Russia, the French and the German armament men pooled their resources and experiences, their secrets and their patriotism. There were no secrets in artillery, declared André Tardieu, editor of the Figaro, ally of the Comité des Forges (the union of French steel men) and destined Premier of France.

The Krupps denied intentions to buy Putiloff. But le Temps complicated the scandal by asserting that German interests, including Krupp, were actually offering capital for the enlargement of the Russian works. This report had its effect. The French government and French financiers were tricked into producing a new loan, 50,000,000 francs, which Schneider provided through the sale of stock. Behind this manœuvre the hand of the armament genius, Zaharoff, was fairly visible. The best comment was contemporary, and not from the Liebknecht, but the conservative big business side. The Liberal Frankfurter Zeitung of April 21st summed up the armament race thus:

"Frequently in Germany as in France, the great danger is noted in that the big industries, with their huge capital and international connections, are interested in preventing the people from living peaceably and in friendship.

"This is how the plan works: A French newspaper announced that France plans a new armament plant; the German jingo press seizes the false report with joy and demands, threateningly, if the German war leaders are asleep. Several days later appears the announcement that Germany naturally will arm herself to the full extent of her ability. This bullet flies back to the French press, which now naturally demands adequate French armament . . . and after a while the leading statesmen of France and Germany made declarations to the effect that months and months earlier they had planned the increased armaments.

After the war G. Raphael in his book, Krupp und Thyssen, charged that the Krupps collaborated with the Schneiders and Skoda in the Putiloff report for the purpose of exciting French public opinion and promoting cannon orders there as well as in Germany and Russia.

Sheet 15.

Mr. . . . . . . , Paris . 8236.

We have just wired you: "Please await in Paris our letter sent to-day."

The reason for this message was that we should be glad for you to get an article into one of the most widely-read French newspapers—the Figaro if possible—to the following effect:—

"The French Ministry of War has decided to accelerate considerably the provision of new-pattern machine guns, and to order double the quantity at first intended."

Yours faithfully,
for the German Arms and Ammunition Factory,
(Signed) Von GONTARI
POSEGARTEN

In May, 1913, it was noted even in America that the Waffenfabrik was involved in a great scandal, that it had been engineer-\ning a war scare for profit, and that the defence of the armamentmakers by the German Chancellor had "become indeed ironical."
It was shown that "once more attempts are being made to inoculate the citizens of France with the fear of the coming invasion.
Lying statements of all kinds are being spread abroad, maps are
being shown with the [lost] provinces, and it is actually maintained that these maps are in use in German schools. This chauvin-\nistic movement has even forced the French government to bring\nin a bill for the reintroduction of the three-year military service."

Although the Figaro itself changed the wording of the Waffen-fabrik's fraudulent news item, the following day the Matin and the Echo de Paris as well as the Figaro published articles claiming that the French army was superior to the German in machine guns.

Krupp and Waffenfabrik dividends rose fifty to fifty-five per cent.

It was all a hoax. The French had not increased their machine guns and had no such intention. But now that the Reichstag had voted the German increase, thanks to the gunmakers' plot, the French were forced to do likewise. The machine-gun race was on.

Speaking in the Reichstag, Mathias Erzberger defended Germany, in early 1914, when he asked "Ist Deutschland der Ruestungstreiber?" ("Is Germany the Armaments Race Leader?"). The whole world, he declared, now replies Ya, and even in Germany more and more persons were convinced of it. Andrew Carnegie had often asked the Kaiser to call a halt to the world's armament race, and the world would be breathlessly thankful, but in truth, Erzberger continued, Germany was not the leader; under the stress of circumstances created by other states, Germany was only defending itself—it did not want to remain behind and be overrun and crushed. . . .

"The political source of the great armaments-race expenditures of the last decade lies in an international power's policy of encirclement of Germany. Whoever participates in this circling is willingly or unwillingly the international armaments-race leader." It was England's desire to drop her policy of "splendid isolation." "There is proof that not Germany, but England and the United States, lead the world in arming ships with large-calibre guns. . . . The study of submarine construction was first intensified in France, then in England. Only in 1912 did Germany take the systematic building of submarines in hand. Heligoland was armed only after England built the large-calibre guns for her ships of the line. . . ."

But when it came to the machine-gun race there was another story. When it began, Erzberger told the Reichstag, "military circles all over the world were not as yet convinced of the superiority of machine guns as is the case today, when they are held to be an essential weapon . . . in many quarters, including, of course, the German army, machine guns were looked upon as weapons to be used against Herero and Hottentot; very small—infinitesimal, indeed—were the provisions for machine guns in these quarters at that time. France then began to order machine guns for the equipment of her European army. When you thus

conjure up the actual situation, the letter of the German Arms and Munitions Factory takes on quite another aspect."

Armament-makers' intrigues in South America and in the Far East were disclosed in the suit of Robert Lawrie Thompson against Sir W. G. Armstrong, Whitworth & Co., December 14 and 15, 1905. Mr. Thompson demanded commissions for warships and other war materials he had sold to Chile, China, and Japan. The case was the forerunner of the Shearer case in 1929. And because Thompson threatened to reveal how the warshipbuilders work "diplomatically" in setting nation against nation and encouraging wars in all parts of the world, the case was settled out of court. The following report, however, was published at the time.

"It appeared that the plaintiff, from his previous avocation, knew a great many things that were going on in various parts of the world and was personally acquainted with many foreign personages and officials in high position. His engagement with the defendant firm was not that of an ordinary commission agent; his business was to find out what was happening in various foreign countries, to let his employers know, what was likely to be required, and generally to prepare the ground for orders for warships and war material. His position, in fact, was somewhat analogous, said counsel, to that of a private diplomatic agent or ambassador."

situation, and returned to the Far East with an expense account of £3,000 a year in addition to commissions. The plaintiff alleged that not a penny had been paid, although he obtained orders for millions of pounds of arms and vessels. In the correspondence read the first day in court it was shown that Thompson got sums ranging from £3,695 to £8,711 as commission on certain orders.

"I shall try," continued Thompson, "and see the Mikado with regard to the model of your new battleship. In spite of all difficulties, I shall also try to show the model to the Emperor of China.

"I intend, with De B——'s help, to make this (the increase of the American naval force in 1892) very clear to the Japanese; and I think they will go ahead in their naval preparations. Lord Salisbury knows Admiral H——m's views, and I intended, before leaving, discussing the matter with the former, as I have been in communication with him through his secretary on our policy in the Pacific. I am sorry Lord Salisbury is likely to go out of office, but I have already arranged to carry on the matter with Lord Rosebery if he becomes Minister of Foreign Affairs."

In June and July of the first war year, naval corruption in Japan, which involved German and British armament firms and showed their methods of promoting warship-building by bribing high officials, was exposed in the Far Eastern press. The most famous two cases involved Mitsui-Vickers and Siemens-Schuckert. They resulted in the fall of the Japanese Cabinet and the expulsion or imprisonment of many high naval officials, admirals, and captains.

Rear-Admiral Fujii Mitsugori had come to England to supervise the ships Vickers and Armstrong had bid on in 1910. He reported in favour of Vickers and a contract was signed for £2,367,100. It was testified that the director of Vickers at Bar-

In 1911, according to the Union of Democratic Control review of the case, when Naval-Constructor Yamamoto Kaizo was visiting England, A. F. Yarrow, president of the Yarrow Shipbuilding Yard, saw him and explained the superiority of a destroyer fitted for the consumption of oil fuel which was the latest invention of the yard, and supplied a plan of it, expressing at the same time his desire to get an order from the Japanese navy. The specification was sent to the Stores Department and following this further remittances were sent to Rear-Admiral Fujii. Subsequently the order was given to the Yarrow firm, and on December 27, 1912, a contract was signed between the Japanese government and the Yarrow Yard for the construction of two destroyers.

In addition to Vickers and Yarrow, other British war-supplies sent tribute to Fujii: Arrol & Co., £1,750 for an order of £33,-000, and Weir & Co., £1,000 for an order for six ships' pumps.

In the Siemens-Schuckert case it was testified that Carl Richter, clerk in their Tokio office, obtained documents which involved Japanese naval officers in graft. It was testified that Vickers and Siemens-Schuckert paid the Japanese 5 per cent to encourage war orders. Admiral Matsuo and Rear-Admiral Fujii were accused of receiving £35,270 from contractors, "including two well-known British ship-building firms" and other naval officers and Shinji Gondo, director of a Tokio news agency, were similarly accused of sharing these spoils. A Japanese named Kaga, who was in the habit of receiving Fujii's money for custody, was asked by the court whether the following were the chief amounts:

Yen 300,406.67 from Vickers & Co. Yen 34,071.05 from Yarrow Yen 656.32 from Siemens Brother

Accused Kaga replied in the affirmative.

Accused A. M. Pooley, correspondent of the Reuter News Agency in Tokio, was charged with buying from Richter, for 750 yen, secret papers that showed the delivery or promise of delivery of bribes between Siemens-Schuckert and Japanese naval officers, and between Siemens Brothers of London and Engineer Rear-Admiral Fujii Mitsugori, knowing the papers to have been stolen from the firm. . . .

Reuter's Agency, May 13, 1914 declared it was "in a position to state that the commission of investigation into the transactions of the Muroran Steel Foundry and the dealings of Messrs. Armstrong and Messrs. Vickers has found that there is not the slightest taint of corruption." Robert Young, editor of the Japan Chronicle, commenting on the Vickers-Mitsui and the Siemens-Schuckert cases, said: "Since the war with China in 1894 brought in an era of huge contracts for supplies, corruption in places, high and low, in the army as well as the navy, has been a constant theme of the Japanese newspapers. . . . The most fertile source of demoralization has been the temptation offered by huge contracts for armament material and the competition of rival firms."

In July the court brought in its verdict:

"When in 1910 the Imperial Navy decided to build a large armoured cruiser, the firms of Vickers and Armstrong were nominated to send in competitive tenders . . . and keen competition arose between the two builders. About August the same year Iida, Iwahara, and Yamamoto, who were at the time directors of the Mitsui Bussan Kaisha, together with Matsuo, technical adviser of the firm, resolved to obtain the contract for the warship for Vickers, for whom the Mitsui Bussan were the sole agents in Japan. To attain this end, accused resolved to bribe the naval officers concerned by means of the company's money, drawn out by cheques illegally issued by the directors. . ."

Vice-Admiral Matsuo to three years in jail, and Captain Sawasaki to one year.

It is not necessary to detail the numerous scandals which the armament-makers caused in Argentina, Sweden, Bulgaria, Portugal, Spain, and other countries. In Portugal, Spain, China, and many other lands the warship- and cannon-makers knew the axiom, no business without graft. But there was this difference: when the manufacturers of peace materials sold these nations things that were not needed, thanks to bribing Cabinet members, generals, and admirals, they caused only economic damage. When they forced nations, through bribery, to buy guns and dreadnoughts and to engage in land and sea armaments against their wishes and solely for the profit of the providers of materials and the recipients of graft, they were leading nations into war.

Most of the revelations mentioned in this chapter date from the few months which preceded the World War. In that year every armament firm in the world reported splendid business. But Snowden and Liebknecht and the trials for graft in Berlin and Tokio and London, in their exposures of the armaments ring, caused a slight echo in the directors' meetings of gun companies. On April 18, 1914, shareholder D. Amphlett in Armstrong, Whitworth & Co., said "there was a question of general interest which he wished to raise and which he desired the chairman to answer. One not infrequently heard that armament firms were the instruments of fomenting war scares or international friction. If the chairman, as the distinguished head of one of the greatest, if not the greatest, of such firms, could emphatically assure the shareholders that the company was not engaged in pursuing such a policy, he thought that some of them, who were proud of being shareholders in such a splendidly managed concern, would feel more comfortable in having their money invested in the company."

really against their interests, and they did not do such things. If the shareholders wanted to be reassured they should look upon the firm as equipping the police of the world. The ultimate appeal for all order was force, and a great armament firm furnished the means for the suppression of disorder. That was really how they ought to be regarded. The suggestions in the papers were incredibly foolish and mischievous. In the words of Mr. Churchill, they were 'hellish insinuations.' 'We are glad' he added, 'of the opportunity of absolutely and definitely repudiating such an allegation. It is merely the phantasy of fools.'"

Three months later the "police of the world" which Krupp, Harvey, Vickers, Schneider, Armstrong, Skoda, John Brown, Cammell Laird, Nobel, and their comrades in the armament international had been equipping to maintain the peace of the world, were engaged in the war which the armament race had made inevitable. The phantasy of fools was the reality of Flanders Fields. The ships and the machine guns and the rifles and the gunpowder which the manufacturers had by every intrigue forced upon the nations, were exploding throughout the world, and did not cease until ten million men had been killed by them.

"In this smash-up of empires and diplomacy, this utter disaster of international politics, certain things which would have seemed ridiculously Utopian a few weeks ago have suddenly become reasonable and practicable. One of these, a thing that would have seemed fantastic until the very moment when we joined issue with Germany and which may now be regarded as a sober possibility, is the absolute abolition throughout the world of the manufacture of weapons for private gain. Whatever may be said of the practicability of national disarmament, there can be no dispute, not merely of the possibility, but of the supreme necessity of ending for ever the days of private profit in the instruments of death. That is the real enemy. That is the evil thing at the very centre of this trouble.

"At the very core of all this evil that has burst at last in world disaster lies Kruppism, this sordid enormous trade in the instruments of death. It is the closest, most gigantic organization in

"It was still possible to argue that to be prepared for war was the way to insure peace. But now everyone knows better. The war has come. Preparation has exploded. Outrageous plunder has passed into outrageous bloodshed. All Europe is in revolt against this evil system. There is no going back now to peace; our men must die, in heaps, in thousands . . . we must all suffer endless miseries and anxieties. . . . Out of it all must come a new universal result: that this iniquity must be plucked out by the roots. Whatever follies lie ahead for mankind, this folly at least must end. There must be no more buying and selling of guns and warships and war machines. There must be no more gain in arms. Kings and Kaisers must cease to be commercial travellers of monstrous armament concerns. . . .

To this 1914 statement of Mr. H. G. Wells' must be added his revision of the present day. "In the excitement and resentment of the invasion of Belgium in 1914," he writes, "many English writers, the present writer included, denounced the 'Krupp-Kaiser combination' as the sole cause of the collapse of European peace. They forego the Vickers-Armstrong side of the story and the aggressive British Imperialism of the Kipling period. The TWIN BEGETTERS OF THAT WAR WERE THE ARMAMENT INDUSTRY AND AGGRESSIVE PATRIOTISM WHEREVER IT APPEARED. Nevertheless, it was mainly the genius of Alfred Krupp, stimulating and being stimulated by the ambitions of the Hohenzollern dynasty, to which we must ascribe the full development of this strange, monstrous, morbid development of human industry, science, loyalty, greed, vanity, and tradition, the armament trade. It has slaughtered twenty million people and it still towers menacingly

But before the armament international of today is investigated, it is perhaps opportune to look into the trade in death during the World War itself, at a time profits could be made not only in preparing war, but also in treasonable activities during war.

The Profits in Treasor

Although the outbreak of war ended the company and the plan, the Thyssens in 1916 did business with the enemy. They sold cannon shields to Holland, which were resold to the Allies, and they were caught in this traffic, found guilty, fined 100,000 marks. This treasonable action was discovered by a German editor whom the Thyssens at first threatened to sue. When they were fined, they dropped the suit, but eventually they obtained a remission of the fine from the Prussian Ministry of State. The Thyssens then sold horses to the Dutch. (The Allies, it seems, still held their belief in a crash-through with cavalry.)

It was of the Thyssen project to build smelters in France that Le Chatelier recalled the classic adage, "Where iron is, there is the Fatherland." In 1917 it was found that French and German industrialists had safeguarded the Thyssen profits during the war. A special wartime company was formed in France and part of the profits realized in making war munitions were put aside for the Thyssen group, to be paid over legally after the war. "Gold has no odour," said l'Œwere, "and steel has no Fatherland."

Throughout the war German soldiers in the trenches found on "dud" hand grenades the marks "Kpz 96/04." Their own grenades were marked "Dz 96."

_

Throughout the war Vickers carried a Krupp account on the debit side of its ledgers.

Herr Hugo Stinnes, the Saturday Evening Post's German choice of a hero for its two million readers, was one of the most enthusiastic jingoists among the Kaiser's industrial advisers. It was Stinnes who stripped the Northern French and Belgian factories of their machinery to assure the German heavy industry against quick competition after the war, and it was Stinnes who advised the Kaiser to deport the Belgians and force them to work in Germany. (It was also Hugo Stinnes who encouraged the German inflation and made about a billion dollars out of it while the sixty-three newspapers he owned or controlled blamed "foreigners" for this looting of the Fatherland.) During the war he founded the A. G. Hugo Stinnes fuer Seeschiffart und Ueberseehandel—an overseas shipping line—for the purpose of making the extra profit in dealing in food, chemicals, nickel, and other metals which all nations needed. The Differdingen works, belonging to Stinnes, were caught in a flagrant instance of selling steel abroad (destined for the enemy). But Stinnes and the other patriotic steel, iron, and coal barons got out of their treason by paying the German fine of five marks per ton for foreign shipments.

This man, who in his youth had gone into the iron business in a small way, was able in 1906 to dominate the coal and iron situation in Scandinavia. His main plant was in Fagersta, and he was known as the Steel King of Sweden. He also had large plants in Russia.

other raw materials to the Russian factories, where munitions were made to kill the German soldier boys he so loved.

