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her national Church, Fascism should realize to the full the promise of its great practical constructive scheme.

IV

In the meantime Fascism must be tested, and can be tested, by something more than a favorable hypothesis. We have seen how, in Mussolini's time, the population problem has been settled, and what measures have been taken generally to balance production with consumption. Not less interesting is Mussolini's control over the exchange, which he has fixed at about twenty-five to the dollar, which is roughly ten per cent lower than the day on which he assumed his ruling power. If Mussolini had improved the currency he would have increased the war debt, and as it would have been difficult to reduce wages, and therefore prices, a better exchange would merely have embarrassed Italian competitors in foreign markets. Everyone must congratulate him with regard to the railways. Trains are still often overcrowded and unpunctual; the service is still easily disorganized. But he has wiped out the deficit of sixty million dollars which the railroads cost the country in the year before his revolution, and railwaymen no longer inconvenience the public by their strikes. Since 1913-1914 the passenger traffic has increased by sixty-eight per cent and the goods traffic by seventy-two per cent. When we consider the value of the lira, the prices which have been raised in England by fifty per cent have been lowered in Italy by six per cent, with the object of increasing traffic, and yet the railways have made in the last year a profit of 176,000,000 lire, or roughly seven million dollars. That is a fine advance on the loss of sixty million dollars three years before.

The first object of Mussolini was to

balance the budget. From July 1, 1921, to June 30, 1922, the deficit was 15,760 million lire; this was changed, for the same period in 1924-1925, to a credit balance of 2076 million lire. Of this six milliards have been saved on the cost of administration. The circulation. of notes has been reduced from twentyone milliards to seventeen milliards, and the floating debt from 102 milliards to ninety-five milliards. That is why Italy flourishes in spite of higher taxation. The lira depends, however, not so much on the budget as on the national balance of trade in regard to foreign countries. The lira, which was 108 to the pound when Mussolini took office, is now 120. But in return for that Italy is in an excellent industrial position; her silk and cotton factories have orders for many months ahead. Her prosperous peasants can well afford the heavy taxes they are paying, and she has, in fact, solved the problem of how to produce at rates successful in competition.

But in the years before the war the country was dependent for about a million dollars on invisible exports. Half of that was sent in remittances from emigrants; the other half was gained from the tourist traffic. Now if Italy's emigrants go to France rather than to the States, their wages, and therefore their savings, are at a lower rate. This Mussolini could not help, but he has done his best to encourage tourists to spend their money in the country, to live in her rooms, to eat her food, and to buy in her shops. The Government Tourist Department, generally known as E. N. I. T. (Ente Nazionale di Industrie Turismo Turistiche) has become an international organization modeled on Cook's, with offices not only in the tourist centres of Italy but in Nice, Paris, Barcelona, Brussels, Madrid, Alexandria, Bâle, Berlin, Bucharest, Buenos Aires, Budapest, Constantinople, Cairo, Geneva,

London, Lausanne, Lucerne, Lugano, Madrid, Munich, New York, Rio de Janeiro, St. Gall, San Paolo, San Sebastian, Tunis, Vienna, and Zurich. It has done a great deal to keep the attractions of Italy advertised. It has discovered that in the Dolomites Italy has the most gorgeous of all Alpine scenery, unique in its wealth of lovely valleys and the warm colors of its lofty crags. It has begun to exploit the Dolomites, but its special coup has been to make the Italian Riviera a rival to the French for the winter season. It has this winter attracted Sir Austen Chamberlain; and even before Christmas, both in the lovely bays beneath the purple hills where Santa Margherita, Portofino, and Rapallo lead down to the fine mountain views of mountain and sea at Viareggio, and at the other end, where the palms of Bordighera and San Remo continue the fashion of Monte Carlo and Mentone, the hotels were full of wealthy English and Americans. The hotel industry, organized against its own possible foolishness by carefully arranged prices, regulated by Government, is now bringing Italy something approaching forty million dollars directly, as well as a large amount in traveling and shopping. The pilgrims of the Anno Santo produced a special increase of numbers in 1925, well over a million.

Such figures, such a plain business view of what is actually taking place, give the just answer to those who are wondering whether Fascism is essentially a tyranny. There was tyranny over the Tyrolese this autumn. Some Fascists even tried to prevent their having their Christmas trees. Mussolini himself is a political opportunist, not a saint; he has made mistakes, and he has had a nasty element in his party; there have undoubtedly been some atrocities. But the last word about Fascism was spoken at Leghorn toward the close of 1925 by Roberto Farinacci, who sometimes speaks the truth, though he is the noisiest man in Italy and the secretary-general of the Fascist Party. 'If our faults have been great,' he said, 'great also has been our work for the good of the country.'

