LAND 6? WATER 
December 12, 1918 
LAND&WATER 
? Chancery Lane, London, W.C.2. T,l. HoUcm ziiS 
TH URSDA Y, DECEMBER 12, 1918 
Contents 
page 
The Declaration of Right (Cartoon) 
- Raemaekers 
I 
Leading Articles 
2 
The Bridge-heads of the Rhine 
Hilaire Belloc 
3 
Freedom of the Seas — II. 
Arthur Pollen 
7 
The Art of Dazzle-painting 
Jan Gordon, Lieut., 
R.N.V.R. 
10 
The Most Miserable of Men . . 
A story by Des- 
mond MacCarthy 
12 
MoNS, 1914 TO 1918 
O.C. 
14 
An Anthropologist 
J. C. Squire 
15 
The Theatre : Jolly Jack Tar . . 
W. J. Turner 
16 
The Reader's Diary 
Peter Bell 
17 
Do Indemnities Hurt ? . . 
Hartley Withers 
18 
Motoring and England's Inland 
Waterways 
H. Massac Buist 
20 
Household Notes 
24 
Notes on Kit 
26 
The Peace Negotiations 
IT is reported that a consultation between the Allied 
Governments will begin at Versailles next Monday ; 
that the discussion of peace preliminaries will open at 
the beginning of January ; and that the Peace Congress 
proper will probably meet in February and sit until 
May — after which,- no doubt, various commissions will go on 
sitting for many months, threshing out questions of detail. 
We shall be glad when these official discussions have begun ; 
for every week that passes offers more and more temptation 
to irresponsible people to start controversies, not with the 
Germans, but amongst the Allies themselves. Our terms 
vis-a-vis the Central Empires are, happily, already settled 
in their broad outlines, and to a large extent in detail. There 
is no longer a question as to the subject nations of Austria 
and Turkey being liberated. We know that Poland will be 
reconstituted and that Alsace-Lorraine will become French ; 
and as for the indemnity from Germany, in reparation for 
her crimes against life and property, the only question at 
issue is not whether she should pay one, but how large a 
one she wUl be able to pay — a question concerning which 
few private persons are at present in a position to form a 
judgment. The outstanding issues are largely issue s between 
the Allies or between one ally and the world in general : 
what shall be done with the German colonies, where shall be 
the frontier between Italy and Jugo-Slavia, what interpreta- 
tion will President Wilson put, and what line can we take 
upon the "freedom of the seas." The dominant need being 
that the Allies should be united at the Congress, and that 
whatever differences still exist between them should not be 
intensified by misunderstanding, suspicion, and over-state- 
ment, it is especially necessary that we should all exercise 
the greatest caution in discussing these knotty points. 
I 
mmigration 
There is a good deal of talk about the necessity of stricter 
immigration laws after the war. The need has been brought 
home to journalists by the presence in our midst of undesir- 
able Germans ; but it existed before the war. Anybody 
who has read the old reports of the Royal Commission on 
Alien Immigration knows that ; or, for that matter, anyone 
who has ever taken a walk down the Whitechapel High 
Road. But the difficulty about alien immigration has 
always been that it has been fought over by two parties of 
extremists — one party talking as though it desired to prevent 
any foreigner from ever landing on our shores, and the other 
party taking the view that absolute Free Trade in these 
matters is the only proper thing, and that any human being 
has, and should be allowed to exercise, the right to settle 
anywhere he likes. The truth lies between the two. We 
— and every other civilised nation — always have taken 
foreigners in. We have benefited by foreigners who have 
settled here, and the progress of the world has been assisted 
by our contact with foreigners who have stayed here only 
temporarily. A certain interchange of citizens between 
nations must be expected and need do not harm ; and "the 
more international contact the better. But what we must 
insist on is that foreigners who come to settle here should 
not come faster than they can be digested : that they should 
come singly and be absorbed into our system, their sons 
living in the light of English traditions and manners. We 
do not want them coming in thousands, knowing nothing of 
England save that she offers them a living, and settling 
down in alien quarters as foreigners who will remain foreigners. 
It is a commonplace that contact between the working 
classes of two civilisations degrades both ; it is also a common- 
place that our own alien East End is a breeding ground of 
every sort of vice and corruption, and that the foreigners 
there, with their low material standards, have a deplorable 
effect economically. We must, somehow, regulate the flow 
of immigration so that these aggregations of unabsorbed 
ahens shall no longer be possible ; aggregations, we may 
add, largely composed of people who do not even get 
naturalised, being anxious to obtain the advantages of 
English residence without the responsibilities of British 
citizenship. A mere money test is not enough (the man 
who has "come back with a first-class ticket" is almost 
proverbial), and a mere literary test is not enough ; but the 
latter is better than the former. Our rulers will have to 
devise measures which will secure the results we desire ; 
and so, we may add, will the rulers of America, where it is 
the universal opinion that the flow of immigration, stemmed 
by the war, must not be allowed to resunie in the old 
unregulated way which seemed to threaten the swamping of 
American civilisation and to postpone indefinitely American 
efforts to raise the working-class standard of living. 
The Drink Regulations 
Is it not time that we heard something as t^o the Govern- 
ment's intentions with regard to the drink regulations ? 
Those regulations may be grouped into three main classes : 
those which affect the hours at which public-houses are open, 
those which affect the quality of the drink sold, and those 
which affect the citizens' liberty of action when he is drinking 
or about to drink. We are quite prepared to consider any 
of these regulations afresh now that peace has come. There 
is certainly something to be said for closing public-houses 
reasonably early (though not at 9.30) in the evening, if only 
in the interests of the staff. It used to be said that a pub- 
lican's breakfast consisted of a beefsteak and a bulldog ; 
the bulldog's job being to eat the beefsteak, the publican, 
whose head was fuddled by late hours and fumes, being 
unable to eat anything at all. That is no longer true ; and 
publicans and their employees welcome the change. But it 
would be grossly undemocratic were the Government to 
perpetuate any of these regulations without further discus- 
sion ; for they were framed, and accepted, purely as war 
measures. Many people are urging their continuance ; but 
these people are almost invariably found, on investigation, 
to be people who desire to stop drinking altogether, and 
consequently favour any and eveiy step which may approach 
the goal of their desire. We fancy that now the war is 
over we shall hear more of the viev; of the common man 
who, whilst not desiring prohibition, has not shared either 
the view of the chief opponents of prohibition that every- 
thing should be left, as it should be. Whatever the ordinary 
citizen wants it is not the public-houses as they are, and cer- 
tainly not the abolition of the public-house ; he wants that 
improved, ventilated, cheerful, civilised public-house which 
the prohibitionist fears because it may mean the perpetua- 
tion of what he calls "the consumption of alcohol," and the 
brewer because it wiU. reduce his profits. Yet, has any 
party got real pubhc-house reform in its programme ? 
