Читать книгу The Inside Story of the Peace Conference - Emile Joseph Dillon - Страница 12

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(1.) Les deux femmes composant l'unique personnel de la maison publique de Gladbach (2, Gasthausstrasse), sont venues en délégation déclarer qu'elles ne pouvaient suffire à la nombreuse clientèle, qui envahit leur maison, devant laquelle stationneraient en permanence de nombreux groupes de clients affamés.

Elles déclarent que défalcation faite du service qu'elles doivent assurer à leurs abonnés belges et allemands, elles ne peuvent fournir à la division qu'un total de vingt entrées par jour (10 pour chacune d'elle).

L'établissement d'ailleurs ne travaille pas la nuit et observe strictement le repos dominical. D'autre part les ressources de la ville ne permettent pas, paraît-il, d'augmenter le personnel. Dans ces conditions, en vue d'éviter tout désordre et de ne pas demander à ces femmes un travail audessus de leurs forces, les mesures suivantes seront prises:

(2.) JOURS DE TRAVAIL: Tous les jours de la semaine, sauf le dimanche.

RENDEMENT MAXIMUM: Chaque jour chaque femme reçoit 10 hommes, soit 20 pour les deux personnes, 120 par semaine.

HEURES D'OUVERTURE: 17 heures à 21 heures. Aucune réception n'aura lieu en dehors de ces heures.

TARIF: Pour un séjour d'un quart heure (entrée et sortie de l'établissement comprises) … 5 marks.

CONSOMMATIONS: La maison ne vend aucune boisson. Il n'y a pas de salle d'attente. Les clients doivent donc se présenter par deux.

(3.) RÉPARTITION: Les 6 jours de la semaine sont donnés:

Le lundi—1er bat. du 164 et C.H.R.

Le mardi—1er bat. du 169 et C.H.R.

Le mercredi—2e bat. du 164 et C.H.R.

Le jeudi—2e bat. du 169 et C.H.R.

Le vendredi—3e bat. du 164.

Le samedi—3e bat. du 169.

(4.) Dans chaque bataillon il sera établi le jour qui leur est fixé, 20 tickets déposés aux bureaux des sergents-majeur à raison de 5 par compagnie. Les hommes désireux de rendre visite à l'établissement réclamerout au bureau de leur sergent-majeur, 1 ticket qui leur donnera driot de priorité.

The value of that document derives from its having been issued as an ordinary regulation, from its having been reproduced in a widely circulated journal of the capital without evolving comment, and from the strong light which it projects upon one of the darkest corners of the civilization which has been so often and so eloquently eulogized.

Manifestly the currents of the new moral life which the Conference was to have set flowing are as yet somewhat weak, the new ideals are still remote and the foreshadowings of a nobler future are faint. Another token of the change which is going forward in the world was reported from the Far East, but passed almost unnoticed in Europe. The Chinese Ministry of Public Instruction, by an edict of November 3, 1919, officially introduced in all secondary schools a phonetic system of writing in place of the ideograms theretofore employed. This is undoubtedly an event of the highest importance in the history of culture, little though it may interest the Western world to-day. At the same time, as a philologist by profession, I agree with a continental authority[42] who holds that, owing to the monosyllabic character of the Chinese language and to the further disadvantage that it lacks wholly or partly several consonants,[43] it will be practically impossible, as the Japanese have already found, to apply the new alphabet to the traditional literary idiom. Neither can it be employed for the needs of education, journalism, of the administration, or for telegraphing. It will, however, be of great value for elementary instruction and for postal correspondence. It is also certain to develop and extend. But its main significance is twofold: as a sign of China's awakening and as an innovation, the certain effect of which will be to weaken national unity and extend regionalism at its expense. From this point of view the reform is portentous.

Another of the signs of the new times which calls for mention is the spread and militancy of the labor movement, to which the war and its concomitants gave a potent impulse. It is differentiated from all previous ferments by this, that it constitutes merely an episode in the universal insurgency of the masses, who are fast breaking through the thin social crust formed by the upper classes and are emerging rapidly above the surface. One of the most impressive illustrations of this general phenomenon is the rise of wages, which in Paris has set the municipal street-sweepers above university professors, the former receiving from 7,600 to 8,000 francs a year, whereas the salary of the latter is some 500 francs less.[44]

This general disturbance is the outcome of many causes, among which are the over-population of the world, the spread of education and of equal opportunity, the anonymity of industrial enterprises, scientific and unscientific theories, the specialization of labor and its depressing influence.[45] These factors produced a labor organization which the railways, newspapers, and telegraph contributed to perfect and transform into a proletarian league, and now all progressive humanity is tending steadily and painfully to become one vast collectivity for producing and sharing on more equitable lines the means of living decently. This consummation is coming about with the fatality of a natural law, and the utmost the wisest of governments can do is to direct it through pacific channels and dislodge artificial obstacles in its course.

