if they wish to have the money for development they must lower the price of coal, even at the cost of their own wages. There is in fact no escape from the evils of State control under any system of nationalisation which makes the State financially responsible for the industry. If the State is to be the ultimate paymaster, it must insist upon supervising the whole operations of the industry, wherever these operations involve expenditure, or the possibility of expenditure. But if the State is not financially responsible, who is to be? The workers themselves cannot accept the responsibility. A mine, for example, takes about five years to develop. During that period the workers are receiving wages week by week, and not one penny is coming back. If the workers had to provide the money themselves they would have to forego the whole of their wages, and would in most cases then have nothing to live upon. Thus we are driven back to the private capitalist, i.e., to the person who has saved some of the money that he might have spent, and is willing to lend it to others to spend. He is the person who has hitherto financed all the industries of the nation, and who, to a very large extent, is at this moment financing the nation itself. He lends his money to pay for enterprises which give mployment to the wage-earner and create wealth for the whole community. He seldom professes to be a philanthropist. His main purpose is to provide for his own future advantage by foregoing present expenditure. Sometimes he aims at securing a safe competence for his old age; sometimes, with even greater advantage to his country, he acts in the spirit of adventure, risking large losses in the hope of large gains. The latter motive is the mainspring of nearly all new departures in industrial or commercial development. It is also the source. of most private fortunes. Possibly, as the Socialists allege, the capitalist, whether aiming at dull security or at speculative fortune, is so morally contemptible a creature that he deserves only abuse if he succeeds, and oblivion if he fails. Nevertheless, the critics of the capitalist would do wisely to reflect that the only alternative to the freedom and elasticity of enterprises financed with private money is the monotonous tyranny of the bureaucratic State. No. 472 will be published in April 1920. EDITOR. New York! Saint Mary's School PEEKSKILL-ON-THE-HUDSON, N. Y. Boarding School for Girls gif charge of the Sisters of St. Mary. of building beautifully situated EEKXFacs address The Sister Superior. SCHOOLS California California Hospital, Los Angel In this beautiful residence city. Medical, Surgical, Maternity, Eye and Ear In the midst o trop X-Ray Departments. gardens. Booklets free. 1414 South Hope Los Angeles. Also limited number of you men (High School Graduates) adr itted to two years' course. University of Southern Californ COLLEGES Liberal Arts, Medical, Dentist HIGH STANDARDS in Scholarship and Mont Prea. GEORGE F. 30VARD, A.M., D.D., LL University of Oregon-Euge Graduate School Summer School School of Muste IN THE PEACE CONFERENCE AND THE ADRIATIC QUESTION N its essence the problem of the Adriatic presented itself to the Peace Conference in the following formula. The AustroHungarian Empire had dissolved into its component parts. The provinces of this Empire bordering upon the Adriatic, and inhabited almost exclusively by seven million Southern Slavs, had thereby achieved liberation and claimed union with their Serbian and Montenegrin kinsmen. Italy was opposed to any such complete union as being liable to constitute a menace to her future security. It remained for the Conference at Paris to reconcile the ethnic claims of Yugo-Slavia with the strategic claims of Italy. How came it that this Adriatic question-a problem in itself scarcely more complicated than that of the Polish frontiers, a controversy at first sight less prejudiced than that of the Saar Basin-should have remained unsolved through all those months of unique opportunity when the destinies of Europe lay in the hands of three men, omnipotent, well intentioned, and unbiased? Such an occa. ion for justice as was bestowed on these three during the early reeks of 1919 will scarcely again fall to the lot of human statesmen; and yet they failed to achieve their object. They failed, not from ill-intention, not wholly from cowardice, certainly not from lack of information, but from inability to VOL. 231. NO. 472. differentiate principles from facts, or to disentangle the essential moral problem from the flotsam and jetsam of the old diplomacy. They hovered, distressed and hesitating, between two worlds -one dead, the other anxious but powerless to be born. They gazed in sorrow and bewilderment at the countless facets which the question presented, turning the matter listlessly now this way and now that, and from time to time laying it down with a sigh of exhaustion. Eleven vital months had passed before the Adriatic question was grasped as a whole and dealt with jointly by the three Allies; and even then the old cross currents blew up from Downing Street and Rome, and the joint memorandum of 9th December was allowed to crash again into the old tangle of past engagements, compensations, and sectional agreements. The future historian, reviewing these facts as an isolated problem, containing accepted formulæ leading apparently to perfectly logical conclusions, will doubtless be confounded by what will strike him as the futility, the amazing laxity of the Council of Four in dealing with this question. He will be tempted to search for some far-fetched motives to illuminate their clouded methods; and in doing so he will, to a very great extent, be mistaken. The following pages constitute an endeavour to indicate that the Adriatic problem was not isolated; that in its essence it implied a conflict between Latinity and Slavdom, between different stages of two dissimilar civilisations; that in its developments it stretched from Klagenfurt to Abyssinia; and that in its origins it became entangled by previous engagements, such as the Treaty of London and the arrangement of St. Jean de Maurienne, and with the issue of Franco-Italian relations. The main responsibility will inevitably, but to some extent unjustly, be held to fall upon President Wilson, who hesitated at the initial and so crucial moment at once to isolate the problem, to sever it at a stroke from the entanglements of the past, and to insist on the immediate and public application of his own doctrines. When once this crucial moment had been missed, it was beyond the power of any ordinary statesman to stay the gangrene which set in from all sides, and which poisoned all hope of remedy. Three things alone could have saved the situation if applied simultaneously and at the first moment of the discussion, namely, co-ordination, |