Land & Water 
March 14, 19 i 8 
of idealists, well enough meant, no doubt, the foundat o is 
of the future poaci- of Europe are at this moment bang laid 
Tn the trenches in France and Flanders, m the daily proofs 
that there are soldiers in existence whom German military 
ambition cannot meet on equal terms. 
* * 
The significance of the raids of the past week or two, 
apparently meaningless, lies in this. The enemy m them 
has been "putting to the te.st the supposed improvements in 
his tactics. It has not been the only purpose, of course 
but it is one purpose, and important. There is more in it 
than reconnaisance. These activities may very correctly be 
termed a trial of probable costs. From that point of view 
they must have been consistently disappointing. Ihey have 
been disappointing because, though many experiments in 
training have been going on behind the German front, the 
devices have nothing in them that is original. 
A^ tlie moment, the anxiety of the rulers of Germain is to 
overc^me this obstacle of tactical inferiority. They have 
been moving heaven and earth to find, a solution, fhe 
existence rr disappearance of the Prussian military system 
turns upon finding one. In any event, it is a striking dis- 
closure of deficiency to embark upon tho search m the midst 
of a great war. 
« * * 
I 
Directly Turkey entered the war, Germany .'irectad that 
country's" main mihtarv effort towards the capture of the 
Batoum oil-fields. But Russia's armies were too strong, and 
Turkey suffered heavy defeat, taking her revenge on the 
.Armenians, a race which will probably be exterminated now 
that Germany has deUvered them over to the tender merciL.. 
of the Turks— an act of heartless cold-blooded cruelty'. 
What was impossible in war has been achieved by peace, 
and Turkey is to occupy the most important and valuable 
. oil-field in the world. Her authority will be merely nominal ; 
Germany will be actually in possession, and having on one 
pretext or another installed herself at Odessa, Germany will 
dominate both shores of the Blagk Sea and its exceedingly 
wealthy trade. The Teuton parrot-cry "freedom of the 
seas" is not intended to apply to a German-ruled Baltic or 
a German-dominated Black Sea. 
The most serious feature of this latest development of 
Bolshevik folly and perfidy is that Germany has at last 
arrived at her "long-desired goal — Central Asia. Thwarted in 
Mesopotamia, she is getting there by the Trans-Caspian 
route. The effect on the British Empire must be the same, 
if German influence is allowed to remain there. 
It wotdd be foolishness to minimise the danger which vnll 
arise to the British Empire first and foremost, and finally, 
to the peace of the world if German influence is given a 
foothold in Asia. By a strange coincidence, the "modesl 
tribute of a generous and not ungrateful people," to quote 
Mr. Austen Chamberlain, was being paid by the Houses 
of Parliament to the late Sir Stanley Maude just at the 
moment when the details of the Bolshevik treaty came 
through, and few probably realised the close connection 
between the two incidents. 
Had Germany obtained that treaty before Bagdad had been 
conquered, she would have found in every bazaar from the 
Caspian to the Hindoo Kush soil lying ready for her evil 
seed. After the failure at Kut, British prestige had never 
fallen so low in the East since Britain became an Asiatic 
Power. But with the flag of England flying over the old 
capital of the Caliphs, and the sacred city of Jerusalem 
— as sacred to Mohammedan as to Jew and Christian — 
in our hands, the f)osition is entirely altered. More than 
that, the Arab tribes of Mesopotamia are happy and pros- 
perous under our administration ; they are allowed to make 
money, and Ihey are allowed to keep it. These facts are 
whispered through the echoing galleries of the Orient, and 
German influence will find it a difficult and costly job to 
push forward at this moment her anti-British propaganda. 
What the Empire really owes to Sir Stanley Maude for this 
rehabiUtation of her prestige can never bC set down in pounds, 
shilUngs, and pence. It is incalculable. 
