A.N. FIELD
The Truth About the Slump
The course of events since this book was written at the beginning of 1931 has provided much additional evidence of the truth of the matter assembled in it. In par ticular, the stabilisation of money in purchasing power, two years ago regarded as little more than the hobby of cranks, is now receiving support all over the world.
In Britain a Government Committee on Finance and Industry, composed mainly of bankers and presided over by Lord Macmillan, admitted in a report presented to Parliament in June, 1931, that "the recent world-wide fall of prices is best described as a monetary phenomenon." It declared that the objective of monetary policy should he "first of all to raise prices a long way above the present level and then to maintain them at the level thus reached with as much stability as can he managed."
Although the Macmillan Committee recommended the maintenance of the gold standard, yet within three months of its report Britain was obliged on September 21, 1931, to go off gold in order to avoid almost immediate bankruptcy on it The return to the gold standard in 1925 had been made on the precarious basis of gold borrowed from America, and American pressure resulted in its abandonment. Tersely summing up the situation Mr. J.F. Darling, a director of the Midland Bank, wrote in his pamphlet "Monetary Leadership" (Ernest Bern. 1932) that "the Federal Reserve Bank of New York refused to lend us any more money because our balance-sheet did not warrant it. Britain's cheque was refused. That is the plain English of it."
Since the abandonment of gold the pound sterling has been inconvertible paper money. The sole discernible objective in its regulation appears to be to maintain it at a more or less steady value against the dollar. This means that Britain in monetary matters still trails along as the poor relation of the United States and is dragged from pillar to post into whatever depths of deflation the conontrollers of American finance choose to go.
Although Mr. Neville Chamberlain as Chancellor of the Excheuqer apparently bankers after a return to gold, it is worth noting that the British Conservative Party, at its national conference attended by 1700 delegates in October of this year resolved against any such step back to gold slavery, and urged the Government to consult the Dominions with a view to stabilising the purchasing power of money within the Empire on the basis of an index scale of wholesale commodity prices. This is in line with the policy advocated in this book.
In Time last the London Chamber of Commerce, representing 60,000 firms and companies, issued a "Report on Monetary Policy" supporting the same principle. It stated: "The currency must be backed by real wealth, i.e. commodities with a market value; that backing must not be one commodity, the value of which, in term, of other commodities, can be made to, fluctuate widely, either through scarcity from natural causes or through being cornered."
In October, 1931, it was announced that the Riksbank of Sweden, which controls the currency of that country, had tentatively decided to aim at stabilisingg it in purchasing power on a commodity basis. Information is lacking as to how far, and with what succes, it has pursued this policy.
More recently the United States House of Representatives on May 2 last passed the Goldsborough Stabilisation Bill by 289 votes to 60. The bill was subsequently rejected by the Senate and so failed to become law. It is notable, however, as being the first measure to be approved by the people's representatives in the legislature of a great nation directing the restoration of the purchasing power of the people and the maintenance of money at a steady level against commodities. The principal clauses of the bill read as follows:
"It is hereby declared to be the policy of the United States that the average purchasing power of the dollar as ascertained by the Department of Labour in the whole sale commodity markets for the period covering the years 1921 to 1929 inclusive shall he restored and maintained by control of the volume of credit and currency. The Federal Reserve Board, the Federal Reserve Banks and the Secretary of the Treasury are hereby charged with the duty of making effective this policy."
In moving the bill the chairman of the House Banking and Currency Committee, Mr. Henry B. Steagall, said :
"Mr. Speaker, this bill represents years of careful study and mature deliberation, and it is reported with the unanimous judgment of the Banking and Currency Committee of this House. ... No legislation since I have served on that committee was ever more fully discussed or more seriously and thoroughly considered.
"The proposal is not radical. It is not extreme: it is not dangerous. It is conservative and constructive. It comes before you with a unanimous report of the com mittee, after hearing discussions by many of the ablest economists of the country, by members of the Federal Reserve Board, and by persons in other positions of high authority. It is backed by nation-wide sentiment among farmers and business interests throughout the country."
Mr. Steagall pointed out that in 1920 and 1921 they had seen the power of control possessed by the Federal Reserve exercised in currency contraction and credit re striction to the extent of about $2,000,000,000 with the result that prices were cut in half and confusion and distress reigned. Then the policy was reversed and expansion and liberal credit substituted, and prosperity revived for a number of years, in 1929 again there was another horrible contraction of currency and credit with a consequent decline in commodity prices that brought depression and panic and a wave of bank failures and bankruptcy to all classes.
Although passed by a majority of nearly live to one by the House, the Goldsborough bill was rejected without a division by the Senate. The New York Times (see page 95) stated that even had the Senate passed the bill President Hoover was certain to veto it.