"After the outbreak of the war, Possehl was faced with the question of keeping his factories going as well as could be done, avoiding deliveries to the German government and so preventing confiscation of his property, or closing down the factories, with immediate confiscation as a result. If he decided on the former course, although, as he recognized a certain quantity of steel would inevitably go to Russia to be used for war purposes, still this would not abet Russia's cause so much as if, by completely shutting down his factories, he would allow Russia to take them over and put them entirely at the service of her military needs. It cannot be held, therefore, that Possehl gave aid, of his own will and through his business, to a foreign power at war with Germany."

With the verdict of not guilty the Kaiser publicly expressed himself as pleased.

Italy, Denmark, Switzerland, and Holland, the near-by neutral countries of the first days of the World War, became the centres of the international trade in all the requirements of war. It was, of course, as legal for Scandinavians, Dutchmen, and Italians to sell to both sides as for far-away Americans. But there was one difference. The international chemical syndicate, formed before the war, continued to operate through these neutral countries, continued to ship, not the chemicals for medical use, but the chemicals for killing soldiers, and they continued to divide the profits among Frenchmen and Germans and Italians while the war was going on.

The Compagnie Générale d'Electrochimie de Bozel was an intermediary for numerous electro-chemical firms. In 1914 its president was Giraud-Jordan, a Frenchman.

known as the Crédit Commercial de France. The directors of Lonza were:

Dr. Wacker, German, administrator of Siemens-Schuckert Werke, majority stockholders of Bozel.

Charles Schlumberger-Vischer, Swiss, vice-president and also administrator of the Schweizerischer Bankverein, Bâle.

A. Ritter von Maffei, German, of Siemens-Schuckert

Mons. Giraud-Jordan, French.

Dr. Hugo Koller, Austrian

In 1912 Krupps asked for another 1,000 tons because, he said, war would break out in 1914 and make delivery difficult during a general mobilization. A letter from the French representative in the trust contains the sentence, "Concerning the stock of 1,000 tons asked by Krupps in view of the possibility of a war, it is necessary that the payment for such stock must be made in a contract for three months, accepted by Krupps." Business was business. But that was not all.

In a trial in France evidence was produced that the Société des Produits Azotes shipped 1,000 tons of cyanamide to the Societate Italiana per la Fabrication di Prodotti Azotti in 1915 and that the Italian firm reshipped this nitrogen to the Lonza, which was arming Germany and which reshipped the French chemical to the Germans, who converted it into shells. Testimony was given against M. Gall, M. Giraud-Jordan, Herr Koller, M. Riva-Berni, and Engineer Tommasi, the Swiss bankers Gandillon, Sauter, and Hullin, and members of the Lonza board.

In 1919 Edouard Barthe, Socialist member of the Chamber of Deputies from Creusot, in an interpellation read two letters from M. Giraud-Jordan, Frenchman, president of Bozel, administrator of the Société des Produits Azotes and member of the Chambre Syndicale des Forces Hydrauliques. Both were dated the 13th of March, 1915—the second year of the war. In the first, addressed to Herr Freydel, a fellow director of the Lonza, Chraud-Jordan wrote:

"I had at first hoped that our reciprocal relations could have continued unchanged by this terrible war. . . . If some day international relations become better again, perhaps we can resume the collaboration which was based on times of peace."

"Dear Sir: I have addressed a letter to the Lonza with my resignation, of which I am sending a copy to you herewith. Nevertheless I will continue to interest myself in the Lonza, of which I am the largest stockholder (with M. Wacker), and I have demanded of him that he continue to send me the documents of the committee meetings, reports and monthly balances, through you as intermediary, and I will be obliged if you will receive them as in the past and transmit them to me when you have the opportunity.

"I am sending you the records of de Bozel in triplicate; please send two copies to Lonza, one for Dr. Koller, who has asked me to keep him au courant with the affairs of our firm."

"I have here," continued M. Barthe, "the contract which was signed with Krupp several years before the war, and by which the big cannon-maker benefited by a reduction in price of forty marks a ton. What is serious is that when the French industry treated with the constructor of German cannon it knew it was contracting for the production of war munitions. I will say more—it knew that it was furnishing Krupp with stock for a war that was coming. Better yet, it knew that the war would break out about 1914."

• "(1) That ferrosilicon was delivered

• "(4) That there was the customary stipulation that a strike might annul the contract, but that war between only two nations was not considered an annuling cause, so that, if war had existed between Germany and France alone, or between Germany and Russia, the contract would have continued in force."

The ex-Premier again expressed his regrets that "the Advocate-General, M. Wattine, had the accusation abandoned." In the two years preceding July 29, 1914, 6,000 tons of ferrosilicon were received by Krupp from France, 1,000 tons a year more than the normal needs of the armament firm.

The war was fought with steel. One school of historians would have the world believe it was fought for steel. And every month

It was a simple matter of profits, treason or no treason. The Stahlwerksverband paid a small fine for shipping ore and steel, sold at a high price to neutrals, who got still higher prices from France.

There was another complication. Germany needed aluminum for its Zeppelins, carbide and cyanamide. The Swiss imported bauxite and cyanamide from France in huge quantities, and French patriots sold them for higher than internal prices. Lyons merchants also sold unusual quantities of silk to Switzerland. Zeppelins made of French materials dropped bombs over England, spied on Jellico's fleet at Jutland-Skagerrak, flew over French cities and killed civilians.

In the Chamber of Deputies January 24, 1919, Henri Béranger declared that on the 21st of September, 1914, "a three-master Norwegian schooner, the Bennesloet, loaded with nickel, sailed for Hamburg, and on the 24th it was stopped by the French ship Dupetit-Thouars and brought to Brest. Half of its cargo had been paid in advance by Krupp. Despite the opinion of the prize court, this ship was released and directed toward Copenhagen. From where did the ship come? It came from New Caledonia, a French colony."

This ship was released by the French government on a promise from the captain to unload it in Norway and in the belief that nickel was not a contraband of war. At the same time—in fact on the same day—according to a statement to the Chamber by Deputy Barthe, "the English stopped a ship loaded with lead en route to Antwerp. The shipper was an English firm, the destination was the Metallgesellschaft. The cargo was not contraband of war . . . but the English admiralty court ordered it held."

"I affirm," concluded M. Barthe on January 24, 1919, "that certain members of the Comité des Forges during the war furnished war materials to Germany, and in order to suppress the facts the committee has interfered with the judicial investigations. I affirm that at the head of the Comité des Forges there were and are foreigners, among them a German subject whose father is an industrialist in Berlin."

M. Barthe had begun his revelations by showing how the Comité des Forges wilfully limited the development of the production of iron and steel before 1914 so that it could exploit scarcity for profit. François de Wendel of the steelmasters' organization stated that the furnaces sold minerals but never iron ore and cast iron to Germany. "That policy," replied Barthe, "was carried out by the Comptoir de Longwy."

Which brings up still another phase of the international war traffic. The Comptoir was the sales agency of the Société des Aciéries de Longwy and part of its 1,950 shares were owned by Roechling'sche Eisen und Stahlwerke of Voelklingen, which in turn was partly owned by Longwy.

Robert Roechling was mobilized as a captain of cavalry in the German army and later put in charge of exploitation of the Briey basin. He was captured at Thionville, charged with abstracting and destroying French machinery and tried at Amiens. But Frenchmen, members of the Comité des Forges, testified for Roechling. Among them was the patriot Alexandre Dreux, vicepresident of the Comité and deputy of the Longwy iron works. Result: acquittal.

1913 192

"Announcement of the exchange of ordinary shares of the Nobel Dynamite Trust Co., Ltd., London, for shares of the Dynamit Aktien Gesellschaft, formerly Alfred Nobel & Co., Hamburg.

"With the consent of the two governments, and contingent upon the acceptance by the general meeting of the executive heads of the following companies formerly owned by the Nobel Dynamite Trust Co., Ltd., London: the Dynamit Aktien Gesellschaft, the Rheinische Dynamit Fabrik of Cologne, the Dresden Dynamit Fabrik of Dresden on the one hand, and the Nobel Dynamite Trust Co., Ltd., of London, on the other hand, have agreed to complete severance of the above-mentioned German companies from the Nobel Dynamite Trust Co., Ltd., and its associated British dynamite companies. This agreement is to be retroactive to January 1, 1914. . . ."

Still another international flourished and passed through the war without harm. It was not until the end of 1918 that Prime Minister Hughes of Australia called London's attention to it in a public address:

"It is called the Metallurgische Gesellschaft; the American Metallurgy Company; the Australian Metallurgy Company; the African Metallurgy Company; and finally, in Switzerland, the Schweizerische Gesellschaft, a double name, sometimes German, sometimes French, sometimes in another language, but at bottom it is always German.

Of the armament international it has already been affirmed that in supplying the guns and shells for potential enemies they caused the death of Australian and New Zealand soldiers through British guns, and in the case of Serbia, the hand grenades and the shrapnel which killed and routed the soldiers came to Bulgaria from Serbia's ally, Schneider-Creusot-France. It has been stated that American soldiers in 1914 were killed in Mexico by Villa men armed with American rifles. Krupp cannon destroyed the Belgian forts which Krupp engineers had created many years earlier, and German submarines were sunk with the aid of Parseval airships which the British bought in 1913. In that year

Six months before the battle of Jutland-Skagerrak (May 31, 1916) the British fleet was able to outfit itself with the superior Zeiss firing detectors which it obtained from Jena via Holland.

Verdun was attacked by the Germans and held by the French with the greatest losses to both sides in any battle of the war. On the French wire at Douaumont thousands of German soldiers were caught and torn to death. On the spools of this wire appeared the words "Magdeburger Draht und Kabelwerke." It was imported, via Switzerland, during the war.

Italy, after entering the war, supplied the Germans with sulphur. Official documents exist in France showing that French firms sold trainloads of bisulphide to Germany for the manufacture of phosgene gas. The price was exactly ten times the price for France. The French aluminum for German Zeppelins has already been mentioned, and the Thyssen bucklers for Allied guns.

But these were minor items compared with the great trade in iron, steel, and cyanamide which went on year after year, the French supplying the Germans with poison to use against the French (and also the British and American) soldiers, and the Germans supplying the French with the metal for shells to kill German soldiers. Millions of men died so that the few hundred members of the Stahlwerksverband and the Comité des Forges could pile up their millions of marks and francs.

figures of the Danish, Swedish, and other governments.

In 1917 and 1918 this writer, then a member of the press section of the American Expeditionary Force in France, heard in the trenches of the Luneville-Baccarat sector in Lorraine, and again in the headquarters of the 94th aviation squadron, where he was the guest of Captain Eddie Rickenbacker, America's ace of aces, the rumours that for some mysterious but sinister reason the French were opposed to the American army bombarding the iron and steel works of the Briey Basin either with long-range guns or with air torpedoes. It was a disquieting rumour, but there was no proof, so it caused little if any damage to the morale of the boys making the world safe for democracy. What might have been the effect had they known they were making it safe for the dividends of the Comité des Forges and the Stahlwerksverband is open for speculation.

Behind that line few Americans knew that French mines and the Briey smelters were pouring out millions of tons of ore and steel for the shells which would soon come exploding among them. In 1913 Germany got 29,000,000 of its 36,000,000 tons of iron ore from the Lorraine basin, and from the Meurthe-et-Moselle, part of that same vein, France got more than 19,000,000 of its 21,500,000 tons. The French part of the common basin was called Briey. It had carelessly been left to France by the victorious Germans of 1870 because the ore was worthless, but new smelting processes had made France rich again and provided her the iron needed for the blood of war.

"If the production of raw iron and steel had not been doubled since the month of August, the continuation of the war would have been impossible. . . . As raw material for the fabrication of these quantities of raw iron and steel, the ore of Lorraine takes a place of more and more importance. From this ore at present from 60 to 80 per cent of our raw iron and steel is made. If the production of the Lorraine ore was disturbed, the war would be practically lost."

Dr. Schenkler of the Saarbruck Chamber of Commerce wrote to the Lokal Anzeiger, Berlin, in wartime, that "it must be regarded as extraordinary good luck that Germany since the beginning of the war has been in possession of the Basin of Bricy, for without the French mineral the German industry would have found it impossible to make munitions enough for ourselves and allies."

something wrong in Briey. In 1914 General Sarrail, commander of the French Second Army in Lorraine, who is credited with "brilliant disobedience" in the attack which saved Verdun, projected an attack on the Spincourt-Longuyon-Longwy line (which incidentally was under American bombardment exactly four years later) for the purpose of either restoring Briey to France or at least making the exploitation of the mines impossible.

"But," adds Clarence Streit, now New York Times correspondent in Geneva, who in 1919 wrote the first story of Briey under the title, "Where Iron is, there is no Fatherland"—"General Sarrail, as General Verraux remarks, was not in the good graces of the General Staff. When the plan was submitted, the Staff sent back a voluminous refutation based chiefly on the argument that it was impossible to manœuvre in this region. This difficulty, however, had not prevented the Germans from advancing fourteen kilometres in two days in this district. The upshot of it all was that the projected offensive never materialized, and on January 3, 1915, General Sarrail was replaced by General Gerard. And the iron-mining Basin of Briey remained in tranquillity."

In the Verdun battle of 1916 the Crown Prince issued a comnunique (October 27) which said in part:

heaviest task of the fighting for the next few weeks. Upon it the security of the Fatherland reposes. . . ."

Finally, Mr. Streit in April, 1919, asked General Fox Connor, chief of military operations of the American army during the war: "Is it true that this district of Briey was held so important to Germany for munitions that she could not have lasted for six months had the Allies taken it?" General Connor replied: "I do not know about the six months' limit, but the capture of it would have sounded the doom of Germany."

German military authorities believe their army could have held out a year if all the Briey Basin was lost, two years if its exploitation was hampered by aërial bombardment. British and French experts set other time limits. But all agree that by the spring of 1917 Germany would have been defeated.

Aristide Briand, pacifist and many times Premier of France, and Albert Thomas, Minister of Munitions and later head of the labour bureau of the League of Nations, were two French wartime patriots who asked the government to attack Briey. In a Chamber of Deputies discussion Thomas related his conversations with the General Staff:

"At the end of 1916, during Briand's second Ministry, whilst General Lyautey was Minister for War, I demanded the bombardment of Briey several times, and the Council of Ministers was annoyed at the inaction of the air force. The War Minister announced that he had given the order for the bombardment of Briey several times, but that his orders had not been executed.

... The reason given by General Lyautey for the attitude of the General Staff was the insufficient number of planes and strength . . . to which we replied (it was the moment of the repressive attacks)—that if there were enough planes for open towns, there were also enough for Briey."

Conservative Deputy Fernand Engerand on February 1, 1919, told the Chamber of Deputies (according to the Journal Official of February 13, 14 and 15, from which the translations are by Mr. Streit and M. Launay):

"In May, 1915, the six large German associations declared that without the Lorraine minerals the war would be lost, and this admission has been repeated in Germany five or six times. It was, therefore, necessary for us to hinder by all means the pro-

duction of minerals from the two basins where the Germans were obtaining them. We should have annihilated, if it were possible, these Lorraine mines where the Germans were getting all their iron.

"At the end of 1915, seeing that nothing was done, I thought that this was due perhaps because the facts were not known, and I thought it my duty to warn General Headquarters. Having no relations with anyone there, I took the matter up with a member of the French Academy who had entrée.

Confirmation was given by Deputy P. E. Flandin: "I am prepared to give the Chamber testimony of facts in which I was personally involved at the end of the year 1916 and the beginning of 1917. During that difficult period we soldiers at the front often wondered why our aviation, which was so active during the battle of Verdun, had not been ordered to intervene and bombard the mines and smelters, from which arose immense clouds of smoke which we saw on clear days covering the horizon in the direction of Conflans.

first, because, it appears that Joeuf was not in the sector of the Second Army [Laughter], second, because general headquarters reserved for itself the right to give orders of this nature to the bombing squadrons. . . .

"For twenty-seven months the Germans were allowed, without being hindered, to extract thousands of tons of iron ore for their war works.

After November 1916, when the Germans had for twenty-seven months without hindrance taken millions of tons of ore for their munitions-works, the French began a series of aërial bombardments. By February, 1917, forty had been carried out, but according to Deputy Laurent Eynac they were so skillfully ordered that little damage was done. In the Chamber, February 14, 1919, Deputy Eynac, describing the first bombing, said:

"The orders of the objectives to bombard were given to the bombing group in execution of a bombing plan, a secret document established under the direction of Lieutenant Lejeune, at that time attached to the aviation section of the group of armies in the East. This plan received the approbation of the Grand General Staff. Frequently in telephone messages or in visits to the bombing squadrons, Lieutenant Lejeune, who indicated the objectives of the day or for the moment, repeated the order prohibiting the aviators to attack certain objectives situated within the blockaded railroad lines."

This Lieutenant Lejeune, who had charge of bombing operations, was, according to other testimony in the Chamber, an employee of the Comité des Forges.

"I affirm that either owing to international solidarity of the

The Comptoir Metallurgique of Longwy, the Union des Industries Metallurgiques et Minières and the Aciéries de la Marine, have the same address, 63 Boulevard Haussmann, and the same secretary. M. Pinot is also general secretary of the syndicate of railway material producers, and the hydraulic power association.

