lost. Senator Johnson's oratory really profits by its very faults. He can grip an audience for two hours, holding attention as few men in public life can hold it. The tremendous demonstrations of enthusiasm that have followed his speeches in towns and cities all over the country have not been equalled since the days when Colonel Roosevelt was the great public idol.

Opposes the League of Nations

Senator Johnson's campaign has been based upon the issue of the League of Nations. He has been one of the Senate "irreconcilables." From the very first, when the famous document was laid before the Senate, he has been one of the leaders of the opposi tion; and he has frequently said that, while he seldom agrees with the present occupant of the White House, he does agree with him upon one thing-that the League of Nations shall go to the people of the country for their ultimate decision.

Effort has been made to make it appear that Senator Johnson is opposed to a League of Nations of any character whatever. Yet he has repeatedly declared this not to be the case. He is opposed to the particular League of Nations proposed by the Paris Peace Conference, and he is opposed to it because he believes it is calculated to bring about conditions exactly the reverse of those for which it was intended. Instead of promoting peace and preventing war, it will, he believes, bring about innumerable wars and definitely commit America to participation in them through all time to come. He has declared himself in favor a league or a tribunal at which representatives of all the nations could assemble for the settling of disputes and the arbitration of difficulties under codified international laws. He would, however, oppose any league which did not give to America absolute independence of action, or which threatened in any way to entangle America in the quarrels of Europe and Asia.

A Safe and Sane Governor

It is as the evangelist of Americanism, as opposed to the internationalism of the League of Nations, that the people of the East know Senator Johnson most intimately. But his own land of the West knows him as a great executive. It is this knowledge of his executive ability that gives Californians firmest faith in his qualifications for the presidency.

Johnson was responsible for great reforms in California. Yet these very reforms proved

that he is, above all things else, a sound, safe, and conservative business man. As Governor of California he insisted that the employer and the employee are equally representative of business and should be accorded equal consideration as such. He had enacted a workmen's compensation law which is so well constructed that it has proven absolutely lawyer-proof. To-day there is not an employer nor an employee in California who does not regard Johnson's workmen's compensation law as the finest piece of constructive legislation ever enacted into the statutes of the State.

Business men of a certain class protested vigorously against the adoption of a "blue sky" law in California. Honest business men, however, were naturally for the enactment of the law. It has given stability to securities such as they never had before. Investors in the stocks of California corporations know that they are not being inveigled into any wildcat scheme. Fly-by-night promoters have been forced to go to more verdant fields of activity, while legitimate corporations find it far easier to dispose of their stocks than in days of hit or miss operation.

Johnson reformed the banking laws of his State. He did this after obtaining expert advice from some of the biggest bankers of the Pacific Coast, and it is now the boast of every California banker that his State has the finest, safest, and soundest banking laws in the Union.

Herbert Fleishhacker, president of the Anglo-London and Paris National Bank, of San Francisco, the largest individual banking institution west of the Rocky Mountains, was asked by a Wall Street banker a few months ago whom he favored for the presidency. "Johnson," answered Fleishhacker.

"What!" demanded the New Yorker in amazement. "Johnson, after what he did in California!"

"Because of what he did in California," returned Fleishhacker. "I opposed Johnson when he first started his reform laws, but he had vision when I was shortsighted. These very reform laws have given a stability to business in California which it never had in the old days."

Dr. A. H. Giannini, president of the East River National Bank, of New York, and of the Bank of Italy, operating twenty-four banks in the richest sections of the Pacific Coast, is another man who has preached to New York acquaintances that Senator Johnson was a real business Governor.

Hand in hand with such big business men as Fleishhacker and Giannini, during the recent primary campaign in California worked P. H. McCarthy, president of the Building Trades Council; Michael Casey, president of the Teamsters' Union; and John I. Nolan, labor leader and member of Congress.

Johnson has the confidence of all classes in that part of the country which knows him best.

Never a Dangerous Radical

The charge of radicalism has been made against Johnson far and wide during the campaign. Yet many men who pride themselves on their conservatism have been won to Johnson. They have investigated his record and have discovered that reform legislation which he initiated, and which was at irst regarded as radical, proved to be sound in every way in its operation, and, therefore, was to be regarded as essential and conservative. They have also listened to his campaign speeches, and have found in them only that Sort of radicalism which insists upon the constitutional rights of freedom of speech and freedom of assembly. They have been reached by the arguments that no man who believes in upholding the Constitution can be regarded as intensely radical. It would be difficult in this country to-day to convince anybody that the fathers of the Constitution created a radical document.

