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Show THE CITIZEN 4 I I of Nations. Then shall we hear an answer to the poets question Invisible will endure and some day it will become the visible League When shall all mens good Be each mans rule, and universal peace Lie like a shaft of light across the land, And like a lane of beams athwart the sea, Through all the circle of the golden year? The progress made at Paris has been in the hearts and minds of men. The real gain has been the will for peace and justice. We can see ujgly, dangerous flaws in the terms, injustices that should not have been permitted, but we can see resplendent above all the spirit of man, guided by Divine Providence, striving after the goal of universal peace and justice. Tennyson expresses his faith in the progress of mankind when he sings i i I doubt not through the ages one increasing purpose runs; And the thoughts of men are widened with the process of the suns. Just as the influence of American democracy is more potent and than any covenant which its representatives formulated at Paris, so the spirit which animated the conference, the desire for world-wid- e justice and peace is bound to guide the destinies of mankind when present pacts have long been replaced by others wiser and life-givi- ng nobler. The resolve of the great races of men in congress assembled to do justice to the lowly, to do justice among themselves, to establish international law and abide by its rules and decrees means more for the welfare of the human race than all the words on all the parchment pages signed at Versailles. The days that will be darkest are just ahead. There is a chasm to pass and then Europe will emerge upon safe ground. The forces of anarchy will be overthrown; the hosts of law and order will triumph once again, and once again organized society will move forward loftier attainments. CRIMINALS AS DICTATORS (JXT7 E do not want equality, says Bela Kun, leader of the Hun-Vgarian revolutionary government, but the dictatorship of V the proletariat. Apologists for Lenine and Trotzky have pretended that a dictatorship of the proletariat is really the rule of the people, because ninety per cent of the population is of the working class. Spargo, an American socialist who recently wrote a book on Russian conditions, show how hollow is the claim of the communists. His own estimate is that not more than five per cent of the people have joined to maintain the dictatorship of the proletariat. Bela Kun discards the Russian hypocrisy and frankly admits that Hungary is ruled by an active minority. The majority is passive, but the minority is active, he declares. This is the spirit of the new revolution, so digerent from the spirit of our revolutionary forefathers, who desired to establish a democracy in which the majority should rule. Majority rule is not flawless, but its use has not brought discouragement to Americans. In North Dakota the League has obtained control of the state and is introducing socialistic institutions. It is majority rule secured through the medium of the ballot. However alien to what we have been accustomed in this country, these institutions have been established according to law. If they prove failures they can be, and will be, obliterated by ballots. We cite the North Dakota experiment as an instance of peaceful revolution. All reforms can be obtained in the United States through the ballot if public opinion supports them. Here the dictatorship of an active minority would be more hideous injustice than in Russia or Hungary, for in those lands the minority has always ruled. There has always been a despotism by a ruling class. In our coutnry, on the other hand, there has been no ruling class. so-call- ed Non-partis- an A minority" can control in this country only by violating law. It thus becomes a criminal class. This is fortunate because it gives authority a chance to deal with revolutionaries as criminals. Because a minority cannot come out into the open, and battle, as in Russia and Hungary, to dominate all the rest of society, our revolutionists have resorted to secrecy. They dynamite reservoirs or factories, kill officials and seek to exert control by terrorism.. They may create a reign of terror throughout the country if proper means are not taken and taken speedily to check their activities, but they can never hope to dominate until the United States is as near chaos as is Europe. Meantime we must deal with the terrrorists as criminals. We have always had a criminal minority. Every nation has had such an active minority and sometimes there has been a dictatorship of criminals. Some countries have even been ruled by assassins and bandit chiefs. We cannot hide from ourselves the significance of such affairs as the Ogden dynamiting. They warn us that terrorism, striking secretly, may cause widespread havoc by a single blow. A few sticks of dynamite may cost hundreds of lives and a loss of millions of dollars in the stock of wealth which is divided among our people. Inasmuch as the revolutionaries in all countries have declared war there is only one way to deal with them when they pass from theory to practice. They must then be treated as criminals. This suggests that cities and states are insufficiently policed to cope with revolutionary outbreaks and secret acts of violence. Obviously more money must be expended by the nation and the states to develop an organization which can effectively battle with those who strike in the dark. So long as we are dealing with Americans, and not with foreigners who shun citizenship, campaigns of education are valuable. The press of the United States has done much in the last year to keep the American workmen informed concerning the evil operations of Bolshevism, which has made a hell of Russia and could make a worse hell of our own country. Enlightened public opinion, as of old, is the surest protection of our republic. Tt sees through the subterfuges of propaganda and and the most ignorgets at the truth. Only the most violent-minde- d ant are uninfluenced by public sentiment, by the reign of common sense. IF THERE HAD BEEN NO WAR f set back the world a century, we often see it stated by a writer who does not pause to analyze his startling war has npHE A declaration. We look around us and find the world very much the same as before. The steam engines rush through the night with shrieking whistles and mark their trail with a glory of sparks. Marvelous machines hum in the factories at their old tasks. The auto trucks bear their tons through our surging thoroughfares. Men traffic not in the goods and wares of medieval times, but in the most modern merchandise. Wireless messages flash from ship to shore and from shore to ship with a frequency unknown before the war. In a few hours daring men fly across the Atlantic ocean. How foolish to say that war has set back civilization a hundred years, a generation or even a decade, we are tempted to retort. It is true that we have not abandoned the railway cars or the automobiles for the stages of our fathers and grandfathers. On the contrary we have seen science make some wonderful advances in the last few years the years of the war. And yet there is truth in the statement that the world has suffered a setback. It is a setback appalling to contemplate because it seems so intangible, so mysterious. To realize how far the war has set the world back we must try to visualize what might have been had the war not struck across the path of civilization. We are speaking here of material progress. Had there been no war there would have been a spiritual loss beyond our power to estimate. German Kultur would have continued to percolate through the world and then, perhaps, would have flooded it. With the commercial supremacy of the Teutons would have come a domination by |