Members of the Comité des Forges, notably the de Wendels and Schneider of Creusot, and members of the German ore and coal cartels of similar strength, Thyssen, Roechling, and the Berlin branch of the de Wendel family were the principal owners of the Briey Basin. François de Wendel, president of the Comité des Forges and Charles de Wendel, his brother, a naturalized German subject and a member of the Reichstag, and their relatives, actually owned one piece of property of 22,500 acres of iron mining-land which was exactly on the border, evenly divided between Germany and France.

On the German side the de Wendel family and their associated industrialists owned concessions producing 3,000,000 tons of ore a year and the blast furnaces and smelters and other works; on the French side they produced about a million tons and had similar establishments. At Joeuf, the French basin, the de Wendels were joined with Schneider in eight blast furnaces. Altogether, the Franco-German family controlled one-eighth of the entire basin. At the frontier, underground tunnels connected their French and German holdings. Roechling, the German patriot, was the largest stockholder in the Vallerupt mine in the Briey Basin and his 8,000 shares in the Longwy steel corporation made him a partner with all the French patriots.

In self-defence François de Wendel addressed the Chamber of

Deputies in February, 1919, denying that he personally had intervened to prevent a land offensive or an aërial bombardment of Briey because of personal interests in mines and furnaces. "On the contrary," he said, "it was I, myself, who by my own hand pointed out on maps and plans of mines and smelters in particular of those I direct, the vital point of which should be hit by bombardment. This bombardment was evidently possible, but could it attain the results which certain persons hoped for it?" He added that after the war an examination showed that the bombardments which did occur late in the war did little damage, but he admitted that the nightly bombardments in Lorraine, the German-owned part of the Briey basin, almost totally disorganized the work there. M. Barthe called the Chamber's attention to the fact that his references had been to the first twenty-seven months of the war when no bombardments were carried out, not the later bombardments which were carried out half-heartedly, or the very last bombardments, after the American forces had entered the war, when the German part, but not the French part, of the works was "completely disorganized," as M. de Wendel had admitted.

In confirmation of this statement Senator Henri Bérenger, conservative, gave the commission of inquiry a report he had presented to the army committee of the Senate and which was adopted May 29, 1916, and which concluded: "From a declaration of the Minister of Public Works, it is obvious . . . that if Germany were deprived of thirty million tons of iron-mining in Lorraine and Luxembourg, the German Empire would not possibly be able to continue the war."

of Max Hoschiller, published three articles in June with the general title "The Legend of Briey," which attempted to show that the Senate report was based on wrong information.

Gustave Téry recalled that because of his attacks on the press campaign of the Comité des Forges, his liberal newspaper, l'Œuvre, was invaded by the police.

The Max Hoschiller who signed the Temps campaign articles was born in Odessa, the son of an Austrian father and a Polish mother. He was married to a Frenchwoman, was an associate of the metal industrialists of the Comité des Forges, and has since become one of the principals of the Society of Economic Studies and Information, of the Comité.

To the military mind this was all in order. Major de Grandmaison, later a conservative Deputy, was of the opinion that "the Germans on their side may well ask their government, why were not Briey and the coal-mines bombarded and destroyed?" ... It can be said today that the truly remarkable activity of our coalmines of Pas-de-Calais . . . have contributed to save France from defeat." Then referring to the Briey question, he continues, "The motives of this prohibition of which the aviation officers speak, seem, according to rumours, to have been due to a tacit agreement between the belligerents. It would seem that we said to the Germans, 'We will not bombard Briey from which you get your iron ore if you will respect, on your side, Bruay and the coal-basin of Pas-de-Calais.'"

the French military and business men for not attacking Briey, gave the view of the French high command under the signature General X... who wrote: "War is a matter of conventions... At Compiègne (French General Headquarters) the Germans bombarded the station, the bridges over the Oise, the crossroads—they visibly spared staff headquarters."

First, a statement from Hindenburg, made to the present writer the week following the armistice, at his headquarters in Wilhelmshoehe, Cassel. "To begin with," said Hindenburg, "I must confess that Germany could not have won the war—that is, after 1917. We might have won on land. We might have taken Paris. But after the failure of the world food crops of 1916 the British blockade reached its greatest effectiveness in 1917. So I must really say that the British food blockade of 1917 and the American blow in the Argonne of 1918 decided the war for the Allies."

In other words, an effective blockade carried out by the British,

The Danish ships went into German service. Not a single steamer of the East Asiatic line was sunk by German submarines, and a dividend of 30 per cent was paid by it in 1916. Swedish ore, which Ludendorff said was of "paramount importance," was shipped to the total of four to five million tons a year—and carried over railroads burning British coal. More sinister was the copper and nickel trade with Britain. In 1913 Britain exported 517 tons of copper to Sweden, and in 1915, 1,085 tons. Sweden's importations from the United States were 9,559 tons in 1913, 13,390 tons in 1915. In 1913 Sweden sold Germany 1,215 tons and in 1915, 2,304 tons, after selling 3,960 tons the year before. Nickel was manufactured in Norway. The Kristiansand Nikkel Raffineringswerk, connected with the British-American Nickel Corporation, contracted to give its total output of millions of pounds to Britain, but exported between 600 and 700 tons a year to Germany.

SCANDINAVIAN EXPORTATION: METRIC TONS OF FOOD

From the beginning of the war Consett began protesting. To Lord Faringdon he sent statistics proving that British as well as American traders were coöperating with Scandinavian traders in keeping Germany in the war. But all this time statements were being made in the House of Commons that there was little trade between Scandinavia and the enemy.

When America entered the war Mr. (now Earl) Balfour came to Washington, where an agreement was made to stop food and metals for Norway unless Norway quit its abnormal export trade with Germany. Pressure was brought upon Sweden, curtailing food for Germany and placing Swedish bottoms at Allied disposal. Embargoes were placed on Sweden and Holland. For these actions great credit belongs to Bernard M. Baruch, head of the War Industries Board. In fact the decision of President Wilson, Mr. Baruch, and Mr. Balfour to really blockade Germany in 1917 may be termed the decisive civilian action of the war.

Before the United States joined the Allies it must be admitted that the same American commercial interests which were beating the tomtoms of preparedness and placing some of their

war profits into security and defence associations were not averse to profiteering from war materials for the Central Empires (via Scandinavia) as well as for the Allies. These great patriots were demanding the right to ship cotton, rubber, fats, and other materials to Scandinavia with full knowledge they were aiding the very nations against which the American government and the American people were arming. These American business men, however, were not equally guilty with their British colleagues. And American officials, once war was declared, were not so criminally negligent or stupid as their Allied colleagues, because the blockade became effective immediately.

Of Consett's revelations Hilaire Belloc, conservative, Catholic, and military expert, says, unqualifiedly: "No replies are possible to the facts alleged. They have not been denied. They are true. The conclusion is that the Great War could have been won in fifteen to twenty months if the British naval power had been employed by the politicians and their financial supporters to blockade the enemy. The politicians, working on behalf of commercial and financial interests, decided otherwise . . . they are responsible for the war lasting fifty-one months instead of fifteen or twenty. Whoever in the second half of the war has lost a son or a brother or a husband can blame it on the politicians, or the men of wealth whom they obey, for the manner in which they conducted the blockade at the beginning of hostilities. . . . It is history."

The coal, iron, and steel men, individuals and associations in France and Germany, who continued the war for two years, have been named in official documents; the metal and cotton and food traders who operated through Scandinavia remain anonymous. But the Briey affair and the blockade failure give irrefutable proof that the profit motive alone was responsible for the last two years of the war—for the blood of millions of soldiers, the loss of billions of dollars by all the peoples of the world, for the benefit of those few armament and business men who profit in war.

The Bloodshed International Today

THE World War did strange things to all the international movements which preceded it. The Second International of Juarès, Liebknecht, Vandervelde and the European labour leaders received a blow from which it still staggers, but the Third International of Lenin, Trotsky, and Angelica Balabanoff was born in Switzerland in 1916 and broke out in triumph in Russia a year later. The international Catholic Church, whose efforts to make peace in 1917 were denounced by the press of both sides as "defeatist," and whose participation at Versailles was refused in 1919, recovered completely. The international peace movement is still limp under the blows of Mussolini and Hitler and the Japanese of Geneva and Manchuria. But the armament international, which promoted the armament race up to 1914 and which did business during the war, again flourished in the 1930's.

It has adapted itself to the times. The House of Krupp, dismantled by the Allies, has turned its swords into ploughshares literally as well as figuratively, but it also acquired stock in the Bofors cannon works in Sweden and has exploited its patents in Switzerland and made contacts with Dutch munitions firms. The House of Skoda, once Austrian and affiliated with Germany and Russia, is now a Czechoslovakian national enterprise affiliated with France and Poland. In all neutral countries new war-works have been fostered by the old enemies to supply the materials for the next war.

The agreement which went into effect April 11, 1924, has been kept secret, according to Guenther Reimann, who has described the power of the I. G. Farbenindustrie A. G. in his Giftgas in Deutschland. But he presents proof that the signatures were attached in 1923, at the very time French troops with engineers sent by Mussolini were invading the Ruhr and when the German government was calling upon all good men to engage in passive resistance against the ancient enemy.

Graselli Dyestuffs Corporation, Cleveland, Ohio

Fabrication National de Colorantes y Explosivos, Madrid, (which, incidentally, manufactured the poison gas for use in Morocco)

Also the following makers of poison gas, dynamite, etc.

Norsk-Hydro Elektrisk Kvaelstof A. S., Norway Sociedad Electroquimica de Flix, Barcelona Carbidwerk Deutsche-Matrie, Vienna, and Stickstoffwerk Ruse, (through Dynamit A. G.) British Bergius Syndicate, Ltd., London (organized to exploit the German Bergius patents). The largest chemical concern in the world, the Imperial Chemical Industries, Ltd., of England, is affiliated with both the I. G. Farben and American companies. It is capitalized at £70,000,000 and controls the entire British civil as well as military chemical supply. President: Lord Reading; chairman, Sir Harry McGowan; leading directors, Lord Ashfield, Lord Colwyn, Lord Melchett, Lord Weir, and Sir Max Muspratt. Well-known stockholders according to annual returns, April 28, 1932: Sir John Simon, M.P., 1,512 shares; Baron Doverdale, 34,124; Earl of Dysart, 38,020; Lord Cochrane of Cults, 47,180; Rt. Hon. Neville Chamberlain, M.P., 11,747; Sir Austen Chamberlain, M.P., 666. At the 1932 annual meeting Sir Harry McGowan in his survey, said:

"The shares and debentures in and advances to subsidiary companies shown in the balance sheet at £69,264,978 represent in the main the company's holdings in the eight manufacturing groups referred to in the report, namely, alkali, general chemical, explosives, fertiliser and synthetic products, dyestuffs, leather-cloth, lime and metals, in Imperial Chemical Industries, Ltd., of Australia and New Zealand, and in our foreign merchanting companies. . . .

". . . The marketable and other investments, standing at £9,540,677, mainly represent investments in large industrial companies with which we have, directly or indirectly, trade connections. The chief items are investments in the General Motors Corporation, Du Pont & Co. and the Allied Chemical Company in the United States, the International Nickel Co. in Canada, the I. G. Farbenindustrie in Germany, and Joseph Lucal & Sons in this country."

In July, 1932, the above facts were brought to the attention of Sir John Simon, Foreign Minister and active in peace and disarmament work, by the pamphlet, "The Secret International," issued by the Union of Democratic Control. In March, 1933, Sir John sold out his stock in the I. C. I. when he found it financially interested in a subsidiary manufacturing munitions for China and Japan, then at war. The Union of Democratic Control further pointed out that the British government is closely related to the chemical industry, having guaranteed the principal and interest of the debenture stock of the Synthetic Ammonia &

Nitrate Co., and bought many shares of the British Dyestuffs Corporation, Ltd., with which it keeps in close touch.

Concludes A. J. Gillian in his pamphlet, "The Menace of Chemical Warfare to Civilian Populations":

"In almost every country in the world there exists a close association between the governments and the chemical industries for control, collaboration, research, and subsidy. Chemical Warfare Research Committees link the chemical industries with the universities. In Britain the Chemical Warfare Committee connects up the National Physical Laboratory, Imperial College of Science and Technology, and the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (D. S. I. R.). On the Chemical Warfare Committee are many of Britain's most prominent chemical manufacturers. Similar Chemical Warfare Committees exist in France, Italy, Poland, Japan, and U. S. A. Chemical supplies for munitions, explosives, and poison gas in Britain are almost entirely in the hands of the Chemical Combine (I. C. I.), who control most of the dye-works—90 per cent explosives production, 100 per cent of alkalis (sodas). This chemical combine stands as a menace to the peace of the peoples."

The Nobel dynamite trust, dissolved in 1915, has made other combinations. In France the Société Centrale de Dynamite (Nobel) was capitalized at eighty million francs in 1930, and on its administrative council appeared the name of Paul Clemenceau, brother of Tiger Georges. The French society controls the Union Espagnole d'Explosifs of Bilbao, Spain, its president being Pierre Chalbaud of Paris, its vice-president Juan T. de Gandarias, a Spaniard. On the administrative council appear the names of Dr. Aufschlaeger, a German, who is its vice-president and who is also director of numerous German chemical and explosives works, including Dynamit A. G. (formerly Alfred Nobel A. G.), and Harold Mitchell of the British South African Explosives Co., also numerous French and Spanish gentlemen of the nobility. Thus the old dynamite international is shown partly, if not entirely, reconstituted.

In Japan the armament-makers unite again in the Mitsui company. Mitsui is part owner of the Nippon Petroleum Co., the Mining company, the Medajima Aircraft Co., the Taisho Marine and Fire Insurance Company, and the Nippon Steel Works. The Nippon Steel Works are controlled by Vickers. The French connection is through the Franco-Japanese Bank, founded with the collaboration of Schneider-Creusot whose annual report recently announced that in twenty-five plants Mitsui now employed 100,000 men, and "our bank has acquired important participation in various activities of the Mitsui group, a group destined to have a fine future."

In 1903 the Wright Brothers flew an airplane; in 1933 airplanes were being built for war purposes by England, France, and Germany, and in 1933 Skoda in Poland and Mitsui in Japan were manufacturing Wright motors for war planes, reports the Union of Democratic Control. Colt, Gatling, Hiram Maxim, Harvey with his armour plate, Hotchkiss, Remington, Peabody, Gardner, Pratt and Whitney, John P. Holland with his submarine, and now the peaceful Wright Brothers are having their inventions internationalized by the war-traffickers.

Fokker, the Dutchman, sold his famous airplane to the Germans because the Allies could not see its superiority. The Fokker helped German air superiority until the last days of the war. Now the Fokker Aviation Corporation of America, in which General Motors owns 41 per cent of the common stock, is manufacturing war planes for America, while other Fokker companies are doing the same for other countries. The United Aircraft and Transportation Company, Inc., a combination of a dozen American companies, supplies not only the American navy, but Cuba, Peru, Brazil, and China.

The Fairey Aviation Co., Ltd., is now one of the biggest British companies and one of the largest furnishers of war planes for the world. It supplies Australia, Ireland, Argentina, Chile, Holland, Portugal, Japan, Greece, and Belgium. It has a factory at Gossillies, Belgium. Organized in 1928, its dividends now are about 10 per cent a year and its profit in 1931 was £184,000. Members of Parliament who hold stock are Sir Harry Hope, 500 shares; Sir G. Dalrymple-White, 400; Oswald Lewis 1,400; and Major G. Lloyd George, 500.

Other British aviation manufacturers who do an international business are: Armstrong-Siddeley Development Co., which owns almost all the A. V. Roe (the famous "Avroe" machine which all American aviators knew in the war) stock; Blackburn Aeroplane & Motors Co., Bristol Aeroplane Co., Vickers (Aviation), Ltd., Napier & Sons, Ltd., and Rolls-Royce, Ltd.

In France Breguet (Société Anonyme des Ateliers d'Aviation Louis Breguet) supplies France, Belgium, Spain, Greece, Poland, Yugoslavia, Turkey, Argentina, China, and Japan.

When today the world sees British and American airplanes fighting each other in South America and in the Far East it must realize that the next war in which any major power is engaged will inevitably find the airplanes its own citizens have sold (for profit) being used to spy on its own army and navy and kill its own sailors and soldiers. In other words, the aviation international takes its place with the dynamite, the rifle, and the gunpowder internationals of pre-airplane days.

In Switzerland, where the French and Germans did a magnificent business of buying and selling poisons and steel during the war, the armament international has been revived.

There are three large companies making arms in Switzerland: the Schweitzerische Industriegesellschaft Neuhausen, the Oerilikon, and the Soleure. The first makes 75 per cent of the small arms, and the capital is Swiss. This concern has refused certain foreign orders. But on the other hand Oerilikon and Soleure deliver nothing to Switzerland. They make anti-aircraft and anti-tank guns, and on one occasion were accused of contravening the St. Petersburg convention by making small explosive bullets. The capital and the board of directors appear to be exclusively German.

But apparently the international armament-makers, notably the Germans, who need a foreign supply of guns for the next war, are powerful enough to keep the Swiss plants going.

Among the other great raw material internationals, all of which are related to the armament business, are:

The International Steel Entente or Stahlkartel (1926)

Cartel Européen de l'Aluminium (1928)

Consortium du Mercure

Entente Franco-Allemande de la Potasse

Frust des Couleurs d'Aniline entre les Producteurs d'Allemagne et de France.