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Although the Macmillan Committee in its main report looked to international monetary control to remedy the depression, six of its fourteen members saw no difficulty in action by an individual State, included in that six were Mr. Reginald McKenna, chairman of the Midland Bank, and Mr. Keynes, the most quoted British monetary authority of the day. In their addendum they said:
"Theoretically the most obvious and comprehensive method of effecting the desired object [of adjustment to the slump] would be to leave money incomes alone but to change the monetary standard. ... This would bring the direct, initial benefit to those industries which need it most, namely to the foreign trade industries. It would involve no interference with contract. ... It would affect every class of income without the necessity of any other especial measures. For a country which was not an international banker and was not owed large sums from abroad fixed in terms of sterling this would be the simplest solution."
That paragraph appears under the heading "Devaluation," which term is synonymous with "inflation", "reflation", and "depreciation of the currency". Of the various terms "reflation" carries more meaning and signifies a reversal of deflation until normal conditions are restored. At this point is it not inappropriate to insert a brief passage from the evidence of Professor Irving Fisher, the famous American economist, given in March last on the Goldsborough bill:
"It is discouraging and sickening to read all that stuff shouted by the inerudite about the fear of an ‘inflation'. They simply do not know anything about the real situation. They do not know where, when, nor how their own bread is buttered. Their policy has killed agriculture, and now the inability of agriculture to consume as well as to produce is killing all industry and investments."
Equally emphatic was another leading American economist, Professor Willford I. King, who occupies the chair of economics in New York University. Professor King in the course of his statement on the Goldsborough bill said he saw no economic difficulty at all in the way of any country raising its own price level to any point it desired. All that was necessary was to put more money into circulation until the desired point was reached and thereafter to regulate the quantity of money in circulation to keep values stead}, at that level. To regulate money scientifically would be something new, but Professor King said he failed to see that this was an objection. "Of course," he said, "the first man who went up in an airplane was something new; and if you never begin you never get anywhere." If they were going to wait to get an agreement among all the nations of the world to stabilise they might just as well quit in his opinion.
Exchange rates would, of course, vary, and this alarmed some people. "I do not believe," said Professor King, "you can find a shred of evidence that variation in the exchange rate hurts trade." The statistics of trade between the United States and Europe in the 1920s when there was rapid variation in exchange rates lent no support to the view that these variations made trade better or worse.
The proof of the pudding is in the eating. Turning from theory to practice, one finds Argentina bearing witness to the advantage derived from the deliberate depreci ation of its currency. In a memorandum published in London in July, 1931, the Ministry of Finance recorded a great improvement in the trade balance. It was added:
"The depreciation of the peso, which stands at 26 per cent. on the par value, has been an important contributing cause of this improvement of the trade balance. It has stimulated exports by cheapening the cost of Argentine products [in other currencies] and has restricted imports by making them dear in terms of pesos. This is the outcome of deliberate policy, for the new Ministry of Finance has throughout taken care to prevent any appreciation of the currency which would have hindered the export trade and encouraged imports."
In Australia currency depreciation has taken place to some extent as the result of Government deficits, and the Australian pound has thus been maintained 25 per cent. nearer to the pre-slump level than sterling. This has considerably eased the situation in that country and been a substantial benefit to the primary production on which depends the national solvency.
The policy so far pursued in New Zealand has been in the opposite direction, and at the time of writing the Government is committed to a policy of maximum de flation by means of a proposed central banking company to he established on the basis of parity of exchange with sterling. This private corporation is to be set up on the advice of Sir Otto Ernst Niemeyer to "form a link with the other central banks of the world."
In Britain a considerable body of opinion now exists that no particular benefit to the public is resulting from the intimate contacts established between the central banks of the world. Mr. Montagu Norman, Governor of the Bank of England, still travels as diligently as ever to consult the Federal Reserve in New York, and foreign financial interests are still as strongly represented on the directorate of the Bank of England. Lord Beaverbrook in his newspapers, the Sunday Express and Daily Express, in May last was, however, courageously urging a national campaign to throw the foreign bankers off the board and to restore the money power to Parliament.
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The chief central bank of the world is the United States Federal Reserve system. Nothing is more remarkable in the evidence of the numerous witnesses on the Goldsborough bill than their general distrust of that institution and disbelief in any genuine desire on the part of those controlling it to relieve the present depression.
Even ex-Senator Owen, who in 1913 as chairman of the Senate Banking and Currency Committee had sponsored the Federal Reserve Act itself, declared that the slumps of 1920 and 1929 had both been precipitated by the "deliberate contraction of credit."
Mr. Owen was of opinion that if improvement was desired the Federal Reserve authorities must be directly ordered to restore conditions to normal. Professor King, already quoted above, was of similar opinion: that unless it was mandatory "they will do nothing whatever about it." Professor Irving Fisher recalled that the Federal Reserve had been created to function as a common reservoir for the banks in times of emergency: in practice when the emergency came the tap was turned off at the reservoir and the banks were worse off than before they had pooled their resources.
On January 24th last Mr. Paul M Warburg, a prominent founder of the Federal Reserve system, died in New York in his 64th year. According to the New York Times his death followed on "overwork, the result of a strenuous summer spent in following the European crisis."
