Life — May 5, 1921 — page 22: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

“While there is Life there's Hope” Published by LIFE PUBLISHING COMPANY VOL. 77. No. 2009 London Offices, Rolls House, Breams Bldgs., London, E. C. ECAUSE the com- plexities of Europe have not been put in the way of orderly solu- tion, they seem likely to be solved in the other way. It cannot be said that they were not thought out. They were thought out after a fashion at Paris, and back of that thinking it was proposed to put an agreement by Great Britain and the United States to see that France suffered no injury from Germany, That proposed agreement was not ratified in Washington, and so it fell through. What was thought out in Paris suffered the same fate so far as this country was concerned. Aloof- ness of the United States from the settle- ment of Europe’s troubles left Europe to settle them for herself as well as she could. One result has been the refusal of Ger- many to pay the reparations assessed upon her under the Treaty by the representa- tives of the Allies in London. Her rep- resentative met them, and made his objec- tions to the assessment, which was some- what modified to meet them, but Germany has not accepted the modifications. The money and other reparations that France expected have not been paid her, and her forces have intruded into Germany beyond the Rhine, and propose on the first of May, unless satisfactory payments are made, to go still farther—perhaps to Ber- lin—and apparently to lay hands on what the country contains that can be used to pay the reparations. This proposed military movement would involve great expense, which is bad, and result in states of mind both in Germany and France which would be likely to be still worse. Probably it would not have heen needed if the United States had ac- cepted the part arranged for her in Pari: 17 West Thirty-first Street, New York but as things are, one must sympathize with France in declining to sit still and let Germany welch on her agreement, and at the same time deplore what France pro- poses to do. Obviously the reparations nut is hard to crack. Of course France cannot take any considerable part of the repara- tions due to her out of Germany by force of arms, because the means of payment does not yet exist. The means must be created by German industry over a long term of years. The further invasion of Germany by France will not promote that industry, but retard it. France needs and deserves her money, but if she really does what she is planning, she will not get much of it in that way. Mr. Cunliffe-Owen, an Englishman, and an accomplished newspaper correspondent who knows many things, suggests in the Globe that it would be a good move for General Foch, when he gets to Germany, to seize Hugo Stinnes. He thinks that Stinnes and von Buelow are planning to restore the Hohenzollerns. He points out that Stinnes is enormously rich, having managed in the war and since the war to get hold of properties in Germany of in- calculable value, and to have got control of great industrial enterprises in most of the other countries in Europe. Stinnes is generally credited with vast possessions—possibly with a great deal more than he really has. He stands out as the great German war-profiteer, and is one of those men whose droll and pre- posterous habits of acquisition make property seem a joke. Mr. Carnegie, in his day, was a little that way; Mr. Rockefeller still more so. They both by exaggerated acquisition made prop- erty seem unreal and jocular, but the very Charlie Chaplin of the current financial world-movie is Hugo Stinnes. In appear- ance he is a comic figure, but to his in- fluence is credited the destruction of the French coal mines and the deportation of the inhabitants of the invaded regions of France to hard labor in Germany. Mr. Cunliffe-Owen thinks that if Foch took charge of him he could make an important contribution to the payment which Ger- many owes France. All that is interesting, but it does not sound much like the reorganization of I rope on the basis of co-operation between the nations. It sounds very much more like knock-down-and-drag-out, and of that surely Europe has had a-plenty. Possibly Russia can be helped by some domestic fighting, because in that country there is a mighty bad crowd to be cleaned out, but it has not yet appeared that fighting has done any good in Ireland, and it is not known as yet to have accomplished any- thing valuable as between Greece and Turkey, and the prospect that France will do good by direct action and strong-arm operations in Germany is very faint. In the opinion of Alfred Fried, of Vienna, who won the Nobel prize in 1911 for the promotion of international peace, the only path to Europe's salvetion is for France and Germany to make peace, a real peace. So long as France fears to be destroyed by a recuperating and recover- ing Germany, and Germany sees in France the chief obstacle to its recovery, it will be very hard indeed for Europe to get back to a peaceful working basis, Dr. Fried that Germany alone can save France, and that France alone can save Germany. He insists that Germany st assume the honest obligation to help re- store France economically and that France must make it her duty to abate the grading -conditions of the Versailles Treaty, thereby giving German Democracy the strength to beat its militarists. Of course that sounds like sense and it is sense, but it is very like inviting the insists comicbooks.com