The last named, the chemical, color, and aniline trust, united the poison-gas manufacturers of France and Germany, inasmuch as almost all war gas comes from their factories. The French consortium is related to the Kuhlmann establishments and the I. G. Farben of Frankfort. The members are: Theodore Laurent, vice-president of the Comité des Forges; Duchemin, president of the Confederation Générale de la Production Française; Marlo, president of the Chambre Syndicale des Forces Hydrauliques; Ernest Mercier; Hermann Buecher, president of the board, A. E. G. (the German General Electric); Professor Bosch, inventor with Professor Haber of the nitrogen-from-the-air process, chief of the I. G. Farben; Poensgen, director-general of the Rheinische Stahlwerke; and von Papen, president, council of administrators, of Germania.

works. Le Temps reports that the Aciéries de Longwy controls the new firm and Alexandre Dreux is president of both. "But," says the Union of Democratic Control, "although Roechling sold to Dreux much of his plant to form the Lorraine firm, he kept in the Saar at Voelklingen important steel-works, the Eisen und Stahlwerke. Until last September the sales medium of Roechling in France was the Société Française des Forges et Aciéries de la Sarre—French only in name, for it was formed by Roechling money and belonged exclusively to him. In past times Roechling stimulated Pan-German propaganda in the Saar, particularly when negotiations with the Comité des Forges were in process, choosing that moment to address 10,000 Sarrois, proclaiming himself the sworn enemy of France!

"An important step in this Franco-German Steel Trust was taken on October 4, 1932, when, according to Usine, the paper of the Comité des Forges, the Lorraine Minière (the French group of M. Dreux) had just taken a share in the Société des Forges et Aciéries de la Sarre (the German group of Herr Roechling), and that this fusion would now work under the name Lorsar. The Lorraine Minière board of directors' report, which was read to the shareholders on December 17, 1932, said that the share taken was 50 per cent. Thus Lorsar, which has the monopoly of the sale of steel of the Lorraine Minière and of the Roechling group, is composed of half French capital (from the Dreux group) and half German capital (the Roechling group). It is this alliance of French and German nationalists which is a source of supply for the arms used for national defence. But that is not the whole story. At the general meeting of the Lorraine Minière et Metallurgique on December 17, 1932, it was reported that Lorsar was represented on the board of directors of the Lorraine Minière and that Lorsar had become an important shareholder of the firm.

"Thus Roechling has increased his market by the increased contacts with the French steel firm, and the resulting possibilities of orders in the building up of the French national defence schemes, whilst M. Dreux has strengthened his contacts with the German steel industry, so that he will be able to reap the full benefits of German rearmaments."

fortifications of the German frontiers, which cost billions of francs, the Société Lorraine obtained one order for 2,500 tons of bar steel at 626 fifty francs a ton. The steel-and-concrete Chinese wall is now complete. On this wall thousands, perhaps millions, of French and German soldiers will bleed to death in the next war. Meanwhile Herr Roechling, the Nazi patriot, and M. Dreux, the French patriot, have already shared a profit.

HE charge that the armament-makers not only intrigue among the nations to fight one another, but actually start conflicts, is fully proven in the war between Sir Basil Zaharoff and Kemal Pasha.

When England and France told Zaharoff they were tired and could give neither political nor financial support, the armament-maker himself equipped and financed the war in Asia Minor. The Greeks advanced after France and Italy had stolen islands and a small part of the Anatolian coast. With Vickers guns, Zaharoff money, and the political leadership of old Venizelos, Greece at first triumphed on the way to Angora—and the oil-fields. Victory perched on the Zaharoff machine guns in 1920 and 1921.

In these circumstances Lieutenant-Colonel Walter Guinness arose in the House of Commons to ask Lloyd George to explain. There had been rumours that the Prime Minister had approved Zaharoff's war in Turkey. Lloyd George had once been Minister

* ^ *

of Munitions and had repaid Zaharoff's manufacturing activity by making him Sir Basil. Both were friends of Venizelos. In reply to the republication of a report that "a beautiful Greek woman who often passed days at Chequers, having been introduced through the kind offices of Basil Zaharoff," Ralph Thompson received, via Current History, a letter from Lady Domini Crosfield, née Domini Elliadi, "neither confirming nor denying this allegation, although she stated that she was acquainted with Zaharoff." Lloyd George was a Grecophile and the moment Greece was defeated there was a storm in the Commons.

Sir Henry Wilson, British field marshal, told the House of Lords: Mr. Lloyd George sustains Greece to please Zaharoff. Lord Beaverbrook turned his jingo press against the Prime Minister. Lord Eustace Percy attacked the Greek policy of the British government in the Lords.

"However mysterious he may be, Basil Zaharoff is not unknown in France. Before the war he showered gifts on our grateful institutions. On one occasion he purchased a journal which was only semi-political, but this was regarded as the whim of a Mæcenas. During the war he established an agency which was to keep the French press informed, and which was, in fact, the most skilful means of inspiring and directing it.

"When England has calculated what a policy à la Zaharoff, from Egypt to India, will cost her, she will also, without a doubt, be ready to make her peace with Islam."

The guns for both sides—with Zaharoff profits sure, win or lose—were sent on credit, and with the approval of the French and British governments. Payment was practically dependent on victory. The Quai d'Orsay and 10 Downing Street were in-

As for the armament king, his loss is estimated variously. The war he had made single-handed, single-pursed, is reported to have cost him a hundred million dollars. (A reliable French estimate is two billion francs, or \$80,000,000, to regain which "he instigated the Druse uprising in Syria and the Abd-el-Krim uprising in Morocco, and then went to Monte Carlo, not to play, but to recoup his fortune by buying the casino, reorganizing it to its primitive splendours, and then selling it with £5,000,000 to the good.") At all events, the Alexandrian, pan-Hellenic dream of empire and oil was ended.

It also taught Zaharoff that the old methods of arming both sides and instigating wars was much better than financing them.

The Tsar was the best customer of the Comité des Forges. The Soviets, by repudiating their debts to France, as France was to do several years later to the United States, hit the gun-, munitions- and warship-makers a heavy blow. Now it is the custom of nations to send armies and navies to collect their debts when the debtor is weak and there is little danger of the creditor getting hurt. That is why American marines are landed in Haiti but not in Havre, and it is one of the explanations of the American, French, British, and Japanese wars on Russia.

Poland in 1920 was permitted by the French to advance into

physician father, became the policy of the Comité des Forges it meant the encirclement and blockade of the Bolsheviki. In Poland the Comité des Forges has built twenty-two war plants, employing 60,000 men, and manufacturing vast amounts of war materials for the next war. Schneider is the chief backer. Through Skoda he established the Polska Zaklady Skody. In 1926 Skoda established the machine-gun works at Rembertov, dividing the stock in the company fifty-fifty with the Polish state. The Polish war budget, which reached 2,250,000,000 zloty in

The entire history of the cordon sanitaire—the Polish invasion of Russia, the Wilson expeditions to Archangel and Vladivostok, the atrocity propaganda campaign against Russia, the subsidizing by France and England of the four great civil-war leaders, the German plots to lead an "Allied" invasion, the food blockade, the financial blockade, and the refusal to recognize Russia by many nations—is the history of the intrigue of the armament-makers and their colleagues, the coal, iron, steel, and oil men.

The relationship between the forgers, the patriotic revolutionaries and the oil interests having been established, the chief of police asked permission of the national government to search the premises of Sir Henri Deterding's Royal Dutch-Shell Oil Company. But inasmuch as this concern is partly owned by the British government, the matter was hushed up in Berlin with the same suddenness with which it sprang to light. Some time later, however, the Soviet government officially accused Sir Henri of planning uprisings and plotting European wars against Russia.

"Sir Henri Deterding has again and again incited certain sections of Russia against the Soviets; in 1919 British banknotes were used to provoke the Kabardians and Mingrelains so that Great Britain might obtain control of the Transcaucasian routes; and in 1923 he stirred up the people of the Caucasus to an insurrection which was 'liquidated' in blood by the military forces of the Russian government. What Sir Henri Deterding is driving at is all too apparent: he cannot, of course, resist the seductiveness of the pipe lines from the oil wells of Baku which is the port of export all the way from the Black Sea to the Isthmus.

"Hence the unceasing crusade, in the press and elsewhere, against the 'oil robbers'—who are the Soviets of course—because forsooth, they nationalized both the British and American prewar oil concessions along with the rest of their natural resources."

On Armistice Day, 1930, eight Russians were tried in Moscow for conspiracy with foreign enemies. Professor Ramsin confessed that British, French, and other interests had planned an invasion. The signal was to be a frontier incident. Rumania would declare war, and France, Poland, and England would join. Generals Loukomsky and Denikin, with a mixed force of 600,000 men, including a great number of emigrés, would march on Moscow. Among the financial backers, it was testified, were Poincaré, the head of Vickers, Ltd., Churchill, and Sir Henri Deterding, whom Moscow had previously accused of planning uprising and plotting wars.

The French and British called the plot fantastic. Sir Henri said: "The Bolsheviks have to concoct such stories to disguise the fact their whole system is breaking."

In 1923 Herr Arnold Rechberg, the German potash king, a leading industrialist who was a power in the European steel cartel, informed this writer that a great plan for war on Russia had been completed by French, German, and British industrialists. Rechberg arranged an interview with the putative leader of the army of invasion, General von Hoffmann, who had dictated the peace of Brest-Litovsk to Trotsky and confirmed to the world the fear that a German peace would be an unparalleled disaster. In fact this enemy of Bolshevism was in reality its stepfather. Bolshevism was the natural reaction to von Hoffmann's imperialism.

"The civilized world must crush Bolshevism," the would-be leader said. "Europe is in danger. America is in danger. You are going to America. Could you give President Coolidge my views on this subject? The American people, I know, are a bit disgusted with the outcome of the war. They would not now fight

With variations, this idea was presented to the business, financial, and political leaders of the world. Lloyd George frowned when Rechberg favored war. But the French ambassador to Berlin, de Margerie, sent Rechberg to the Comité des Forges in Paris. He presented the war plan to MM. Robert Pinot and Charles Laurent. M. Loucheur was interested. M. Coty, supernationalist, published it in Figaro. Eventually Rechberg presented it to President Poincaré and Marshal Foch. According to Rechberg the famous general approved. But American money was not forthcoming. General von Hoffmann tried to raise it from the members of the steel cartel, the Comité des Forges, and finally from the British and American oil men, but the sums pledged were not enough to supply an army of 100,000 men.

With von Hoffmann's death the plans of the war-makers did not end. They enlisted Lieutenant-General A. D. Otto von Muelbach as commander. He gathered the Stahlhelm and the Bermond-Avaloff officers, the notorious Captain Ehrhardt and other monarchists, to his banner. "Uprooting Bolshevism before it sets the whole world on fire," he said to a gathering of these officers, "will be the best way of founding our pan-Europa. To prevent the Goetterdämmerung of Kultur we must strike now, for the time is dangerously short. . . ."

These projected German wars for confiscated Russian natural resources never materialized. But wars, revolutions, bloodshed, the objective of which is always oil, have marked post-Armistice history and, according to military leaders as well as politicians and economists, will become more important in the future. American companies have involved American armed forces in the Caribbean and American banking-houses, as amply proven by the 1933 Pecora investigations, have entangled American military and naval forces on foreign soil. To protect dividends and capital for the bankers who floated the loans and the individuals who held them, American marines have killed and been killed in many

"The losses among the French troops number thousands. All the hospitals in Morocco are filled with wounded. The number of killed, which has been kept carefully concealed, is large. From the Moroccan press we learn that every day French families are being informed of deaths of their children, in frequent cases several weeks after the event. It was the militarists and the financiers who desired to prosecute this veritable war, which Parliament never anticipated and never approved. The regions which have just been conquered contain rich deposits of minerals which are coveted by the Schneiders and by a certain large bank of Paris."

Thus a new era in exploration and exploitation is open in Morocco. Phosphates, lead and manganese can now be exported in great quantities for the Schneider works; iron, copper, and antimony, already located, can be mined, while prospecting for gold, silver, tin, oil, and coal can go on undisturbed in the mountains. Abd-el-Krim and the "bandits" of more recent date fought the French with rifles which bore the French marks: eventually

all the new mineral treasures will be turned into rifles and airplanes and perhaps gas, some of which, as in the past, will be sold to crush some new Abd-el-Krim who will attempt to free the Moroccans.

In underwriting the conflicts between the war lords of China the munitions-makers have become responsible indirectly for the opium traffic. In fact, the charge has been heard at the League of Nations that the armaments international is the leading exponent of the great narcotic trade in India, Persia, and China. To pay for the guns the war lords not only kill men and loot provinces, but they obtain their greatest revenue from the exploitation of opium and they have at times warned their creditors that if opium growing is curtailed the guns will not be paid for.

been enriched.

Japan has great armament works of her own. China, therefore, has been helped by the armament industry to become the largest buyer in the world. It is a recurrent paradox of the international gun trade that nations arm their enemies, and Japan is no exception, having in 1930 supplied China with 37½ per cent of the total imports of guns and powder. In the last three years China has been dealing with British, American, and French companies, shipping great quantities from Hamburg, which Skoda uses as a seaport. There is also evidence that Germany has been manufacturing armaments for export secretly. "It is particularly interesting to learn," says Lieutenant-Colonel Drew of the Canadian army, "that while Secretary of State Stimson was urging in the strongest terms the Japanese recognition of the Kellogg-Briand Pact, the Nine-Power Pact, and the Covenant of the League of Nations, American armament manufacturers were shipping to Japan nearly \$200,000,000 worth of war equipment."

Despite temporary bans on arms shipment to Japan and China, both nations, thanks to intermediaries and the international freedom of Shanghai, have never had difficulty in getting as great a

Concrete instances reported in 1924 were the direct cause of civil war between Marshal Tso-Lin and Wu Pei-fu. An Italian firm imported a quantity of weapons from a plant in Italy and stored it in Shanhaikwan and Tientsin. Chang Tso-Lin offered \$4,200,000 for the lot, or six times its worth. Although the offer was accepted and the money paid, the Chihli party, frightened, negotiated with the munitions company which accepted \$5,500,-000 and returned Chang his money.

Banditry, the Review points out, is made possible only through the importation and smuggling of arms. In 1923 the "Blue Express" was held up by the Lincheng bandits who had just received a shipment of European pistols and rifles. These same foreign powers protested this and other outrages, but did nothing to prevent their nationals from supplying the means. In the same year an Italian priest, Father A. Melotto, was kidnapped and murdered by bandits near Hankow, and Mussolini protested to the Chinese Foreign Office, but neither before nor after this

In 1927 the Soviets shipped large quantities of war supplies into China. Russia's red hand was seen behind the success of the Cantonese, who marched into Shanghai, planned to capture Peking and reunite China under the banner of the Kuomintang, which was founded by the nation's George Washington, Sun Yat-Sen. This war became a reality in America with the headlines "Americans Killed in Nanking; U. S. Warships Open Fire to Save Survivors." There was rioting against foreigners, who had been warned three days earlier to leave the city, but did not do so. America heard that one hundred had been killed and the Associated Press dispatch of "brutal treatment of American women" later was proven to have been verbal insults and some rough handling. Only one American was killed. No press dispatches mentioned the fact that American guns and European guns sold by enterprising salesmen had made the civil war possible.

With the Sino-Japanese War of 1930 the armament-makers did their best business in years. Paul Linebarger, a general legal adviser of the Chinese government, told the Foreign Affairs committee of the House of Representatives that American bankers and munitions-makers were aiding Japan against China to the extent of \$181,000,000 worth of war supplies. Walter Runciman, president of the Board of Trade in England, reported millions of dollars' worth of shipments from France and England to both sides. From Hamburg, crates containing acids for making explosives were shipped, labelled pianos. Chemicals for poison gas were found in German ports en route to Japan. France sent Creusot tanks and Hotchkiss machine guns to both sides. Skoda sent grenades and cartridges. Paul Faure on February 11, 1932 told the Chamber of Deputies that French armament-men were coöperating with Germans in arming Japan. He gave the Cham-

ber documents. One was an order from the files of the Schneiders for:

"One thousand kilogrammes of powder B.G.4, for Mauser gun cartridges to be sent to the Mauser factory in Leipzig. Order, Japan, 6,907." Another document read, "We, the undersigned, Schneider and Co., masters of the Creusot works, solicit authorization to ship to Paul Capit, at Palmrain, Baden (Germany), the powder designated below coming from the Pont-de-Buis powder works: 2,200 kilogrammes of powder B.M.; 11,200 kilogrammes of powder B.M.13. Our shipment will include sixty-six cases." The Minister of War, answering an interpellation, said that this was "a powder for artillery, evidently a secret powder," apparently another and more modern instance of the munitions-makers handing over secrets to foreign governments, including potential enemies.

China became a large buyer of American airplanes. A salesman and aviation company scout, Bert Hall of the Lafayette Escadrille and the A.E.F., became instructor for the Nanking government, sold it planes, changed to the Cantonese government, organized its air force, and sold it planes also. He was known as General Chan. He did considerable business in other arms also, and when the war lords began fighting among themselves he took a check for \$10,000 which one of them gave him for rifles because he was owed that amount and more, for other war materials. This complicated his sales efforts, so he left for Japan, hoping to do business with China's enemies; being a professional soldier, he had no more emotion than the professional armament-maker. However, he was arrested, and the American consul having removed the extra-territorial protection by declaring him an importer of illegal firearms, Chan-Hall was sent to jail. (Regretfully the author chronicles the sad fate of an old friend, one of the rare American holders of the médaille militaire.)