Opponents of Johnson have laid emphasis upon his having at one time been apparently in favor of government ownership of the railroads. Senator Johnson's attitude toward government ownership has perhaps undergone a change. At least, if he really believes in the theory he does not believe that government ownership is at present possible. He has publicly declared that the manner in which the railroads were operated under government control during the war period has postponed the possibility of government ownership for at least two generations, if not for all time. It will be necessary, in his opinion, for an economic development of the theory of government ownership to a satisfactory point of practicability.

Entirely aside from his popularity with the public, it has been demonstrated during the present campaign that Senator Johnson is extremely popular with those who know him personally. He has many friendly disputes with many persons; but, a good fighter himself, he holds another good fighter in high esteem. Few members of the Senate are as well liked by the members of the press gallery. This is due perhaps to the fact that Senator Johnson is not so overcome with the dignity of his position as to cease to be a common, ordinary citizen. He is approachable at all times, always has a ready smile, and is never too obsessed with the great governmental problems of the day to chat about baseball and the "movies."

During the war he had a record of 100 per cent. Americanism. He supported every war measure on the theory that the stress of the situation demanded the enactment of the laws. When the first information came from Europe that a document was being evolved which would forever put an end to wars, Senator Johnson was as enthusiastic concerning it as any other man in America. Like all Americans, he responded promptly to the abstraction of promoting peace and preventing war. It was not until the League of Nations covenant was in his hands and had been carefully studied that he came out in opposition to it. For a time he was supported in his opposition only by Senators Borah and Reed, and they were three of the most unpopular men in the Senate. The nation was still responding to the abstraction and giving little heed to the concrete terms of the contract.

Johnson took the fight against the league to the people last year, when he followed President Wilson in his tour of the country, and told why he was against the league. He is still making the same fight, but there is apparently a tremendous difference in the attitude of the public from that of a year ago. The League of Nations is apparently to be a big issue of the campaign. There will be no doubt in the mind of any American citizen as to where Senator Johnson stands on the issue.

I.

W

SAN REMO AND AFTER

HEN I closed my article for last month, the representatives of the various Allied powers were just beginning to gather at San Remo, on the Italian Riviera. As I pointed out at the time, this conference promised to be one of the most important since that gathering at Versailles which fixed the terms of the armistice. To be sure, it was not the German but the Allied situation that was bound to be uppermost in the minds of all present. There was, in fact, a question whether the alliance itself would emerge from the conference shattered or restored.

In Lloyd George's phrase, everyone left San Remo happy. Discounting such optimism as one would expect in a public statement, the fact is no less clear that for the moment at least the immediate perils were exorcised. French, British, and Italian statesmen after long debates-not all of them immediately satisfactory or conciliatory-arrived at a common basis for action, arrived at a common agreement that the alliance itself was of too much value to the nations interested to be suffered to fall apart. San Remo was in this sense a renewal of an alliance.

So much is clear gain for the world; and yet it must be evident that even the agreements of San Remo cannot permanently stand if, in some fashion or other, the nations which fought each other do not resume relations, economic even more than political. And this explains the decision at San Remo to invite German delegates to meet their former enemies at another conference at Spa, to discuss the fixing of the size of the German reparations, to settle upon many questions remaining unsettled or newly arisen.

At San Remo the British accepted the clear, uncompromising and unmistakable assurance of the French Government that France had no intention whatever of employing the treaty of peace as a vehicle to further French imperialistic ambitions. For his country, M. Millerand definitively renounced

aspirations for the annexation of German territory adjacent to the French frontier. I do not think anyone familiar with the real sentiment of France at the present time believes that any thoughtful Frenchman, or any considerable and influential number of Frenchmen, would desire to annex German territory. But the belief that such a sentiment existed had developed in Great Britain. The charge had been made; it had been reechoed by the President of the United States; and to a continuance of the partnership between England and France some clear and definite statement was necessary. This M. Millerand gave, gave without qualification, gave in such fashion as profoundly to impress Lloyd George, who transmitted his impression to the British public.