Mussolini is without doubt a great man. His party is proving its claim that it would organize the government of the country on an economic foundation and build up a strong nation. In doing this Mussolini has outraged those who based their theories on the ideals of liberalism and democracy. But that involves another question, a deeper, a more general, and perhaps a more fascinating one - the question whether in Europe the whole fabric of democracy, with all its theories, is not itself collapsing.

THOSE WILD MEN OF THE CLYDE

BY CHARLES RUMFORD WALKER

GLASGOW, the Reddest spot in the British Isles! Yes, but before Glasgow is Socialist, or Communist, she's Scotch. I was traveling with the London correspondent of the Wall Street Journalwhat a companion for an invasion of the Red Clyde! We got off the train and into a taxi that had no meter and only the remnants of an engine. The car coughed its way up a hill to Armstrong's Hotel, and the driver demanded two shillings and sixpence. Wall Street protested. 'No other taxi in England,' said he, 'would charge over a shilling for that ride.' 'Aye,' said the driver, 'but this is no England.'

Right you are. Glasgow is 'no England,' but Scotch, and all the movements in it, labor and political, whatever else they are, are Scotch too. The city blocks and the residences, almost wholly stone, have more sturdiness and respectability in them than anything in Boston or Main Street. The better pubs are oaken chapels for the worship of Scotch whiskey. The shops are full of substantial Scottish goods at Scottish prices. 'No New Yorker,' said a lady of my acquaintance, 'could afford to live in Glasgow.' (She was charged twenty-five shillings for a small cambric handkerchief.) Every other block is an insurance company, and every third is a church. Bookstores are very thickly sprinkled over the town: we noted a Presbyterian bookshop, a theosophical, a Catholic, and a Socialist. The Scotch nationalize everything. In the Roman Catholic shop they were booming a Scottish Jesuit who had

written a book. Religion is everywhere. I looked into a tobacco shop, and filling the window was 'Dr. White's Presbyterian Mixture,' with a picture of the church on the can!

I

The Prime Minister of Great Britain slipped up to Glasgow the other day and made a tour of the slums, 'incog.' There has been a 'rent war' on for months in Glasgow, and this is the other side of the picture.

If you will walk through the streets of Bridgton, which is the constituency of Jimmy Maxton, most popular of the Clyde M. P.'s, you will begin to understand the political atmosphere of Glasgow. Or if you go through Clydebank and Dumbarton, which year after year send Davy Kirkwood, the noisy and eloquent opponent of royalty, to the legislative halls of the House of Commons. The odd thing is that the slums are as sturdy and Scotch as the shops, the churches, or the pubs. Dark and unsanitary, they are built solidly of stone, like Roman walls or the Cloaca Maxima. They are likely to last as long.

For a time these sturdy stone buildings, smoked over with soot from factory chimneys and steel mills, will deceive the American visitor. Compare this firm construction, he is led to say, with the rotten jerry-built shacks of our own Pittsburgh! But the proof of the house is in the living. One toilet for five families, a floor that has been damp

for a hundred and fifty years, rooms that for a century have been lit by lamps and not by sunlight. And, in large numbers of houses that do not suffer from these defects, the evil fact of overcrowding. Houses in Clydebank, pleasant enough from the outside, are often packed to the windowpanes if there are any with humanity. For every room, or for every two rooms, a family. Because of the so-called 'rent strikes' of Glasgow the Government instituted an inquiry; evidence showed the need for a hundred and fifty thousand new houses in the Clyde region.

I was in Bridgton at twelve o'clock on Saturday, when the whistle blew, and I found myself among the crowds ejected from a boiler factory, a carpet mill, and a laundry.

Here were folk by no means broken either by industry or by poverty. Hardy Scots, shod well and clothed decently. Most of the laundry girls had silk stockings, like any American stenographer. But these hurrying eddies of men and girls were in sharp contrast to the silent pools of unemployed that lounged along the same street. The latter were sallow and hungry and broken. They looked like scarecrows that have been out in the rain too long. Their eyes, which I hated to look at, were dead or neurotic. Their faces had lost character along with their clothes. My Wall Street companion pointed to an open market in an empty lot, and we moved over to it. These little markets are good places to visit if you want to find out about the people of a neighborhood. The quality and variety of the goods will show you what the people use, and the prices are an index of purchasing power. This was Wall Street's suggestion.