The war in the Gran Chaco is more than a war between Bolivia and Paraguay for some malarial swamps; it is also a war between British and American oil interests. Americans are supplying airplanes, guns, and shells for both sides; British and French are doing the same. In the Leticia dispute between Peru and Colombia the armament international has cooperated without friction as is testified by dispatches from Rouen, France, in December, 1932. The docks of that seaport were crowded with French, British, and Austrian war materials. The Norwegian ship Tonsberg, bought by Colombia, took on the war materials from the British steamer Royal Highlander and the French freighter Zenon. The Tonsberg, rechristened Bogota, was towed to South America by the German seagoing tug Atlas. The French steamer Dinard, renamed Cordoba, had already been towed to the mouth of the Amazon. The cargoes consisted of French 75's, Austrian 88's "packed without shells and consigned as ordinary merchandise."

Some time later Santiago, Chile, reported that, despite the reports of a settlement, the Leticia dispute remained "feverish with preparations for war" because Peru was making big purchases of materials, pushing troop concentrations, and might involve the neutral neighbours, Brazil and Ecuador. "War cannot be avoided in view of Colombian and Peruvian preparations."

With the exception of discussing the ethical right or wrong of the American armament-makers who protested President Hoover's embargo idea, the American press has had little to say regarding American arming of its friendly neighbours. Few newspapers have taken the strong view of the St. Paul Pioneer Press:

in the Chaco going.

"It has made possible the perennial civil war in China.

significant gain for peace."

Likewise in England, only the liberal press has supported a Sino-Japanese embargo, while in France not a single bourgeois newspaper has had any word but applause for the Schneider and Hotchkiss annual profit statements. There must be good pecuniary reasons for this attitude of the pro-war press.

Power of the Arms Ring in World Politics

OW powerful is the armament international in world affairs?

Before and since the World War the munitions lobby in Washington, openly denounced by one American President after the other, has hampered or defeated the proposals of Wilson, Harding, Coolidge, Hoover, and Franklin Roosevelt to curb armament trade with warring countries. Today when American admirals and generals point with intensified alarm to the war clouds in the Pacific, Japanese ships leave American ports every day with war materials.

Senators and representatives from the rifle, powder, airplane, and warship manufacturing states have almost unanimously and every year voted against limitation of armaments, against embargoes to warring nations, against embargoes to the aggressive nations (Roosevelt's proposal), against rifles for Mexico and Nicaragua and other Central American countries where the

American rifles are almost exclusively used to kill American marines.

A survey of the latest eighty military and naval measures shows that Senators and representatives from Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, and Illinois always vote to increase the expenditure for armaments. These men represent the twelve states which produce all the munitions in America.

Representatives from munitions states voted 77 per cent to strike out the war-navy consolidation amendment; 83 per cent against the measure to abolish the C.M.T.C.; 82 per cent for increased appropriations for organized reserves; 79 per cent to increase appropriations for the said organization.

Connecticut is ranked as the leading munitions state, and Bridgeport, which now has a Socialist mayor (Creusot, Woolwich, and Spandau, curiously enough, elected socialist or labour members in France, England, and Germany), was known as the Essen of America. Connecticut produces half of America's armaments. According to Thomas' Register of American Manufacturers, a comparative statement of the states manufacturing firearms shows that Connecticut has four corporations, each with a capitalization of over a million dollars, and one of over \$100,000; Massachusetts follows with three over \$1,000,000, and one

Not only is the armament ring a power in Washington and in Geneva, but its heads as well as its agents sit in the House of Commons, the House of Lords, the Chambre des Députés, the French Senate, the French White House, the Reichstag, the Italian Camera. Prime Ministers and other members of the cabinet of many nations are directors or stockholders of important munitions works. They are also directors of government and private banks. Thus the combination of the armament-makers, national politics and finance has created a great world power.

Schneider, the honorary president of the Comité, and other armament-makers dominate the union. In the occupation of the Ruhr by the Poincaré army of 1923, the hand of the Comité was openly seen; the agitation to annex the Saar basin to France is the work of the steelmasters' association, and when General Foch called the war correspondents of the American army to Trier in 1918 and explained to them why the safety and the commerce of France depended on the occupation of the left bank of the

The Comité represents the steel industry of France, openly united to play politics and direct national policies. The French industry is dominated by three big corporations, says Professor Delaisi, the economist: Schneider-Creusot, the oldest and best known, the Aciéries de la Marine Homécourt, directed by M. Darcy, and Chatillon-Commentry, directed by MM. Milinos and Guillain.

These and other related companies manufacture peace as well as war materials. They are linked in the Syndicate Council of Manufacturers of War Materials of which Léon Lévy of Chatilon-Commentry is president, M. Magnin of Marine Homécourt, M. de Freycinet of Schneider, and M. Duplomb of the Hotchkiss Company, vice-presidents.

The warship-builders also have an association, and all these firms have the same general offices at 63 Boulevard Haussmann, the same general secretary, Robert Pinot, who is also secretary of the Comité des Forges.

"Just as Vickers traditionally selects the War Minister in England," says Jean Galtier-Boissière editor of le Crapouillot, and his associate, René Lefebvre, "so in France the heavy industries always have one of their members in the government, a Manaut, a Gignoux, or a Charles Dumont, and the French ambassador to Germany is always designated by them. Charles Laurent, who was associated with the Rathenau group before the war, had been president of the Union des Industries Métallurgiques et Minières. François-Poncet was an attaché of the Comité des Forges when he went on the Allied economic mission to the United States headed by Eugène Schneider, and, during the occupation of the Ruhr he was head of the information service. When he presented himself for election in 1924 he was director of the Société d'Etudes et d'Informations Economiques

The Franco-Japanese Bank was established to handle the business between Schneider-Creusot and other members of the Comité des Forges which manufacture war materials, and the Japanese government in its prosecution of the war on China. Its president, Dumont, was once French Minister of Marine. It may be recalled that at a time those nations which still remembered their protestations of horror over the German U-boat campaign were asking the League of Nations to abolish that weapon, M. Dumont said: "Submarines are . . . the weapon of the poor. . . . The submarine is a weapon against the rule of power. It could be the support of the righteous. . . . It must be retained. . . ."

The power of the ironmasters in office is again shown in the contract which M. Etienne, as Minister of War, gave to the Société de Tréfilerie du Havre, a war company in which he had an interest. M. Etienne did not consult the Chamber or obtain its authorization secretly. He gave orders for materials, and they were carried out.

121

industrialists. Millerand, before he became President of France, had been attorney for Schneider in the Ouenza affair. When Georges was Premier of France his brother, Albert Clemenceau, was attorney for Schneider, and Paul, who is today one of the big men in the Comité des Forges, was consulting engineer for Vickers as well as Schneider, also director of the Dynamite Centrale and member of the syndicate of manufacturers of war materials.

On the opposite fence we find the great enemy of the Comité des Forges, the great European, Aristide Briand. His policy was peace. At lunch with Stresemann in 1925 he proposed the Locarno pact which gave France and Germany, and for that matter the rest of Europe, five peaceful years. At times Briand was premier, more often Foreign Minister. At times the Comité was able to keep him out of office—but not for long.

President Doumer, director of the Laminoirs, Hauts Fourneaux, Forges et Fonderies de la Providence, an affiliate of the Comité des Forges, was assassinated by a monarchist madman. The name of Briand for President was proposed. It was the logical reward for a man grown old in service to his country, equal to the title of "Lord" for Asquith or Ramsay MacDonald. Briand was given to understand that he was forgiven by the armament-makers and was for a little while supported by the large press.

But suddenly le Temps and other papers under the ownership or control of the Comité began a calumniatory campaign which blasted Briand's chances, and the Chamber of Deputies elected Albert Lebrun of Lorraine, ex-member of the board of directors of the Aciéries de Micheville (member of the Comité), President of France.

The latest show of force of Eugène Schneider and the Comité was made against Premier Daladier. As War Minister, Daladier had consistently attacked the great armament budgets in the hope of a reduction, and had always failed. On one occasion he addressed the Chamber:

"I believe that from 1908 to 1912 the average military ex-

penditures of our country amounted to 860,000,000 francs, which would prove, if my calculations are correct, that the average present expenditures represent twice as much as the expenditures during the normal pre-war period. The result is that victorious France, which applauds speeches in honour of Locarno and the Kellogg Pact, has imposed on itself military expenditures at least equal to, and in many years greater than, those the country had to meet when it was threatened by the most redoubtable invasion that ever assailed it in the entire course of its tragic history.

"In the entire French national budget how much money goes into all forms of national defence, including the army, aviation, colonies, and the navy? These expenditures represent a total of 12,207,000,000 francs, and when you have eliminated from your budget the sums needed to pay the debt that is weighing our country down and consider only the expenditures on productive ministries and on civil service, you will find that all of these do not total more than 12,098,000,000 francs. I have just listened with the greatest pleasure to discussions about foreign armies and the war budgets of foreign countries and I should like some one to inform me on this point: what country in the world, except France, is spending more money on national defence than on all its productive and civil expenditures put together?"

When he became Premier, Daladier in October, 1933, found himself facing a deficit of 7,718,000,000 francs; he proposed a budget which would meet it by 226,000,000 through a scries of new taxations and economies. Léon Blum, Socialist leader, proposed the state monopoly of the armament industry and Daladier proposed heavy taxes on it. The Daladier bill provided that none should engage in the manufacture and commerce in war materials in France or its colonies without authorization of the War Ministry and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs; that a representative of the government control each factory and inspect its books; that the government participate in the profits of all war industries in proportion to budgetary credits voted for war-material purchases; strict government supervision of the manufacture of firearms for private use and for export and import, and finally a tax of 20 per cent of the value of manufactured war materials, to be paid by the manufacturer the moment the goods leave the factories.

Something has already been said of the British government's supporting the warship-makers in their salesmanship in Greece, Turkey, South America, and the Far East, and more will be said in the chapter dealing with governmental participation in gun-running. The armament international has never failed to have its representatives or its large stockholders in the British Cabinet, and many men in Parliament. When in 1912 Lord Beresford told the House of Commons that a certain type of automatic rifle was necessary for national defence, he did not add that he was president of Henry Andrews & Co., Ltd., which manufactured this recommended gun.

More serious is the charge that the armament-makers, through their influence in the Cabinets and Parliament, have "conspired to cripple and destroy Woolwich Arsenal," the national armament works, which Gilbert Slater, M.A., D.Sc., made at the end of the war. He proves that Woolwich always furnished armaments at a lower price than the private companies—for example, carriages for 18-pounder quick-firing guns at £343/14/- compared with £672/7/- charged by private contractors, and states that an order for 216 torpedoes went to a favoured company despite the Woolwich price, £48,000 lower.

Just before the war a committee of workingmen, of which Arthur Henderson was a leading member, protested the crippling of the Woolwich works. "What was the magic by which the armament ring was able to control the government and the War Office and constrain them into crippling the national factories?" asks Slater, and replies: "The answer is to be found in Who's Who, the Stock Exchange Year Book, and similar publications. The directorates and list of shareholders in the armament-ring

"Now, who are the shareholders? It would be too long for me to give more than a short selection from the list, but I find that honourable members in this House are very largely concerned: indeed, it would be impossible to throw a stone on the benches opposite without hitting a member who is a shareholder in one or other of these firms. I am sorry for the sudden hilarity of my honourable friends, for the shareholders in these armament firms are not confined to Unionist members. I find that the bishops are very well represented. Among the shareholders in Armstrong I find the name of an hon member opposite as the holder of 5,000 shares . . . the member . . . who asked seven questions in five weeks in 1909 . . . the scare year . . . as to when orders for gun-mountings would be placed. The hon member for Osgold-cross Division of Yorkshire (I congratulate him on his election

125

last week as hon. president of the Free Church Council) is the great Imperialist. I have often seen his portrait in the jingo press as that of a man who placed patriotism and Empire before all considerations of sordid selfishness. I find that he is the holder of 3,200 shares in John Brown, and 2,100 shares in Cammell-Laird. . . .

"I want to say one or two words about the Harvey Trust, which was formed a few years ago . . . for the purpose of working certain rights in the manufacture of armour plate, and it combined together the interests in Britain of Vickers, Armstrong, Beardmore, John Brown, Fairfield, Cammell-Laird, the French Steel Company, Schneider, and others.

"I find in the list of shareholders here the name of the present Colonial Secretary, and the name of the present Postmaster-General also figures as a shareholder in Armstrong. I said something about the cosmopolitan character of the shareholders list. Of course, in such a combination as the Harvey Steel Trust, it is only to be expected that a large number of foreign names would appear. I referred a moment or two back to the case of the Admiral of the Fleet, who had been appointed managing director of one of these undertakings. That is not the only instance in which men have been taken from the service of the Crown and placed directly in influential positions under this armament ring. There is, of course, a reason for it. I will not give it in my own words, but in those of a representative trade organ. There is a paper called Arms and Explosives, devoted to the interests of the armament trade, and in September last this paper wrote . . . and I ask the special attention of the House to the quotation, because it puts the matter far more clearly than I could do:

"'Contractors naturally are very keen to avail themselves of the services of prominent officers who have been associated with the work in which the contractors are interested. The chief thing is that they know the ropes, since the retired officer, who keeps in touch with his old comrades, is able to lessen some of these inconveniences, either by gaining early information of coming events or by securing the ear of one who would not accord like favours to a civilian. . . . Kissing undoubtedly goes by favour, and some of the things that happen might be characterized as corruption. Still, judged by all fair tests the result is good. The

"Then we have the case of Rear-Admiral Ottley, naval attaché to Russia, Japan, France, United States, and Italy . . . so that he will 'know the ropes' on both sides. He was the secretary of the Committee of Imperial Defence, and he went from a position like this, a responsible adviser of the government on these important matters, to be the director of a firm which is making huge profits out of government contracts. . . ."

Still more specific was Mr. Newbold, who wrote: "We are all familiar with, and perhaps now some of us will have a clearer understanding of the meaning of, that specious plea so often made, that questions concerning the defence of the Empire should be removed from the dusty arena of party politics. The trust has taken good care that this is, as far as possible, already the case. It has its champions in both political camps; it has made friends with the hand that feeds it; it has left no stone unturned upon its triumphant way.

"Lord Aberconway, nephew of John Bright and a founder of the Eighty and National Liberal Club . . . is chairman of John Brown & Co., Ltd.

"Lord Pirrie . . . is chairman of Harland & Wolff, Ltd., and

debenture trustee of John Brown & Co., Thomas Firth & Sons, and Coventry Ordnance Co.

"Lord Ribblesdale, the fourth advocate of 'peace, retrenchment, and reform,' in the gilded chamber, stated at the last meeting of the Nobel dynamite trust:

"'Our steady increase in business is due in no small degree to the constantly growing demand for war material. . . . In view of recent events in southeastern Europe, it does not, however, appear that anything approaching a condition of universal disarmament is within measurable distance.'

"Opposite these gentlemen sit the following directors: The Marquis of Graham, Earl Grey, Earl of Denbigh and Desmond, Baron Balfour of Burleigh, and Baron Hillingdon, besides a swarm of shareholders, among whom the most illustrious are Lord Midleton (formerly Mr. Brodrick) and the great proconsul of India, Earl Curzon of Kedleston.

"Earl Grey, late Governor-General of Canada and a vicepresident of the Navy League, is a debenture trustee of Armstrong, Whitworth & Co.

"Earl of Denbigh and Desmond, a vice-president of the Navy League and of the National Service League, is . . . a debenture trustee of the Fairfield Shipbuilding Co., part owners of the Canadian Shipbuilding Co.

"Lord Balfour, senior elder of the Kirk of Scotland, is a debenture trustee of Wm. Beardmore & Co., and the Coventry Ordnance Co.

"Lord Hillingdon represents Messrs. Glynn, Mills, Currie & Co., the bankers, as well as Vickers, Ltd., and Wm. Beardmore & Co., of which he is a debenture trustee.

nobility of Aberconway; Godfrey M. Palmer, shareholder in Palmer's Shipbuilding Co.; Sir Stephen Furness, member of the National Service League and director of Richardson, Westgarth & Co.; Sir J. Compton-Rickett, treasurer of the Free Church Council; and Sir J. B. Lonsdale, member of the Solemn League of Ulster, the former interested in John Brown & Co. and Cammell, Laird & Co., the latter in Armstrong, Whitworth & Co.

"The churches are represented by the bishops of Chester and Newcastle, both members of the National Service League and shareholders in Vickers, Ltd.; the bishops of Adelaide, Newport, and Hexham, interested in Vickers, Ltd., Armstrong, Whitworth & Co., and John Brown & Co.; Dean Inge of St. Paul's, like Baron Kinnaird, president of the Y.M.C.A., and Sir Walter Runciman, a well-known Wesleyan, are shareholders in Vickers, Ltd.

"After this 'laying on of hands' one is not so horrified to find that the chairman of Armstrong, Whitworth & Co., Ltd., has been given the order by a grateful government of Commander Jesus Christ of Portugal."

What is the situation today? Among members of the British government Lord Hailsham was a stockholder in Vickers, Ltd., but disposed of his shares in 1933. When Sir John Simon, Minister of Foreign Affairs, sold out his stock in the Imperial Chemical Industries, the London Star of March 9, 1933, reported this instance, with the following editorial comment:

"Sir John Simon has taken a step which every lover of peace will recognize as a handsome effort to clear himself of any sug-

"He has read through with careful attention the pamphlet The Secret International' which the Union of Democratic Control published on the international activities of the armament interests, and he could not help being impressed by its cold statement of facts."

