I

American Tractors to the Rescue

N SENDING 1,500 farm tractors to France in charge of Mr. Henry Morgenthau, Jr.,

the United States has started a movement that may have the utmost influence upon the course of the war. This number of machines will not in themselves compensate French agriculture for the losses of the war. In the uninvaded parts of France nearly 10 million acres have gone out of cultivation as a consequence of war. The simple fact is that the cultivators are in the armies. It is estimated that Mr. Morgenthau's tractors will plow 500,000 acres this spring and 1,000,000 in the fall-thus putting back into cultivation about 15 per cent. of the land that is now lying unused. This preliminary shipment, however, marks only the beginning; there is no reason why, in the next year or two, we cannot send to France enough farm machinery to make good the farm laborers France has lost to the armies and to reëstablish French agriculture as it was in 1914. In that year France was a self-supporting country.

If we do this, we shall merely repeat history. Perhaps the element that chiefly contributed to the success of the North in our Civil War

was the use of the harvesting machine. The Northern armies took one out of every three men from the farms. In many places the situation was not unlike that in France today; only women, children, and old men were left to work the fields. Yet this greatly reduced labor supply produced the food which fed our civil population and the armies, as well as an enormous surplus which, shipped to Europe, provided the liquid capital which financed our military operations. Europeans looked on at a new spectacle—that of a nation fighting the greatest and most expensive war in history and growing infinitely richer in the process. The explanation was found in an ungainly red chariot, which ran over the fields of ripened grain and did the work of fifteen or twenty men. McCormick invented his reaper in 1831, but, owing to the plentiful supply of cheap labor, it did not come into general use until the Civil War. It seems almost like a stroke of an ironical fate that, whereas it was the invention of a Northerner.

Eli Whitney, that made the Civil War inevitable, it was the invention of a Southerner, it inevitable that the North should win. Cyrus McCormick-a Virginian-that made

From the Civil War dates the use of American agricultural machinery in all parts of the world. Ex-President Loubet said, several years ago, that France would starve to death were it not for "the self-binders made in Chicago." Is it too much to expect that this comparatively new device, the tractor, may do for our general food situation now what the reaper did in the Civil War?

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Admiral Mayo's Rank

ITH a portrait of Admiral Mayo, in the WORLD'S WORK for January, the following caption was printed: "Ranking officer of the United States Navy and Commander-in-Chief of the Atlantic Battleship Fleet." This caption was written after the editors had communicated with naval authorities in New York. Word from Washington, received since that issue was published, makes the following correction: "The ranking officer of the United States Navy is Admiral W. S. Benson, the Chief of Naval Operations. Admiral Mayo is Commander

in-Chief of the United States Atlantic Fleet. This includes not alone battleships, but all forces of whatever character which we have operating in the Atlantic or waters adjacent thereto. Admiral Mayo ranks next after Admiral Benson."

T

Mr. Cox's Design on the Cover

HE design on the cover of the WORLD'S
WORK

this month is reproduced

through the courtesy of Mr. Kenyon Cox, the artist. It was originally painted as a patriotic service, being a gift from him to the Government for use as a poster to stimulate recruiting in the Marine Corps. It so fittingly suggests the high motives and firm purpose of our country in this war that it is, the editors feel, a national service to call it further to the attention of the public, in the hope that its inspiration to patriotism may be felt by others who have not seen it.

been turned into a waste; the population ruthlessly destroyed-women have been deliberately left to starve and freeze with their babies on their breasts, children on whose small shoulders rests the future strength of the country, viciously. wantonly murdered. Even the horrors of Belgium pale beside those of Serbia. Not one generation must pass, but two, before Serbia can rise from the ashes; and then, by the German reasoning, it will be too late.

THE PURPOSE OF THE BELGIAN HORRORS

In the case of Belgium, Germany has made her purpose so clear that the mere recital of the sequence of events is sufficient to reveal it unmistakably. In the first flush of the invasion the German soldiery, driven on by its officers who in turn were merely following the instructions of still higher authority, deliberately set about to put the fear of the German in the heart of all Belgium within the path of the invading army. The horrors of The horrors of those early days-the crimes of Louvain, of Termonde, of Dinant-are still fresh in our minds. The object was merely to inspire fear and terror in the souls of the citizens so that there would be no fear of a general uprising against the invaders. Later, when the occupation became an established fact and quiet had been generally restored, the atrocities ceased, and except for the exaction of a large monthly indemnity the Germans made no deliberate attempts to interfere with the commercial life of the conquered state. But later came another phase-events in the various active military fields drilled into the German consciousness that a German peace was impossible. The fortunes of war had so inverted the German mental processes that instead of victory there remained only the hope of preventing defeat. When this was fully realized the German tactics changed. The first evidence of this was the Belgian deportations. Germany wove the usual network of lies in extenuation of this crime, claiming that only the idle were deported. This was in a sense true. But why were so many men idle? I personally know of one case in the province of Hainaut, where, in order to get around a promise made to an American commissioner not to deport workers, one factory was entirely dismantled, all the machinery being shipped to Germany. Then the "idlers" who had been employed in that plant were

deported as an "economic measure." This is but one of a great number of similar cases, until now there is hardly a factory in operation in Belgium, while all the able-bodied men formerly employed have been sent into Germany as slaves. The net results accomplished in Belgium are:

First-the impoverishing of the country

through outrageous levies of money. Second-the economic ruin brought about through stripping all factories of their machinery.