One of the first reforms toward which labor is tending with more or less conscious effort is the abolition of the hereditary principle in the possession of wealth and influence and of the means of obtaining them. The division of labor in the past caused the dissociation of the so-called nobler avocations from manual work, and gradually those who followed higher pursuits grew into a sort of hereditary caste which bestowed relative immunity from the worst hardships of life's struggle and formed a ruling class. To-day the masses have their hands on the principal levers for shattering this top crust of the social sphere and seem resolved to press them.

The problem for the solution of which they now menacingly clamor is the establishment of an approximately equitable principle for the redistribution of the world's resources—land, capital, industries, monopolies, mines, transports, and colonies. Whether socialization—their favorite prescription—is the most effectual way of achieving this object may well be doubted, but must be thoroughly examined and discussed. The end once achieved, it is expected that mankind will have become one gigantic living entity, endowed with senses, nerves, heart, arteries, and all the organs necessary to operate and employ the forces and wealth of the planet. The process will be complex because the factors are numerous and of various orders, and for this reason few political thinkers have realized that its many phases are aspects of one phenomenon. That is also a partial explanation of the circumstance that at the Conference the political questions were separated from the economic and treated by politicians as paramount, the others being relegated to the background. The labor legislation passed in Paris reduced itself, therefore, to counsels of perfection.

That the Conference was incapable of solving a problem of this magnitude is self-evident. But the delegates could and should have referred it to an international parliament, fully representative of all the interests concerned. For the best way of distributing the necessaries and comforts of life, which have been acquired or created by manual toil, is a problem that can neither be ignored nor reasoned away. So long as it remains a problem it will be a source of intermittent trouble and disorder throughout the civilized world. The titles, which the classes heretofore privileged could invoke in favor of possession, are now being rapidly acquired by the workers, who in addition dispose of the force conferred by organization, numbers, and resolve. At the same time most of the stimuli and inventives to individual enterprise are being gradually weakened by legislation, which it would be absurd to condemn and dangerous to regard as a settlement. In the meanwhile productivity is falling off, while the demand for the products of labor is growing proportionately to the increase of population and culture.

Hitherto the laws of distribution were framed by the strong, who were few and utilized the many. To-day their relative positions have shifted; the many have waxed strong and are no longer minded to serve as instruments in the hands of a class, hereditary or selected. But the division of mankind into producers and utilizers has ever been the solid and durable mainstay of that type of civilization from which progressive nations are now fast moving away, and the laws and usages against which the proletariat is up in arms are but its organic expression.

From the days of the building of the Pyramids down to those of the digging of the Panama Canal the chasm between the two social orders remained open. The abolition of slavery changed but little in the arrangement—was, indeed, effected more in the interests of the old economics than in deference to any strong religious or moral sentiment. In substance the traditional ordering continued to exist in a form better adapted to the modified conditions. But the filling up of that chasm, which is now going forward, involves the overthrow of the system in its entirety, and the necessity of either rearing a wholly new structure, of which even the keen-sighted are unable to discern the outlines, or else the restoration of the old one on a somewhat different basis. And the only basis conceivable to-day is that which would start from the postulate that some races of men come into the world devoid of the capacity for any more useful part in the progress of mankind than that which was heretofore allotted to the proletariat. It cannot be gainsaid that there are races on the globe which are incapable of assimilating the higher forms of civilization, but which might well be made to render valuable services in the lower without either suffering injustice themselves or demoralizing others. And it seems nowise impossible that one day these reserves may be mobilized and systematically employed in virtue of the principle that the weal of the great progressive community necessitates such a distribution of parts as will set each organ to perform the functions for which it is best qualified.

Since the close of the war internationalism was in the air, and the labor movement intensified it. It stirred the thought and warmed the imagination alike of exploiters and exploited. Reformers and pacifists yearned for it as a means of establishing a well-knit society of progressive and pacific peoples and setting a term to sanguinary wars. Some financiers may have longed for it in a spirit analogous to that in which Nero wished that the Roman people had but one neck. And the Conference chiefs seemed to have pictured it to themselves—if, indeed, they meditated such an abstract matter—in the guise of a pax Anglo-Saxonica, the distinctive feature of which would lie in the transfer to the two principal peoples—and not to a board representing all nations—of those attributes of sovereignty which the other states would be constrained to give up. Of these three currents flowing in the direction of internationalism only one—that of finance—appears for the moment likely to reach its goal. …

FOOTNOTES:

[36] L'Humanité, March 6 and 18, 1919.

[37] Cf. L'Humanité, April 10,1919.

[38] The sentence was subsequently commuted.

[39] La Gazette de Lausanne, May 26, 1919.

[40] 128th Division.

[41] It was reproduced by the French Syndicalist organ, L'Humanité of July 7, 1919.

[42] R. de Saussure. Cf. Journal de Genève, August 18, and also May 26, 1919.

[43] d, r, t, l, g (partly) and p, except at the beginning of a word.

[44] Cf. the French papers generally for the month of May—also Bonsoir, July 26, 1919.

[45] Walther Rathenau has dealt with this question in several of his recent pamphlets, which are not before me at the moment.