The trustees of the Wesleyan Chapel Purposes, Ltd., of Manchester, after reading the same pamphlet suddenly realized that the Handley Page Company was a war firm and holding stock in it was not quite in accordance with the Bible, so they decided to advise the Swanage Circuit to sell and invest the money in other securities. But numerous Members of Parliament hold impressive amounts of war stocks. High-placed officials and soldiers among the directors of Vickers-Armstrong, in a list compiled by the U.D.C. April 14, 1932, included:

Sir Mark Webster Jenkinson, former controller of the Department of Factory Audit and Costs at the Ministry of Munitions, and Chief Liquidator of Contracts at the Ministry of Munitions after the war.

Sir A. G. Hadcock was an Associate Member of the Ordnance Committee, and like Commander C. W. Craven, Colonel J. B. Neilson, and Major-General G. P. Dawnay and other directors, had previous military experience.

In Japan today the world sees the renewal of German Kruppism of the twenty years preceding the World War. The members of the Cabinet and the royal family are the large stockholders of the armament companies, and the militarists control Japan more thoroughly than the Junkers ever ruled Germany. Baron Mitsui has recently been accused of being the real instigator of the Chinese boycott of Japanese commerce. The boycott was considered an act of provocation by Japan and Japan marched on Shanghai and up to the Great Wall, while the Mitsui enterprises boomed with war orders.

In Poland, Rumania, Czechoslovakia, the national governments make it a policy to acquire 50 per cent of the stock of whatever armament works exist or are established. Skoda in Czechoslovakia presents a distressing problem. Both President Masaryk and Eduard Beneš, who holds the post of Premier or Foreign Minister and who is the strong man of the nation, are pacifists at heart as well as oratory. Not only does the Masaryk-Benes government own half the Skoda works, but Skoda is the leading manufacturer of the country, and any League of Nations decision banning completely the exportation of war materials or cutting production to a bare national minimum would seriously cripple Czechoslovakian finances and industry.

Of the financial power of the armament international more will be said, and much more of its activities as a peace-disturber and its control of the world press in militarizing public opinion and protecting its profits.

Armament-makers Corrupt the Press

campaigns depend almost entirely on the press.

The corruption of public opinion by the armament-makers has been one of the great secrets of the past fifty years. When newspapers in the name of patriotism attacked pacifists as traitors, when they sabotaged international conferences and ridiculed world peace movements, no one suspected them of being owned by the munitions manufacturers. Today, in fact, few readers know who owns and directs many of the journals they believe in. But since the World War many startling facts have come to light.

For example, the readers of the Pittsburgh Gazette-Times, now deceased, never understood the motives of the owner and editor who daily in editorials and in biased and distorted news dispatches held disarmament up to ridicule, attacked all peace movements, opposed union labour, high wages, upheld child labour, boosted the Navy League and the so-called patriotic defence and security societies, shouted "Bolshevism" when anyone proposed a "New Deal," attacked the Christian Churches for

Such an editorial was accepted as honest opinion by the public which did not know its inspiration. Its inspiration was the late Senator George T. Oliver, owner of the newspaper, owner of a steel plant, owner of 1,000 shares of stock in the United States Steel Corporation, owner of a large interest in copper-mines, owner of 7,700 shares in the Pittsburgh Coal Co., as he testified in the Senate lobbying investigation, and owner of the largest two newspapers in western Pennsylvania. The above-mentioned editorial appeared during the preparedness campaign in the United States, at a time billions of dollars were being spent for munitions by the Allies. The Sage Foundation report that "cruel and inhuman treatment" was accorded labour in the steel-mills, including those owned by Senator Oliver, was suppressed by the Oliver newspapers but armament orders were encouraged.

When Nobel bought the Stockholm Aftonbladet he did not do it secretly or for the purpose of fomenting war or selling munitions, as many of his colleagues did later. He stated, simply: "It is a peculiarity of mine never to consider my private interests. My policy as a newspaper-owner would be something like this: To oppose armaments and deliveries of mediæval weapons, and to advocate that the manufacture of arms, if it already exists, should be confined to each country. For if there is a branch of industry that must needs be independent of export to other countries, it is the industry of defence. And since Sweden has factories which produce arms, it would be shortsighted and ridiculous not to hold them to this course. I wish to own a newspaper because I have a desire to inspire and inculcate a very liberal tendency in its editorial policies. There is enough sour dough—there is no need to increase the supply in this country, where the intelligence of the people is 500 per cent ahead of the government."

Years before the World War, Zaharoff through Vickers, became a power in British journalism. In 1910 he invaded France, buying stock worth a quarter of a million (gold) francs in a company called Quotidiens Illustrés, which published illustrated papers, the best known of which is Excelsior. During the war he advanced a million and a half francs to M. Turot for the Radio Agency, which was the only competitor to Havas in France and which therefore furnished news to the competitors of the Associated Press. All Zaharoff-owned publicity organs have consistently supported the French viewpoint at peace and disarmament conferences and helped wreck them.

The controlling stock in le Temps is held by François de Wendel and M. de Peyerinhoff, who is president of the Comité des Houillères, or the coal-mine owners' association. It was acquired in 1931, just in time to use it for sabotaging the Geneva Peace Conferences and supporting Japanese aggression against China. The Comité placed Jacques Chastinet, a leading oil man, on the board of directors. Emile Mireaux, agent of the mine-owners was their choice in the Temps council and he also succeeded François Poncet as director of the Société d'Etudes et d'Informations Economiques, the press bureau founded in 1920 by Robert Pinot, secretary-general of the Comité des Forges.

Two employees of the Comité des Forges are André Tardieu, several times Premier of France, representative of big business and Fascist elements, and François Poncet, now ambassador to Germany, both of whom passed their apprenticeship with the armament manufacturers as heads of the Comité's press bureau.

Of the French press in the armament race before the World War, Professor Delaisi wrote contemporarily:

"A special agent, a talented journalist, long attached to the Echo de Paris, is responsible for distributing among the journals the golden manna intended for stimulating their patriotic zeal. Not a journal of any importance but receives marks of his generosity. One day one sees the Matin devote a whole page to the dock constructed by Creusot at Bordeaux; another day it is the Temps which publishes a luxurious illustrated supplement in honour of the armament firms. . . . The weeklies . . . Science et Vie (which belongs to the Petit Parisien) and Je Sais Tout recently published eloquent articles on battleship-building and on the need of field howitzers. Alongside these articles, on the cover pages, were to be seen advertisements paid for by Schneider and Co. No doubt that powerful firm does not suppose that the readers of these magazines will ever buy a 75-ton gun or a 15,000-ton

cruiser. . . . The advertisement pays for the reading matter. And what else should the review do than give whole-hearted support to an armaments campaign calculated to benefit so good a client?

"A violent and audacious campaign is being carried out against disarmament; it is being done through the Echo de Paris, and its political leader-writer, M. de Kerillis. To fill at the same time the coffers of his propaganda organisation and those of the Echo de Paris, M. de Kerillis has launched an appeal for funds, which cynically is called 'the campaign against disarmament' (Echo de Paris, March 10, 1932), and whilst he announces that the propaganda is going to be intensified in their district, he puts in the headlines 'The Struggle against Disarmament' (Echo de Paris, March 16, 1932).

"On the subscription lists which this big reactionary paper publishes one sees several anonymous subscriptions of 25,000, of 50,000, and even of 100,000 francs. It is quite evident that these anonymous gifts hide the big interests which would lose by disarmament.

"Thus it is the artillery-manufacturer—namely, the cannon merchants—who fill the coffers of the Echo de Paris."

The world press, at this time, accused Japan of violating the Nine Power Treaty ("to respect the sovereignty, the independence, and the territories and administrative integrity of China"); the Kellogg-Briand, or Paris, Pact ("that the settlement or solution of all disputes or conflicts of whatever nature or whatever origin they may be, which may arise among them"—the high contracting parties—"shall never be sought except by pacific means"); and the League of Nations Covenant (Art. X., "to respect and preserve as against external aggression the territorial integrity and existing political independence of all members of the League" and Art. XVI., "should any member of the League resort to war in disregard to its covenants . . . it shall ipso facto be deemed to have committed an act of war against all of the members of the League of Nations").

The universal condemnation of Japanese imperialism was echoed in the French press for only a short time. For a little while the great Paris dailies spoke of the "noble" Chinese patriots, of the Japanese "bullies," of Chinese bravery and Japanese atrocities. Japan was the aggressor, the guilty party. All the big Paris dailies sent their special war correspondents who sang this same daily tune.

At this time Japan was relying on its own munitions. But in 1932 Japan found it needed more guns, more shells, more airplanes, more bombs, more armaments, and gave its order to Eugène Schneider. Millions of dollars were involved. Schneider and other members of the Comité des Forges founded the Franco-Japanese Bank to handle the new war trade. Immediately the Comité gave orders to the newspapers it controlled to go over to the Japanese side. The change was so sudden that the editors were forced to cable the war correspondents to begin supporting Japan the very next morning. In the Paris press the next day could be found delayed telegrams from the front praising the Chinese as heroes and fresh telegrams calling them bandits; old telegrams speaking of Japanese cruelties against the Chinese, and new telegrams relating for the first time Chinese atrocities

Krupp owned or controlled the two Berlin dailies, the Neueste Nachrichten and the Taegliche Rundschau, and the Rheinische Westfaelische Zeitung. Liebknecht in his exposure known as the Brandt-Kornwalzer affair, declared this armament-maker also had bought up the Etoile Belge and an Italian newspaper. The house published the International Review of all the Armies and Navies and a military and a naval almanac. Krupp's influence over the semi-official Wolff Bureau, Liebknecht said, came through government connivance.

At Essen Krupp organized one of the finest propaganda bureaus in the world. It was also an information office for his salesmen. One thousand newspapers and many thousands of clippings were filed and special attention given to provincial newspapers from foreign countries which were more likely to mention the laying down of ship keels, armaments, military and naval plans, and the building of fortifications.

War Ministry Secretary's Dept. No. 911—13 Z.I. Berlin W Leipzigerstrasse, No. 5 23rd. February, 1913

will be published with the collaboration of the War Ministry in Berlin. To insure the completeness of this number it is very desirable that Army Contractors and all industries concerned in the national defence should publish in it accounts of the history of their development and descriptions of their processes of manufacture.

further particulars required.

(Signed) HOFFMANN, Major, Head of the Department.

Baron Stumm, who made a fortune in the Dillingen works, was the owner, with his brother-in-law, Schubert, of the jingo Berliner Post. In addition Stumm subsidized a large part of the German militarist press.

Geheimrat Alfred Hugenberg, chairman of the board of directors of Krupps for many years, not only owned or controlled more than sixty newspapers, but founded the Telegraphen-Union to compete with Wolff. In 1933 Hitler ordered the amalgamation of the two agencies under the direction of Otto Meyer, the Hugenberg official, with Dr. Albrecht of Wolff's, his assistant and Captain Wilhelm Weiss, executive editor of Hitler's Voelkische Beobachter as associate director.

Hitler came into power after suppressing the opposition press before the final election campaign. After coördinating all German activities in the manner of Mussolini, he nationalized the press, made it a servant of the state, ended all journalistic freedom. By this means the National Socialist government has been able, at a time the rearmament or disarmament question became the first international concern, to suppress all information of secret armament or the training of the Fascist storm troops in the national Reichwehr units.

Officers of the Reserve in Nantes that machine guns were a better guarantee for security "than the hollow speeches of Utopians."

• • 4. Survey of disarmament conferences.
• 5. "Questions to be tackled in the coming weeks." These included Security, Effectives, Military Training, Land Materials, Arms Manufacture, etc. Under the last mentioned the instructions read: "The abolition of private arms manufacture must be opposed, since in this case state manufacture would only be encouraged." The instructions conclude: "We must now work in a planned way so that the blame for the failure of the Disarmament Conference is put on France's lack of will for Disarmament. On the other hand, nowhere must a German desire for rearmament be expressed, but only its desire for Disarmament."

The six British newspaper proprietors and leading journalists who held stock in Vickers-Maxim, the three interested in John Brown, the builder of warships, and the eight listed by Armstrong-Whitworth are but one indication of the power of the armament-makers in controlling public opinion in England.

The outstanding militarist, jingoist, preparedness advocate, fomenter of war scares and spokesman for armament interests was Alfred Harmsworth, the publisher of Tid-Bits who became Lord Northcliffe owner and publisher of the Daily Mail and the Times.

Northcliffe believed he was a journalistic reincarnation of Napoleon; he cultivated the physical pose also. He was ruthless. His mind was a collection of headlines. He was one of the rare Englishmen who understood America and American civilization and was as much at home in New York or Chicago as London. He smashed Asquith, created Lloyd George, and "knifed" Lloyd George during the Genoa conference when he supported French intransigeance. When he died he was hailed in the world press as a genius; he had been insane for many years.

modern peace history. The Washington Conference is one of the few which has accomplished anything of importance. H. G. Wells, who arrived as representative of a syndicate of newspapers, thought it would "become a cardinal event in the history of mankind. It may mark a turning point in the history of human affairs." Although an American cynic said of the United States delegation that its "left wing will be represented by Elihu Root," Secretary of State Hughes electrified the peace-seeking world by his proposal of a ten-year naval holiday, the scrapping of sixty-six warships, and the 6-5-3 ratio in naval strength which later became the present 5-5-3 ratio.

Northcliffe's Daily Mail replied by firing Mr. Wells. The cable read: "Tell Mr. Wells I am not asking him to change his opinions, but to express them more decorously with regard to France." Le Petit Parisien also threw Wells out, and its owner, M. Dupuy, raised the question of the "growing responsibility of the press in international politics"! (This same newspaper is listed among those taking money from the Tsar.) The New York World, which had organized syndication for Wells, replied to Northcliffe: "Mr. Wells is under the same instructions as every member of the staff . . . no policy except publication of the truth." The Manchester Guardian supported Wells and said France had no reason to take offence, but Jacques Bainville, notable political writer, cabled that "Wells is a Socialist. . . . Our greatest friends in all countries are the reactionaries."

When Northcliffe's brother, Lord Rothermere, got control of the Daily Mail it continued, despite Britain's renunciation of the Anglo-Japanese treaty which made the Harding conference a success, to support Japanese militarism. The Japanese had obtained the support of the French press by ordering millions of dollars' worth of munitions from members of the Comité des Forges. They also placed orders in Great Britain. But the only support Japan received for its militarism came from the chief antagonist of German militarism, namely, the Mail. Its news columns were coloured with pro-Japanese editorials. In January, 1933, in a Geneva news dispatch it was stated that "unfortunately the indications are that the Chinese consider that Japan's latest military moves entitle them to employ force." Editorial comment, which could not be more editorial than the news columns, attacked "well meaning sentimentalists in Great Britain" for asking drastic action of the League against Japan, for "demanding that the committee of nineteen . . . shall report against Japan [which] is to be required to withdraw from Manchuria. . . ." The Mail defended Japan's occupation of Manchuria as "vital to the safety to Japan. She has rights which every impartial mind must admit. . . . For her interests there she fought the war of 1904-05 against Russia. But for her stupendous effort in that struggle that country would now be part of the Soviet dominions. (The old Red bogy again, in 1933.) . . . Were she driven from it the probable result would be its annexation by Moscow. . . ."

In March the Daily Mail supported the plans of the armament-makers with a leading editorial "Stop the Embargo." "The rapid advance of the Japanese troops on Jehol" said this paper, "has made the British embargo on the export of arms to the Far East look ridiculous.

"The Government would be wise to withdraw this measure without further delay. . . . The main result . . . has been to cause serious tension with Japan. . . . Our first duty is to the British nation, and we are certainly not required to inflict on that nation grievous loss and possible risk of dangerous diplomatic complications in an issue which only remotely concerns us, and where the ruling of international law is decisively and emphatically on our side. Our good relations with Japan, and the welfare of the unemployed, ought not to be sacrificed for a mere 'gesture.'"

At this moment the interventionist press declared that the long-awaited excuse for war with Mexico had fortunately and dramatically arrived. Senator Fall made his first plea for war.

It was not until 1929, when disclosures were made in the Senate and House that America learned how close the country had been to war with Mexico in 1926 and 1927 when the Mexican government tried to restore to itself the billions of dollars' worth of oil lands which had been obtained by American and British companies by bribing the Diaz régime. The connivance of the State Department in perverting the American press has been disclosed by several honourable Washington correspondents, notably Paul Y. Anderson of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

Mr. Anderson has told how Robert E. Olds, Assistant-Secretary of State and former law partner of Secretary Kellogg of Kellogg peace fame telephoned the representatives of the three large American news agencies to meet him on September 16, 1926. The three arrived. Mr. Olds after pledging the journalists to secrecy as to the source of their information, made a lurid oration against "Bolshevik Mexico."

"Gentlemen," he said, "we feel that this picture should be presented to the American people. We cannot prove it, but we are morally certain that a warm bond of sympathy, if not an actual understanding, exists between Mexico City and Moscow. . . . I want your advice and coöperation."