But Germany cannot be allowed to become an Asiatic 
Power or even influence. Japan must head her off from 
the Pacific, and it is for us to defeat her schemes in Persia 
and Afghanistan. Fortunately, we are not without experi- 
ence in those regions ; we have capable officers at our dis- 
posal who understand the people they are dealing with, 
but no time is to be lost in strengthening our influence 
north of the Khyber and Quetta, and in counteracting the 
German emissaries who are probably alrea.dy on their way 
to stir up trouble for us. The future of Germany in Central 
.\sia is yet another question that has to be finally settled 
on the Western front. 
* * * 
The arrangements for demobilisation made public last 
week show that the Government have appreciated the drift 
of working-class feeling during the last few years. The 
Labour Exchanges had" become unpopular before the war 
for different reasons, one of thein being the use made of 
Exchanges during strikes by employers looking for blackleg 
labour. This truth has been grasped by the authorities, and 
the name "Employment Exchange" has now been sub- 
stituted for the original name of these institutions. More 
important schemes for giving trade unions some share in the 
control of the Exchanges are under consideration. 
If demobilisation had been left to these Exchanges and a 
central Government department the outlook would have 
been unpromising. Fortunately, the Government have 
learnt, from the experiences of the war, that bureaucracy is 
not an ideal instrument for guiding industry through a 
critical phase, and they have wisely abandoned the project. 
An Advisory Committee has now been set up, consisting in 
the main of representatives of the employers' associations, 
and of the trade unions, with a handful of officials from the 
departments immediately concerned. In cases where an 
industry has formed an Industrial Council before the con- 
clusion of the war, that Council will obviously be the proper 
body for dealing with demobilisation, and this Advisory 
Conimittee will have in such cases comparatively little to do. 
The blemish in the scheme is the .inadequate representa- 
tion of women workers, for on a Council of nearly fifty mem- 
bers there aie only four women, and yet some of the most 
crucial issues affect women as intimately as men. 
As it happens, a demobilisation question has already 
arisen, for something like 40,000 women have been dis- 
charged from munition works. On the face of it, there 
ought to be no difficulty in providing them with employrrient 
at ;i lime when there is so urgent a demand for laboiu:. But, 
in the first place, it is contended, with good reason, that 
these women ought not to be penalised, and that they are 
as well entitled to unemployment pay during any interval 
that may elapse as they would be if their discharge had 
come at the end of the warj In the second place, the ques- 
tion is complicated by the scandalous pre-war standards of 
women's wages. 
In places like Sheffield a munition woman worker may be 
earning over £2, when before the war she was working long 
hours with deplorable results to the health of the community 
for a quarter of that sum. The only way to prevent a 
disastrous relapse is to abolish this whole system of sweating 
For this reason, the announcement made by Mr. Roberts 
this week that he is going to propose a large extension of the 
Trade Boards is most welcome news, and it is to be hoped 
that the Trade Boards will be encouraged to take rather a 
bolder view of their powers and responsibilities. 
The Business Men's Week must^^be pronounced a great 
success; even those who object to what they caD "the 
circus business" in connection with national finance have 
to admit that the end has justified the means. The publicity 
campaign brought home to people in all parts of the country 
their individual responsibility in this respect, and it has 
also served a good purpose in that it must have induced 
many to begin saving who had hitherto regarded thrift with 
distaste. One may reasonably hope the good which 
this concentrated effort to arouse the people to their re- 
sponsibilities toward the cost of the war has effected, 
will continue. 
♦ * * 
fhe dispersal of the John Linnell collection of works by 
William Blake at Christie's this week is an event of 
more than artistic interest at the present moment. Blake 
was a great Englishman, in the sense in which Chaucer was 
English. The obscurity of much of his work, as well as its 
imaginative range, has distracted attention from its passionate 
nationalism. His earliest drawings were made from the 
monuments in Westminster Abbey ; as a youth, he spent his 
evenings designing subjects from English history, Chaucer 
and Milton were his constant companions, and in "The 
Spiritual Form of Pitt guiding Behemoth" and "Nelson 
guiding Leviathan," he made a definite contribution to the 
political propaganda of his own period. Nor was his influ- 
ence upon other artists any less national ; and in the works 
of Edward Calvert, Samuel Palmer, and John Linnell himself, 
there is expressed an ideal of England curiously in accord 
with what we are striving after to-day. 
/ 