Third-the social and commercial destruction produced through the deportation of the able-bodied male element in the population.

In brief, Belgium is but a shell. Its factories are but walls, its population composed only of women, children, and old men, its past commercial structure but a dream on which they can ruminate. Economic dependence is absolute and will remain so for fifty yearsfor not in that time can the national life so crushed by the German heel be revived and reconstructed.

In the occupied regions of France the same processes have been carried out. We all know the wave of horror which surged over the world at the havoc wrought by the retiring army in France; how railroads were torn up, dirt roads dynamited, houses destroyed and their contents either burned or sent into Germany. Every work of art or of architecture was leveled, every tree cut down, all Nature was systematically ravished until all that remained, of a populous, thriving country was a desert waste. desert waste. The popular idea is that this was but the outcropping of an innate lust for destruction, that it was pure and simple vandalism. I think a moment's consideration of Germany's position will dispel this illusion both in the case of France and of Belgium. As I have said, Germany realized at that time her own inability to win-rather she was seriously threatened with defeat. She realized, too, that these acts of rapacity, more like the venting of rage of some savage beast than like the acts of a civilized, organized State, unless there was some carefully considered interior motive, were calculated to arouse among her enemies a feeling of bitter resentment which would find its reflection in the terms of peace which Germany as a defeated nation could obtain. Germany is cold, shrewdly calculat

ing, and materialistic. She does nothing from impulse but tempers her acts to fit in with a carefully mapped out plan. Least of all would she close the door to a generous peace in the case of possible defeat unless, as I have said, she were impelled by an ulterior motiveand the motive here is easy to divine. It is to so weaken France and Belgium, while she herself is still intact, that they cannot possibly recover from the effects of war in the same time that Germany herself can. To reconstitute the Belgian nation alone, with all its able-bodied men except the relic of its army, will take several generations. With depopulated, blasted France the case is almost as bad. In much less time would Germany be ready to strike again, and with Belgium no longer a thorn in her side, and with the northeastern gateway to France wide open, the German hordes could march without effective opposition direct to Paris and Calais.

GERMANY'S METHODS OF INCREASING HER
POPULATION

The question which is presented to Germany of increasing her population for war purposes has been answered in many ways. The first, in order of time, was the authorized and systematic ravishing of the women of Belgium and of France and the sending of the offspring from this official and bestial debauchery into Germany, to form part of the future "defense of the fatherland."

The deportation of the men of Belgium is another phase. These men will, of course, never return if Germany can prevent it, and so will constitute an effective increase in the male population. But they will either voluntarily or through compulsion form some sort of liaison with the surplus women of Germany and produce offspring which in twenty years will be available fodder for powder. As the excess of Germany's female population is now great and will be still greater after the war, this will prove also a ready means for providing for this surplus.

We next find the German references to the so-called lateral marriages. There are hundreds of thousands of young women in Germany, capable of bearing children, who are at present unattached because of the absence of their husbands at the front. To German efficiency this is a waste of human material. God would not have endowed woman with such an important function if it had not been

intended that she should use it. And to what better use than for the fatherland? Therefore, Germany proposes a "lateral" marriage. A man, married or unmarried-it is immaterial, only if married he must get his wife's permission—is encouraged by the Government to form a temporary union with one of the neglected women (who must also obtain her husband's consent) whose consort is at war. This alliance is to last until a child is born, when it automatically is to cease, the child being either retained by the mother or sent to an institution to be reared that he may form a unit in the future national defense. It is an admirable German scheme, quite typical of the German mind which suffers agony at the sight of anything idle that is susceptible of use.

The next development concerned the women who have been widowed through the war and the men who have been so crippled as to be of no further use in the war area. The burgomasters of the various German towns have been instructed to obtain a list of all war widows in the districts controlled by them, and also a list of all cripples. Advertisements are then to be placed in papers known to be read by women generally, for wives for the deserving cripples. Thus, playing the rôle of Cupid, the beneficent Government will bring together Venus and Adonis and, as is stated in official instructions, sow the seed of a new generation which will, in the fulness of its manhood, take upon its shoulders the national defense.

It is somewhat difficult for us to conceive how, in this enlightened age, a supposedly civilized nation can so foul the beauty of motherhood, so depreciate the great moral value of its womanhood, as to turn the whole community into an official human stock farm by making simply brood animals out of its women. It is an indication of the moral slough into which Germany has descended, so that we need no longer wonder either at the crimes committed by the German soldiery against the women of France and Belgium, or of the complete breakdown of German morality.

Finally, in the discussion of population, we come to Germany's purpose in Africa. One of the terms of peace which Germany will insist on will be, in case of a negotiated peace, the restoration of her African colonies, or in case of victory, the surrender to her not only of