The representative of the United Press said simply: "Let the State Department issue a statement over the signature of the Secretary of State; every newspaper in the country will publish it." Mr. Olds refused to join the government with his propaganda. The United Press correspondent and the representative of the International News Service, owned by Hearst and therefore expected to aid in any anti-Mexican propaganda, shook their heads and walked out. But the representative of the Associated Press of America, the great coöperative news agency, the Cæsar's wife of journalism, obliged. On the morning of November 18th the newspapers of America appeared with flaming headlines: "Bolshevik Plot against U. S. in Mexico." The opening paragraph read:

\$

In April, 1927, the United States mobilized its aircraft in Texas. War correspondents were sent to the border by the Chicago Tribune and other newspapers which knew what Washington was planning. But Representative Huddleston of Alabama arose to denounce the administration as "deliberately and consciously driving toward war in Mexico to protect American business interests . . . so that the oil interests pay dividends." American labour protested war. The liberal newspapers and weeklies not only protested intervention, but named the oil-operators who were working for it. And, more important yet, certain financiers

and big business interests who stood to lose instead of profit by war, made their views known also. Dwight W. Morrow, a Morgan partner, was sent to Mexico, and aided by the emotion of the Lindbergh arrival, he made a peace by which bloodshed was averted and the oil lands, incidentally, saved for American operators. (Eventually Mr. Fall, who rose from Senator to member of the Harding Cabinet, went to prison for accepting \$100,000 as a bribe from the oil companies for whom he had preached war.)

A striking example of armament propaganda in the United States can be found in 3,257 daily and weekly newspapers of the spring of 1916. At this time, in the midst of a preparedness campaign, and at a time when Ambassador Page from the Court of St. James's was warning Wilson that only American intervention could save Britain from collapsing financially and the Allied war from collapsing militarily, the Navy Department proposed building a government armour plant. The Bethlehem Steel Company replied with a series of advertisements in 3,257 publications.

This nation-wide attack on the government's plan soon bore its fruit. Numerous newspapers took the Bethlehem's money and responded editorially. For example, the Washington Post (then owned by McLean) printed, two columns wide, on April 13, 1916, the following statement:

"Where private capital can and will serve the people well at reasonable and fair prices, the Post shall at all times oppose the entrance of the government into competition with such private enterprise.

Grace to Senator Tillman of the Naval Affairs Committee stating that "it is said that a government plant should be built 'to take the profit out of war.' Our company has no inclination to make capital out of the military necessities of the United States. In the event of war or threatened war, all the facilities we have for any purpose are at the disposal of the United States government upon its own terms. . . ." These two statements should be compared with the testimony in the Shearer case when Bethlehem and its friends were accused of hiring an "observer" who fought against the limitation of armaments in Geneva and in Washington and propagandized for the Jones-White naval-construction bill in Washington. They should also be compared with the statement of Bethlehem earnings during the World War.

In 1933 and 1934 a large part of the American press was influenced by the American armament industry, notably the latest recruits, the airplane manufacturers, in a new campaign for preparedness by huge armaments. Despite parity with Great Britain, that nation still remained the "enemy" for several great newspapers, but the majority directed their campaigns against

Japan.

"A particularly provocative article," Lieutenant-Colonel George A. Drew of Canada called the publication in Liberty of December 3, 1932, headlined "Japan's New Threat to the United States!" under which millions of readers were given the best possible argument in favour of increased armaments. The article told the public that Japan's ambitions in the Far East "are bound to bring war with us." It continued: "All who are interested in the Far Eastern problem must realize that a war between Japan and the United States seems to be unavoidable. Will the outburst happen in a few weeks or months, or will it come in ten years? This nobody knows; but Japan is ready for it, and is provoking it, while the United States is not prepared and does not want to fight. . . .

"There are those who say: 'No! No war! Not now, anyhow. Don't accept the challenge. Leave China and the whole of Asia to themselves. If necessary, give away the Philippines and Guam. We are not ready for war. We are weakened by unemployment. . . .'

"But others say: 'Now or never. If we fail now, Japan will

"These are the two viewpoints. Which is right? is the question which America is facing now and must answer."

In Germany the relationship between the munitions-makers and the press was no longer a secret after 1913; in France the ownership of numerous journals by the Schneider-Wendel interests was a public fact, and the purchase of British, French, Greek, and other newspapers by Zaharoff, secret at a time war impended, has been common knowledge in Europe for many years. Hugenberg, general director of Krupps, purchased groups of newspapers which he still owns.

In the face of these facts the second International Press Conference meeting in Madrid under the auspices of the League of Nations was not surprised to hear a proposal from one of its members that correspondents of newspapers or news services receiving money from armament firms be forbidden to operate in foreign countries. It would be more correct to say that no one was surprised but the American delegates. A New York correspondent cabled that "a touch of humour" was added to the convention "and for some reason excited opposition among the French and other delegations."

A resolution calling it improper for the press to carry on propaganda for aggressive warfare was lost through Italian Fascist opposition. The Fascist delegate, likewise the Hungarian, refused to explain their action, but the Lithuanian asserted the press of his country must continue to agitate for the transfer of Vilna from Poland to Lithuania.

The famous report of the League of Nations Commission of 1921 which made the six charges against the munitions interests, said in No. 4: "That armament firms have sought to influence public opinion through the control of newspapers in their own and foreign countries." In that same year the League passed a resolution, which is, of course, no more effective than hundreds of other resolutions of the same body concerning disarmament. It was: "The same persons (i.e., the holders of shares in private munitions factories and members of their boards of directors) are forbidden to assume ownership or control or to exert any influences on newspapers."

In the same 1921 report there is a list of possible ways of controlling private manufacture of armament with a view of preventing possible evil effects. One recommendation is "the possibility of taking measures to prevent armament firms and companies or persons largely interested or holding responsible positions in such firms or companies, from owning, controlling, or unduly influencing the newspaper press."

In 1924 the Temporary Mixed Commission for the Reduction of Armaments reported the outline of a draft treaty entitled "Principles Recommended as a Basis for an International Convention on the National Control of the Private Manufacture of Arms, Munitions, and Implements of War," which provided that the holder of a licence to manufacture must not be in a position to influence a newspaper, and furthermore, that "the holder of a licence must agree not to carry on propaganda of any kind relating to the war materials for which a licence has been granted."

A committee of inquiry in 1926 embodied the principles into a draft convention making more specific the provisions against the influencing of public opinion by armament firms. It sought to prevent advertising by these companies, but took no action against the secret inspiration of war scares.

In 1928 the special commission preparing a Draft Convention on the Private Manufacture of Arms and Ammunition and Implements of War provided for a licence system but no publicity regarding the ownership of the armament companies, and the specific provisions against influencing public opinion and parliaments are omitted. "This omission," in the opinion of Professor Stimson, "and the omission of publicity regarding ownership of the concerns deprive the convention of the character of an attempt to counteract the war-provoking influence of the manufacture of armament. This draft convention ceased to embody the ideas of the movement. . . ."

The Polish government in 1931 suggested that the League approve a resolution calling upon its member nations to imprison any person guilty of "incitement to war" and any person publishing "false and tendentious reports on the international situation." Foreign Minister August Zaleski, sponsor, explained that inasmuch as all countries have accepted the principle of the condemnation of war as an instrument of national policy, his measure would not involve the freedom of the press. He further suggested an international press conference and a tribunal which would hold a trial, on the application of any professional press organization, of "any journalist accused of pursuing activities dangerous to peace."

All these actions preceded the 1933 international press conference where the mere mention of the relation of armaments and journalism occasioned such incredible American surprise.

Saboteurs of Peace

The Harding conference having set the ratios for warship building, the leading nations engaged in a cruiser race as ruinous financially and as dangerous politically as those preceding. For economic, and perhaps also for humanitarian reasons, President Coolidge in 1927 called a conference at Geneva to limit cruiser construction. This conference was, in the language current at the League of Nations, "torpedoed" by hired secret agents of the warship-builders. One man accused was William B. Shearer, who câlled himself "American, Christian, Protestant, Nationalist," and the "Big Drum" of the American navy. But British and French munitions agents were just as active in sabotaging the conference.

The American naval and civil delegation, in accordance with tradition in frightened American diplomacy, refused to take the newspaper men into confidence, as representatives of European governments do. Shearer went about saying he was a naval expert and proving that he had the confidence of the American officers present. He was also a good fellow. His cocktails were dry, his dinners Lucullan. It was evident he was well posted on naval affairs and the facts and figures he handed out were correct, although the propaganda that went with them, in the testimony given later, was poisoned. All the journalists in Geneva knew Shearer's game; those who themselves were upright and honourable and those who represented liberal-minded newspapers shunned Shearer; but to him flocked all the representatives of the jingo press, the anti-Japanese newspapers, the "Gott straff England" newspapers, the Mexican intervention journals, the imperialistic expansion press, the supporters of military occupation of Nicaragua and Haiti, the big navy, the big business newspapers which either held stock in munitions companies or whose stock was held by them, and all the super-patriotic newspapers which believe that armaments mean peace, not war.

Lord Bridgeman, head of the British delegation, and Lord Robert Cecil spotted Shearer at once as the source of anti-British propaganda among the press, the agent of armament-makers, the would-be wrecker of the conference. At the beginning of the conference Lord Bridgeman at a conference of British and American journalists declared, as he afterwards said in a letter to the London Times, that "he had not disputed and did not intend to dispute the claim of the United States to equality in naval strength." Now this was the whole crux of the problem. Shearer's slogan, announced at every one of his conferences with the press, was "No parity, no treaty." The British were for parity. But Lord Bridgeman said that his frank interview with the press was distorted in the Chicago Tribune to the effect that "Bridgeman would never agree to parity."

He went further. Learning of Shearer's activities against Britain and against the success of the conference, "I caused representations to be made to the chief delegate of the United States about the course I believed Shearer was taking."

Nothing came of this. It was now apparent that success or

In the British press Shearer was immediately accused of propaganda work, but with the exception of such newspapers as the New York World, the Baltimore Sun, the Christian Science Monitor, the St. Louis Post Dispatch and the other liberal American journals, no mention was made of the armament agent by the correspondents in Geneva who were publishing his "handouts." Throughout Europe the rumour spread that Shearer had smashed the conference, but America was almost ignorant of the matter, and it might have remained so had not Shearer in 1929, his work well done, sued for the money he said the armament-makers still owed him.

rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintoritir. rintor

"I do not believe that the responsible directors of these shipbuilding corporations have been a part of these transactions as represented in the lawsuit, but their statement of the case is needed." He ordered a Congressional investigation.

It was then that that part of the great American press which is not represented by special correspondents in Europe, and which was betrayed by the propaganda which Shearer's journalistic friends sent out to the metropolitan newspapers, had an opportunity to voice its indignation. The voice of this provincial but powerful American press is heard in the following editorial from the Memphis Commercial Appeal: "The President's accusation adds weight to the already prevalent opinion that wars are brought about by commercial interests that are not unwilling to promote their welfare at the sacrifice of life and treasure. There are so many evidences that international hostility has its foundation in trade and competition that the world is beginning to regard as a tragic and pathetic figure the boy who leaves the plough, seizes the flag, rushes into the fire of the enemy, and lays down his life for his country, that speculators may be made rich and millionaires made multi-millionaires."

When the Senate finally began its investigations it reversed usual procedure: instead of listening first to the accusations against a munitions lobby, the raison d'être of the committee's existence, it called on Charles M. Schwab, chairman of the board of directors of the Bethlehem Steel Company, Eugene Grace, president of the Bethlehem Shipbuilding Corporation, Henry C. Hunter, counsel of the National Council of American Shipbuilders, Clinton L. Bardo, president of the New York Shipbuilding Co., Samuel W. Wakeman of the Bethlehem Shipbuilding Corporation, Frederick P. Palen, vice-president of the Newport News Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Company, and other big-navy men to defend themselves before the attack was delivered. Senators Shortridge and Allen, the inquisitors, appeared crude, muddled, and spiritless in cross-examining the warship-builders. They became a little emotional and ironical in badgering Shearer. Senator Borah, who was not a member of the committee, said of Mr. Grace's letter to President Hoover which stated Shearer had been employed without his or Schwab's knowledge, and merely as an observer, that it was "an insult to the intelligence of the American people."

The hearings were held in an atmosphere of patriotism. Shearer

is a patriot and the warship-builders are patriots. Unfortunately a dispute had occurred, but it was not the intention, apparently, of the Senate to draw any evidence which might aid the pacifists, whom Shearer had termed "communists, bolsheviks, and traitors." No effort was made to investigate the naval and security leagues which were associated with Shearer; in fact, the impression was given that Shearer was being grilled not because he had defeated American peace advocates, spread hatred of Britain, and insinuated disastrous propaganda in the press, but because he had turned upon his employers with a demand for money payment.

To make Shearer look ridiculous, one of his master blunders was exposed. He had placed great faith in a "British plot" because he had found a "secret document," the British report on naval imperialism written supposedly by Sir William Wiseman. This pamphlet he took to the Navy Department, where it was copied and circulated. It proved a hoax, written for public amusement by Dr. William J. Maloney of New York, a naturalized Scotsman, and sold by him for five cents. The Senators had a lot of fun with Shearer about it; no emphasis was placed on the Navy Department's coöperation.

Bardo testified Shearer was first employed in 1926: "that related to the merchant marine." In March 1927 he, Palen, and Wakeman met in response to a letter from Mr. Hunter and agreed to send Shearer to Geneva.

Charles M. Schwab, chairman of the board of directors, Bethlehem Steel Company, appeared. A fine, grey, old, kindly, sweet, sentimental gentleman whose sincerity, honesty, and lack of knowledge of Bethlehem activities impressed all listeners. Like Woodrow Wilson's heart anno 1917, Mr. Schwab's, anno 1929, beat for all humanity. "At a dinner given in honour of Marshal Foch . . . I said, that as controlling the greatest ordnance works then in the world I would gladly see it scrapped and sunk to the bottom of the sea if it would bring peace. . . " He still maintained this view. He had never met Shearer. Why was he interested in the Geneva conference? "I wanted to see peace come to the world . . . as a patriotic American citizen . . . from the prosperity point of view of this country. . . ."

So that was that.

Mr. Wakeman's testimony was magnificent evidence of the existence of that world-famous myth, colossal Yankee shrewdness. He said simply that he had not looked up Shearer's credentials because on meeting the naval expert he was just "jazzed" off his feet. Another representative of big business, Homer L. Ferguson, testified he saw no significance in the merchant-marine fund for lobbying in Washington being transferred to Geneva activities.

Up to then the Shearer investigation was nothing but a field-day for the armament-makers. They had heard nothing, seen nothing, said nothing, understood nothing. But unfortunately for them there are certain newspaper correspondents who can never be bribed. Such a one is Drew Pearson, who during the conference cabled that "a paid American big-navy propagandist who disseminated the most violent anti-British propaganda among newspapermen, and who appeared to be encouraged by some of the American naval experts" was wrecking the conference.

Shearer, hale, hearty, and pugnacious, began his statement by saying that Charles M. Schwab was the first representative of the shipbuilders with whom he talked. His first contract, he said, was for \$7,500 to cover the Sixty-ninth Congress, the three-cruiser-bill Congress. When he went to Geneva he took letters from "practically every patriotic society in the United States

His first contact with the press was during the Red-baiting 1920's. "I was asked or I was approached by a man you all have heard of in his fight against the communists. He was then editor of the New York Commercial, a man by the name of Major Charles, of Military Intelligence, and incidentally the executive secretary of the American Defense Society. . . ."

Just as he was about to sail for Geneva, he received a blue book of "facts" in a franked envelope from the United States Navy Department. Arriving in Paris, he went to see the newspaper correspondents with whom he was to work in Geneva. As proof of his work he presented letters of thanks from them. His credentials as a journalist were furnished by Mr. Henry Wales of the Chicago Tribune. Armed with a press card which made him representative of the New York Daily News, he was able to enter the press galleries, confer with the journalists, and attend the press receptions given by Ambassador Gibson and the naval delegation.

Returning to America, he testified, "my publicity campaign continued in the Hearst papers, Washington Post, journals and weeklies. . . . I have advised certain patriotic societies in their campaign against the pacifists." He claimed he had been speaker and adviser for years for the National Security League, the Daughters of the American Revolution, the American Legion, the American Defense Society, the National Committee of Defense.

the American press; we have been able to defeat the British propaganda machine and get the figures out.

To Messrs. Palen, Wakeman, and Bardo, Shearer wrote, March 10, 1928, again modestly referring to himself: "At the close of the Coolidge Naval Conference, August 4, 1927, the European press recognized and acknowledged the effect of my campaign, referring to it as 'the triumph of the theses of William B. Shearer, the American.'"

Who else earned money through failure of peaceful understanding?

To "My dear Mr. Wakeman" Shearer wrote, January 30, 1928: "Pursuant to our last private conversation and understanding in your office, that future negotiations would be with me direct, I wish to call your attention that as the result of my activities during the Sixty-ninth Congress, eight 10,000-ton cruisers are now under construction. Further, that owing to the

failure of the Tri-Power Naval Conference at Geneva, there is now before the Seventieth Congress a 71-ship-building program costing \$740,000,000. . . .

Patriotism had triumphed and the best part of \$740,000,000 from government appropriations were on their way to the private armament-makers.

The Senate investigation had few results. The attempt to discredit Shearer only partly succeeded; it left indisputable proof that he had been a paid agent, that he had gone to Geneva, that he had helped wreck the peace conference. To escape the charge they had hired a lobbyist to defeat the American government's hopes, the great American business men, the builders of the American navy and the American merchant marine, deliberately made themselves foolish on the witness stand. They didn't know what it was all about. They had been victims of an over-zealous over-patriotic agent. They had been jazzed off their feet and out of their minds. They were innocent. They were also subtle.