There were things laid out on tables and troughs which I did n't believe could draw a farthing from anyone.

The rags and the remnants of trousers and shirts, the remains of utensils, old clocks, in a great mêlée. And a row of shabby toy dogs, which a desperate little man, in an exhausted voice, was trying to sell to unsympathetic paupers. A number of people wandered about, but almost no one made a purchase. A sallow and degraded group, however, had gathered before an ex-soldier in a sombrero, who had something to sell to make men strong. It was a salve. 'I am going to ask you,' said the giver of health and strength, 'to refrain from using soap for seven days.' I looked about me and I knew the right note had been struck. The Bridgton slum audience opened their ears and their hearts to the man in the sombrero.

In the environs of Glasgow is a network of coal mines; not far from the mines sprawl steel mills, and along the Clyde itself stretch the greatest shipyards of the world. For seven miles the sprouting skeletons of ships rise among their supporting poles and runways; webs of railway tracks cover the banks; and against the sky loom those vast steel spiders, the cranes that seize and move the limbs of ships. An army of men live along the bank an army that is many divisions too large, for with the drop in production after the war there was no industry in Great Britain to take them in. Unemployment figures for the United Kingdom stand well over a million.

The same is true for the steel mills. Follow the highway through Dumbarton and Clydebank, and you will come to Motherwell, which is a little Scotch Pittsburgh. Here, in one works which boasts thirty-two furnaces, nine are at work. And while the plant has a capacity for giving employment to eight thousand men, I found four thousand employed.

Upon the foundation of bad housing, unemployment, and a fighting Scotch

temperament, are built the Red movements of the Clyde. There are 'antiparliamentary rallies' held by the Communist Federation at the Ross Street Unitarian Church. And every Saturday the Communists hold a whist drive and social at Bakunin House.

II

The so-called Labor College movement, which believes in education as 'a weapon in the class struggle and no more than that,' finds its stronghold in Glasgow. The number of classes in Great Britain last year was 1048, the number of students 25,071, and of these, according to a rough estimate given me by the Bridgton M. P., over 10,000 are Scotch. "The subjects we study in our classes,' to quote from Plebs, official organ of the movement, 'are means to an end, and that end is the creation and development of a militant, informed, working-class consciousness.'

But you are going to get a wrong impression of this movement and of the Clyde if you just read figures and aims. Especially if you're an American. The only thing to do is to visit a class and listen. Picture to yourself a Scotch working-class town, filled with stone. houses of workingmen, surrounded by mines and by steel mills. In a respectable stone building a schoolroom, with rows of sloping desks. And behind the desks, not fifty school-children, but fifty miners, steel-workers, machinists, laundry girls. Men and women from twenty-five to forty, with tough, hardy bodies, and earnest, intelligent Scotch faces. Pipes are lighted. The lecture begins.

'One of the few things I learned in college one of the very few - was an experiment in psychology.' The lecturer is a graduate of Glasgow University. "Take three basins of water, one

hot, and one cold, and one tepid. Put your right hand into the cold water, and your left hand into the hot.' ('Note,' said a Right Wing Scotch Socialist, 'that it's his left hand that's in hot water.") 'Keep them submerged for three minutes, and then plunge both into the tepid water. To your right hand the water is hot, to your left hand it is cold.' The class gave a serious smile to this and moved their feet. "This shows you, in one way only, how difficult it is to get at facts. How much more difficult in the social and industrial field, where prejudice, passion, privilege, and exploitation rule. . But,' he went on, 'the Labor colleges are the only group getting at the truth, because they believe first of all in taking the capitalistic bias out of education. That sort of education is the only really scientific kind. That sort of education starts with the great scientific truth, set down first by Karl Marx, of capitalist exploitations.'

The class went wild over this, with a deep rumble in its throat, and terrific applause.

'I want to protest,' the speaker resumed, 'against the attempt, the world over, to suppress the work of Karl Marx. Marx. . . . Why is it,' he added, in a soft and burning voice, 'that English gentlemen in English universities refuse to credit him with the scientific truths he has discovered or even to mention his name? It is because, if the scientific work of Marx were disseminated through the world, the present system of capitalism, with its enrichment for them and its load of wretchedness and exploitation for the workers, would be utterly swept away!'

Following the lecture, discussion; following that, questions; and following that, tea! The ladies brought it in, with bread and cakes, and the miners and steel-workers ate and drank lustily at their desks.

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