Newspaper Page Text
November, 1914
THE ATLANTIAN
5
shield or on it, and the Sioux squaw who cheered her off
spring on to battle, the picture given above undoubtedly
represents a soft people—a people to whom the thought
of deliberately inflicted suffering, wounds and death is
intolerable. . In other words, it represents a civilized
people—fond, kind, shocked by violence, impressed mor
ally and emotionally by civilization’s peaceful battles to
uplift and cherish iife rather than to destroy it.
The grand atrocity is the war itself, which, by simply
being, causes a sum of suffering that makes incidental
individual brutalities seem trivial. We do not believe
war ever has been or ever will be waged without them;
and the troops that occupy an enemy’s soil will, of course,
be most prone to them. The major rule of war is sheer
brutality. Restraints the minor rules seek to impose
can never be wholly effectual.—Ex.
Protecting a Gold Stock.
We ship gold to Europe for exactlv the same reason
that one citizen hands a ten-dollar bill to another. The
first citizen either owes the second one ten dollars or is
making him a loan. When we ship gold we either owe
the money or are making a loan. The only way to pre
vent gold shipments is to keep out of debt to Europe and
refuse to lend her money.
There is, of course, the alternative of repudiation. Ev
ery country in Europe is now conserving its gold stock
by refusing to pay its debts; and. as a natural corollary,
the business of every country in Europe is demoralized.
Because there are many technical details about gold
shipments their essential character is often obscured.
At least ever since the panic of 1893 people have dream
ed of devising a scheme that would keep the country on
a gold basis, yet enable it to refuse at pleasure to pay
its foreign debts in gold. This is exactly as though an
individual should undertake to keep his credit good while
refusing to pay his debts whenever payment of them
happened to be inconvenient.
The fault in our system is not that we export gold, for
under any system we must finally do that whenever our
debts to Europe exceed our payments in goods. The fault
is that our gold stock is scattered and there is no way of
mobilizing it.
That will be remedied partly by the new banking sys
tem ; but if we get into debt on the net balance, and Eu
rope demands payment, gold will go out—unless we
repudiate.
Futile Politics.
We have now an object lesson as to the extremely
narrow field within which politics can act effectively. A
large part of recent political action in the United States
has been directed to reducing the cost of living. That
is, the final object of the whole anti-trust campaign—to
reduce the prices of staple commodities that enter into
the cost of living, or to prevent an unreasonable advance
in those prices. That was the whole object of tariff re
vision.
In the face of all that political action, we had in Au
gust the greatest advance in cost of living ever recorded
within so short a time—an advance that put staple com
modities up to the highest level since the Civil War.
By far the greater part of this advance was entirely
unreasonable. The only warrant for it was that sellers
saw a chance to gain an advantage and seized it. No
combination brought it about, for it affected scores of
articles at hundreds of points where no trust influence
exists.. It was a spontaneous effect of human cupidity.
In a single week prices were increased more than they
ever were lowered by all our political action.
Incidentally this jarred Congress—with its incurable
faith in the fetish of a statute—into a series of ludicrous
proposals; such as prohibiting exports of foodstuffs,
amending the constitution in order to tax exports, charg
ing the president with the responsibility of saying when
pork and beans were too high, imprisoning anybody who
asked more for sausage and crackers than he really
ought to ask.
We should like to see what a Congress that prohibited
or taxed food exports would look like when the rural
constituencies got through with it at a general election.
The President’s Triumph.
Any policy is entitled to be judged by its results; and
by that test the president’s Mexican policy is splendidly
vindicated. A vagrant war item records that one Victor-
iano Huerta is marooned in London, presumably await
ing a chanace to get into Spain. Little noticed amid big
ger distractions, the Constitutionalists took peaceful pos
session of the Mexican capital.
The future, perhaps, is anybody’s guess; but Huerta is
out, and a government that has some show to restore set
tled conditions is in, and only a few American lives have
been lost. The president and the secretary of state were
rather lonesome in adhering to the policy that has issued
in this bloodless fashion; but when they look across at
Europe they are entitled to deep satisfaction.
This country is horrified by the European slaughter.
Everybody is horrified by war after it begins; yet only
a few months ago we heard a great deal about the
merits of taking a strong stand with Mexico, asserting
our national dignity and the rest of the rigmarole that
meant rows of American youths dead or wounded in a
trivial cause.
Senator Hoke Smith.
Senator Smith has been re-elected for the full term
of six years by a majority of rather more than four to
one over his opponent on the Bull Moose ticket. The
opposition was sprung during the last thirty days pre
ceding the election rather unexpectedly, and a scatter
ing vote was polled in favor of the Bull Moose candi
dates. The vote against Senator Smith was not cast
against him personally so much as it was against the
Administration with which he is allied, and which the
people of Georgia felt had not shown them and their
brethren of the Cotton Belt just consideration in the
emergency created by the war in Europe. Whether
that opinion was well founded or not, it was believed;
and whether Senator Smith was responsible to any ex
tent for the position of the Administration, or not, many
people believe that he was. As a matter of fact, his po
sition in Congress was directly opposed to that of the
President on the cotton question, and that he made a
strenuous fight for measures which he believed would
be helpful to the cotton producers no man can deny. Not
only so, but he refuses to give up the fight and proposes