Those newspapers which Shearer boasted he had sent his propaganda but which had not used it, sent in denials and protests; the others maintained the usual discreet silence. No one more than the press knows the power of silence. Several editors had been tricked by their correspondents. They had had no knowledge of how propaganda agents influence their men abroad. No mention was made of the fact that the Geneva correspondents who worked for Shearer did so not because of his cocktails and dinners and for no material gain but because they realized his views paralleled the home paper's policy.

For the American navy, Rear-Admiral Reeves testified he had never expressed the hope the limitations conference would fail; he believed in an agreement, just, fair and equitable, to limit navies "for a very simple reason. American naval officers, in the event of war, desire our country shall have a navy of equal strength to that of the enemy. . . . They recognize that a naval limitation agreement is the only means by which equality can be

assured.... Therefore American naval officers desire a naval limitation agreement...."

The warship-builders had a few black moments, but did not suffer morally or financially. They had admitted spending \$143,-000 in lobbying for the Jones-White Merchant-Marine Act in 1928 and they had admitted that they did not fire Shearer until March, 1929, the 15-cruiser bill having been passed in February and eight ships awarded the private manufacturers. The smash-up at Geneva had resulted in business orders for millions of dollars for them and the creation of the revolving fund of \$250,000,000 for loans in the construction of new vessels. Truly Shearer said, "As a result of my activities . . . eight 10,000-ton cruisers are now under construction" by the firms which employed him.

The Munitions Lobby in Washington

ATHER than admit they ruined a peace conference fostered by President Coolidge and the League of Nations, American armament-makers wisely confessed their lobbying activities for the mercantile marine and the fifteen-cruisers bills.

At the moment of reading proof the writer has received confirmation of the charge that motivating influence behind the Vinson big navy bill came from the munitions makers.

In the 1933 embargo hearings before a House of Representatives committee the president of the Colt machine-gun company ridiculed the notion that a munitions lobby existed in Washington.

Brigadier-General William Mitchell, foremost protagonist of the American air service, has twice declared it undermined by the army and navy lobby.

In February 1934 William P. MacCracken, ex-Assistant Secretary of Commerce, arrested for contempt of an order from a Senate committee investigating graft and corruption in airplane contracts, was generally referred to as "lawyer-lobbyist for the larger air transport companies." On the 27th of the same month "the activities of former-Senator Smoot of Utah and his son in behalf of an air-mail carrying concern were described to the Senate committee."

duced in any way curbing the war profiteers or the armament dealers. In the past three years every individual or organization which has discussed the matter with a member of Congress has been rebuffed either because that politician was interested more in the good business of munitions-making than in international peace or because he realized the hopelessness of fighting the Washington munitions lobby. Every fair-minded, honest, liberal member of the Senate and the House of Representatives admits the situation is bad if not hopeless. Senator Borah assails the munitions-makers. But his vote is overwhelmed in the almost unanimous annual votes from Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts, and the other munitions-manufacturing states which consistently favour military expansion and defeat legislation which aims for world peace by armament control or reduction.

George Washington and Abraham Lincoln advocated the nationalization of the manufacture of war munitions as public policy—facts somehow overlooked by all the professional patriotic societies. Lincoln had a ferocious battle with the war profiteers and the munitions grafters. But in those days there were no lobbies. Presidents Wilson, Harding, Coolidge, Hoover, and Franklin Roosevelt have without exception initiated legislation affecting the munitions men and without exception been defeated by the munitions lobby.

In 1914 the neutrality of the United States became a vital question for Europe. But Big Business won easily. The "sell to both sides" advocates had no difficulty in persuading government officials they were right, and the Bryanites, who opposed not only the sale of arms but the making of loans, were routed.

America grew rich shipping foods and munitions to the Allies. Germany torpedoed ships. It is quite obvious, therefore, that American insistence on the right to ship munitions freely to nations at war was one of the real causes, if not the chief cause, of America's participation in the war. "Freedom of the seas" is largely a question of freedom of the munitions trade.

In 1915 one of the strangest means of making peace between two nations was undertaken by a strange American. Although the whole country then laughed uproariously at the Ford Peace Ark, it never realized that its hilarity was to a great extent caused by the munitions agents and propagandists, their paid press and their paid opinion-makers. Ford had said that soldiers "don't want to fight and would be only too glad to shake hands with each other." The censors had suppressed the story of enemy soldiers fraternizing Christmas 1914. Ford wanted to get them out of the trenches by Christmas 1915. They would have come out. Mr. Wells with unusual historical perspective tells how the Ford idea was turned into poison:

The "malignant antagonism" to the Ford peace plan grew tremendously, the European press vying with the American to ridicule it and its participants. The journalists attached to Ford, says Wells, concocted lies about their host. They were under instructions to do so. Why was this done? Because, Wells says, munitions shipments were crossing the Atlantic, because the Allied banker munitions agent, American finance and Big Business in general, and especially the armament industry, were growing rich and taking every measure to keep up the trade.

The American preparedness campaign of 1915 to 1917 was initiated by patriots some of whom were owners of munitions-plants, some of whom were members of societies financed by the armament-makers, and in Washington the patriots, the agents, the lobbyists of the corporations making billions in Europe and hoping for billions from American preparedness, helped America to arm and to enter the war. The few men like Charles A. Lindbergh, Sr., Robert La Follette, and Representative Tavenner who protested the munitions lobby were called traitors and their writings or their speeches suppressed.

In 1921 the world faced the problem of rebuilding its navies. The super-dreadnought men were on one side, the submarine and airplane advocates on the other. The American navy replied to Senator Borah's statement that the battleship is obsolete with the dogma that "the battleship remains the principal unit." In England the submarine crowd had many followers, in France the airplane enthusiasts. But in the midst of international discussion the World reported from Washington that "the steel interests are prosecuting an active campaign against any reduction in naval armaments. This is being done with the slogan that steel is the thermometer of business in the United States, and the declaration that all commercial enterprises would be embarrassed and handicapped if the steel industry were to receive a severe setback.

. . . The most effective lobbyists of the steel interests are here outlining their views to members of Congress and officials of the government. . . . It is known that appeals were made to President-elect Harding, in the belief that he would yield to business persuasion."

Throughout the era of red hysteria in the United States there was circulated secretly what became known as the "spider-web chart." It is still in use. Its object is to show that most of the women's organizations of the country are leagued with pacifist organizations. This means they favour disarmament. Disarmament for America is the sinister plot of Moscow because the Bolsheviki intend to capture the United States and raise the red flag on the Capitol at Washington. At least that was 1920 reasoning. In "Professional Patriots" Norman Hapgood shows the spider-web chart was the work of Lucia R. Maxwell, librarian of the Chemical Warfare Service of the War Department, headed by General Amos Fries. Another disclosure which came years later was that John Thomas Taylor, "legislative agent" of the American Legion in Washington was also acting as treasurer of an organization of chemical manufacturers. The chemical manufacturers of the world have an interest in gas warfare. It was Taylor who led the publicity campaign against the treaty to abolish poison gas in war. Representative Burton of Ohio asked that Taylor's activities be investigated. Representative Fish stated it was Taylor who forced the American Legion at its 1926 convention to adopt a resolution against the proposed treater

Lobbyists became a bit too obnoxious for Congress in 1928 when Senator Thaddeus H. Caraway of Arkansas introduced his anti-lobbying bill. He claimed there were between 300 and 400 organizations lobbying for or against legislation, 90 per cent of them "fakes who prey upon the credulity of those who have an interest in what Congress may do." He proposed that all such agencies register with the secretary of the Senate and the clerk of the House, stating what they were there for, how much they got, who paid. The definition of lobbying given in the bill was:

"Lobbying shall consist of an effort to influence the action of Congress upon any matter coming before it, whether it be by distributing literature, appearing before committees of Congress, or interviewing or seeking to interview individual members of either the House of Representatives or the Senate."

Later in the year came the most important lobby exposure in post-bellum history. To the story of Shearer in the preceding chapter must be added certain facts. First, that newspapers and politicians knew about Geneva for two years and did nothing; second that in asking for an investigation Senator Borah suggested the government break its contracts with armament-makers if found guilty; third that according to Shearer's statement to the present recorder, there have been absolutely no results from the hearing and it is impossible for him to bring the matter up for action. Shearer's employers are today sharing the new billion-dollar naval-expansion program. That it was the intention of the President to have action follow words is evident from the public statement which ordered the investigation. Mr. Hoover said:

"This propagandist has, during the past few years, organized zealous support for increased armament and has been a severe critic of all efforts of our government to secure international agreement for the reduction of naval arms, which includes activities at the Geneva conference and opposition to the movement which I have initiated in the past three months. A part of this

propaganda has been directed to create international distrust and hate. . . .

"In the meantime, I have directed the Attorney-General to consider what action we can take. Unless the companies can show an entirely different situation from that which is purported in this suit, we are compelled to consider what measures can be proposed to free the country of such influences. . . .

Although nothing has come out of the Shearer case except official evidence that armament agents sabotaged peace at Geneva and Washington, the investigation caused one curious reaction. The American Legion rushed into print with a demand that the peace lobby should also be inspected; it attacked the National Council for the Prevention of War, the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America, the American Civil Liberties Union, the League for Industrial Democracy, the National Students' Forum and other organizations opposed to new wars.

In the hearings on the fortifications appropriations bill, in 1912, the charge was made that a powder lobby existed and functioned remarkably well in Washington. The accuser was Robert S. Waddell of the United Safety Powder Company of Louisville, Kentucky, former general sales agent for the Du Ponts. "It is almost impossible to obtain a copy of this document now," Congressman Tavenner says in his speech which appears in the Congressional Record of February 15, 1915; "I will therefore quote a few extracts from the copy of the hearings which I have.

Mr. Waddell: I should say that my statement in regard to the potency of the Du Pont lobby in Washington is the fact that they maintained here a Mr. Buckner, who was the president of the International Smokeless Powder Co. and a vice-president of the Du Pont Trust. He devotes his entire time and attention to Washington business; makes this his headquarters. He does not do anything else. When I was with the company they paid their vice-presidents \$30,000 a year, and I presume he is getting a good, rich salary and a liberal account for expenditures. I know there is a very great deal of money spent here for entertainment—not offensively; I would not use it in that sense, but in the same sense that a sales department always does; they entertain their customers and treat them as well as they know how. They are as courteous as they can be and spend a great deal of money in that way, and we would have to meet that kind of competition.

QUESTION: You say "they." Whom do you mean by "they"?

Mr. Waddell: The Du Pont Trust, so far as I know, have never been accused of unwarranted generosity and throwing away money, and the fact that they spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in Washington is one that they can explain the reason for better than I can. . . .

Mr. Waddell: The officers of the Army and Navy, and particularly of the Army, come into intimate contact with Senator Henry

A. Du Pont, of Delaware, who is chairman of the Committee on Military Affairs in the Senate. [Senator Du Pont is not now chairman, but a member of the Military Affairs Committee.] That position gives him a strong influence compared with that of an outside manufacturer, and in stating this I do not want to reflect on any officer, but at the same time the influence of a man high in authority in the Senate and at the head of West Point does have a very potent power over the members of the Army, and it would be foolish for me to ignore that fact.

When Mr. Cole of Iowa wanted to know whether "killing other people with whom we have no controversies" was preferable to governmental financing of private companies, the Secretary of War raised the point that non-producing countries are opposed to embargoes. Mr. Hull of Illinois maintained that war had to be fomented in order to keep American factories in practice—"You must have war going on to keep our factories in practice?" he asked. To which the Secretary replied, "as far as actual manufacture is concerned, yes. . . ."

The important part of the hearing was taken up with the testimony of the poison-gas makers, all of whom preferred the profits of shipping abroad to any idealistic humanitarian action by the American or any other government. The evidence was unquestioned that the United States does not need continued practice in poison-gas making; in a week to ten days its industry can reach capacity. It is therefore purely a matter of dollars and cents and beating European rivals in the business of bloodshed which animated the chemical manufacturers of America.

The first chemical man to testify was Charles H. Herty, ad-

viser of the Chemical Foundation. He expressed himself in favour of peace, went so far as endorsing the World Court and League of Nations, and demanded greater export fields. Mr. Herty explained that the chemical industry, thanks to protection given by Congress, and on that basis, was able to come to the national defence within ten days and therefore did not need the foreign orders to maintain plant efficiency, as was the case in other munitions.

"I think that manufacturers living under our laws as they do would have a right legally and morally, when called upon to furnish materials in the ordinary course of business transactions, to carry that out. . . ."

Mr. HERTY: I cannot see those two cases on all four legs.

Theodore E. Burton of Ohio went farther. He demanded whether the chemical industry wanted to ship poison in time of war to belligerents, and Mr. Herty replied, blandly, "Just as it has always been the case." To the statement of the chairman that an embargo would permit other nations to get the business, Mr. Herty admitted "It is a commercial question." Melvin J. Maas of Minnesota asked if the industry is dependent on war or a peace-time development.

Mr. Maas: In time of war? Mr. Herry: Any time. . .

Mr. Moore of Virginia: That is, they would make more profits out of war than otherwise they would make?

Mr. HERTY: They would make more money than we would

The representative of the poison-manufacturers was followed by the Hon. Curtis D. Wilbur, Secretary of the Navy, who read a statement prepared by the General Board of the navy opposing any restrictions on the international trade in arms. Questioned by Mr. Fish, he said of the private munitions-manufacturers: "I have never seen a war in all history brought on by that, certainly not in this country, and the matter of getting into war or not getting into war is always in the hands of Congress."

The head of the Navy Department having reached the nadir of naïveté, Mr. Fish exclaimed: "I want this on the record. I do not know of any factor that tends more to get the United States into war with foreign nations than by permitting or continuing the general policy in future foreign wars of private munition-makers sending munitions to the nations who are belligerents and going always on the side that controls the sea. . . ."

Summing up the inquiry, Mr. Burton was of the opinion that profits was the primary objective of the munitions-makers of America.

Five years passed

In a short debate between Congressman Maas and Miss Jeannette Rankin the latter stated that traffic in munitions in itself has been a cause of war and the former stated that "the real causes of war are economic." To Mr. Maas's further assertion that the United States got into the World War because "we loaned a great deal of money which we had to collect," Mr. Fish declared "we got into the war because we insisted on shipping munitions of war, and Germany, not agreeing to our plan of shipping munitions, attacked our ships on the high seas and forced us into war. . . ."

With these preliminaries, the war-supply manufacturers got up to state their case. Luther K. Bell, general manager of the Aeronautical Chamber of Commerce read letters and telegrams from practically all the makers of airplanes: Charles L. Lawrence, retiring president of the A. C. of C., Frederick B. Rentschiller, president of United Aircraft, J. M. Schoonmaker, president of General Aviation, S. M. Fairchild of the Fairchild Corporation, Charles F. Bardt of the Great Lakes Aircraft Corporation, the Lycoming Manufacturing Company, Clayton J. Brukner of Waco Aircraft, the Eclipse Aviation Corporation, and G. M. Bellanca, all denouncing the embargo, all appealing for the right to sell planes and all pleading patriotism.

Guy Vaughan, director of the Chamber, next testified there were 12,000,000 unemployed, and the airplane export business amounted to \$7,000,000. Mr. Hull asked whether the profits on this amount "are more important than the effect on the world's peace by the shipment of arms." Mr. Vaughan replied: "I do not think so. . . . I have some national patriotic blood in me, but I do want to see this business come to this country. . . . I am for business in building up and getting the unemployed back to work. . . . We have five men out now in foreign countries. . . . The Curtiss-Wright has considerably more. . . ."

Thomas A. Morgan, president of the Chamber, told how twelve American airplanes quelled an insurrection in Cuba. (This was an open admission that American business was in favour of keeping the dictator Machado in power.)

Then the rifle men got their chance. H. F. Beebe, representing the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, said the armament men were as loyal and patriotic as any, but an embargo would hurt American industry.

Samuel M. Stone, president of Colt's Patent Firearms Manufacturing Company, said there were "rash statements made about the arms manufacturers fomenting war, but that is just as

ridiculous as a lot of other things that are said. You gentlemen possibly know that there does not exist in Washington a lobby for the promotion of the interests of munitions-manufacturers. . . ." When Mr. Hull suggested that the embargo was an experiment in making peace, Mr. Stone objected, saying, "the mere announcement of the possibility" frightened prospective customers in foreign countries. Mr. Maas pressed for an answer to his oft-repeated question, whether munitions or economic maladjustments caused war, and Mr. Stone answered by saying "I do not think it is necessary for me to answer."

President Hoover was determined to lay down embargoes against nations engaging in wars, especially those he termed the aggressive nations, but he was opposed at every move by the armament lobby, the airplane-manufacturers and many politicians, notably Senator Bingham. The press noted that "every member of the United States Senate has been approached by the munitions lobby. . . . Many Senators did not realize this . . . the campaign was carried on in the name of patriotism." While Congressional investigations were proceeding, "frightening" some prospective customers, the airplane and gun business with both sides of the Gran Chaco and China and Japan was good.

The battle between President, munitions lobby, and politicians from the munitions-producing states lasted until the end of Mr. Hoover's term. In February, 1933, for example, the Hon. George H. Tinkham, of the munitions-producing state of Massachusetts,