By contrast, it was equally necessary that the French public should have an assurance from the British that there was no purpose behind the various discussions of the terms of the treaty of Versailles so to reduce-so to "water"-those terms that Germany would escape payments she could make and France would lose reparations she ought to have, while Great Britain would acquire trade profits which she was anxious to obtain.

While the war was going on a common peril suppressed the questionings and doubtings of most people. It is true that in France German propaganda continued to allege that the British base at Calais was being transformed into a position from which the British would not retire at the end of the war. Nor were the Germans less assiduous in creating the impression in England that French desire for revenge and for German territory was the sole circumstance which necessitated a continuance of the slaughter.

During the war there were more Englishmen who cared about winning the war, and more Frenchmen who cared about winning the war, than there were representatives of either nation who were willing even to listen to these aspersions upon the purposes of an ally. But peace or approximate peace has

brought with it a lessening of the extraordinary pressure so essential to an alliance. Frenchmen and Englishmen to-day are not dying together in the presence of a common enemy. Confidence born of that coöperation can only live while it continues. Nothing is more human-however regrettable-than the fact that, with the enemy beaten, allies tend to resume their own lives, to follow their own purposes, to drift apart. Nothing is more natural than that there should appear in each country a faction opposed to the alliance itself.

The great thing about San Remo is that the alliance between the three western European nations survived the test. There will be other tests, there will be other crises; but the very peril which menaced the alliance has served to give it a new value in the minds of many people. Frenchmen and Englishmen alike, on the whole, are probably going to be more patient and less impulsive as a consequence of an incident or a series of incidents which for the time being have called into question the future of the only association of nations so far established which stands between the world and complete chaos.

II. THE NEAR EAST

So far as the conference at San Remo accomplished anything outside of a readjustment of relations between allies, this achievement was in the Near East. Once more, as so often in the last two generations, the great powers of Europe sat down around the table for the purpose of liquidating the assets of the Turk; and once more the net result was rather an increased number of amputations than any final settlement.

To Greece was assigned what remains of Turkish territory between the base of the Constantinople peninsula and the Bulgarian frontier, together with a considerable area about Smyrna. Constantinople itself was reserved, with British occupation continuing, against that day not yet discernible when Europe can make up its mind to confide the city to a great power or to Greece.

In giving the Greeks Thrace and Smyrna, the San Remo conference did not go outside the bounds of justice and of right. The majority of the population of Thrace, or at least the largest single ethnic element in that territory, is Hellenic and has been for two thousand years and more. Smyrna itself is a Greek city surrounded by lands which were Hellenic in the morning of history

when the first Persian invasions opened the glorious history of classical Greece.

With these two accessions, Greece is made a considerable power. With northern Epirus and the islands of the Egean, which should be and probably will be assigned to her, Greece will emerge from the world war with an area at least half as great as that of Italy, and with a population of seven or eight millions. Moreover, before her will lie the prospect of a later reoccupation of Constantinople. It is by no means beyond the bounds of possibility that another generation will see Greece restoring the Byzantine empire. At all events, the progress that has been made in less than a quarter of a century since Venizelos came from Crete to Athens marks the greatest gain of the Greek race in many, many centuries; and it gives to them the opportunity to become in the future the great commercial people of the Near East.

In the general division of spheres of influence, Italy at San Remo obtained what amounted to a recognition of her claim to predominance on the southern coast of Asia Minor. From the mainland facing the island of Rhodes to the Gulf of Alexandretta, not even an Italian pretended that Italy had here claims founded upon race or upon peculiar strategic, political, or commercial interest. No! The fact remains that this assignment represents an old-fashioned division comparable entirely with similar divisions which the last generation saw traced upon the map of Africa all the way from the Senegal to the Congo.

In this region Italy will now doubtless seek to construct a colonial edifice. For the moment, she has compromised her differences with the Greeks; but with the Turks there is no compromise. Therefore one must look for a long, slow process of pacification and penetration-if, indeed, Italy, after the burdens of the present war, finds herself capable of a new sacrifice and a new effort.

Beyond the Gulf of Alexandretta southward to Palestine, the conference of San Remo recognized the French claims. France is to have in some fashion, either by mandate or otherwise, domination over the Syrian shore, with permission-more or less hazyto expand inland toward Damascus, toward Aleppo, toward the Euphrates.

French claims to Syria, sentimentally and historically, rest upon far firmer foundation than Italian claims to the Adalian coast. French commercial interests in Beirut are of long standing. There has been a Christian