Through the present deflation the Governor of the Federal Reserve Board has been Mr. Eugene Meyer. According to the New York Journal of January 19 last Mr. Meyer is 56, and is the son of a successful Jewish stockbroker of California, formerly a partner in the international banking house of Lazard Freres, in which Mr. Meyer himself served his apprenticeship. During the war he was associated with Mr. Bernard M. Baruch, who as head of the War Industries Board was the war dictator of America and controlled the delivery of supplies to the Allies. Mr. Meyer was also stated to be controlling the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, recently set up by Congress, and the Land Bank system. It should be noted that the Federal Reserve system in addition to the Board includes a powerful Advisory Council and twelve regional Federal Reserve Banks. Responsibility for its policies is thus not readily located by outsiders.
The Federal Reserve system has been trenchantly attacked in Congress during the past year by Mr. Louis T. McFadden, for twelve years up to 1931 chairman of the House of Representatives Banking and Currency Committee, and thus in a position to know what he is talking about. Mr. McFadden is a Republican (Conservative) in politics and is an ex-president of the Pennsylvania Bankers' Association. In opposing President Hoover's policy of relieving Germany of her obligations, Mr. McFadden in Congress on December 13 last spoke as follows:
"If the German international financiers of Wall Street ... had not had this job waiting to be done, Herbert Hoover would never have been elected President of the United States ... I wish to emphasise the fact that international nuance is almost exclusively German. ... After the world war Germany fell into the hands of German international bankers. ... There is no country in the world to-day of which the inhabitants are so enslaved as are the Germans. ...
"Through the Federal Reserve Board and the Federal Reserve Banks over $30,000,000,000 over and above the German bonds that have been sold here has been pumped into, Germany. ... The Federal Reserve Board and the Federal Reserve Banks have pumped so many billions of dollars into Germany that they dare not name the total.
"Do you know that Germany has been lending our money to Soviet Russia as fast as she could get it out of this country from the Federal Reserve Board and banks ? Do you know that she is the author of the Five-Year Plan; that she has armed and supplied Soviet Russia with our money ? Do you know that Germany and Soviet Russia are one in military and industrial matters ... I say that the Federal Reserve Banks have purchased and rediscounted false, worthless, fictitious and uncollectible acceptances drawn in Germany. ... The Government's money in the designated depositaries is gone, leaving nothing but this worthless paper behind it."
Referring to the New York Stock Exchange collapse which initiated the present slump, Mr. McFadden said:
"It was not accidental. It was a carefully contrived occurrence... The international bankers sought to bring about a condition of despair here so that they might emerge as the rulers of us all."
In passing it may be noted that the opinion that the Hoover moratorium was designed mainly to benefit Germany was strongly voiced by various speakers in a warm debate in the French Chamber of Deputies on June 26. 1931. It was pointed out that under the Young Plan for the payment of German Reparations it was necessary for the German Government to give 90 days' notice of intention to default, whereupon commissions of investigation at once came into action to assess what relief was needed. By having President Hoover intervene the Germans were enabled to default without investigation. Furthermore, the time chosen was significant: on June 15 Britain and France paid their half-year's interest on the American debt; on June 17 Germany announced that she could not pay; and on June 20 President Hoover issued his moratorium proposal. Thus immediately the cash had been extracted from the former Allies things began to happen.
Within a few weeks a financial crisis followed in Britain consequent on these proceedings, and the Government to keep going secured an immediate foreign loan, half from America and half from France. According to a speech made on August 26, 1931, by Dr. Addison, Minister of Agriculture in the Labour Cabinet, a condition imposed by the financiers finding the money was that no economy made by Britain would be satisfactory unless it included a reduction in the allowance to a man out of work from 17s to 15s 4d a week. Dr. Addison said that according to the reports made to Cabinet the demand was very emphatic. It was perfectly fair, he considered, for the lenders to say that the Budget should be balanced, but it was utterly unconstitutional to have then dictate to the Government and Parliament in what way the nation should economise.
Mr. Ramsay MacDonald impressively and indignantly denied that there had been dictation by the Bank of England: the officers of the Bank, he said, had merely advised the Government of the conditions on which a loan could be obtained. As Dr. Addison had not alleged dictation by the Bank of England this seeming denial really denied nothing.
Why should foreign financiers desire to hit the poorest class in Britain by cutting down their pittance ? If they desired to promote discontent and pave the way to revolution their action would be intelligible. It is not intelligible otherwise so far as the writer can see.
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Mr. McFadden's allegations concerning the acceptance of worthless European paper by the Federal Reserve system were confirmed within a few months of his speech by the revelation of the colossal Kreuger frauds. The means by which these operations were conducted were described at length by Mr. McFadden in a speech in Congress on July 10 last in the course of which he said:
"Mr. Chairman, we have in this country one of the most corrupt Institutions the world has ever known. I refer to the Federal Reserve Board and the Federal Reserve Banks. This evil institution has impoverished and ruined the people of the United States; has bankrupted itself; and has practically bankrupted our Government."
Mr. McFadden proceeded to declare that these institutions had been established by bankers who came from Europe and foisted them upon the country. These bankers, he said, took American money to finance Japan in her war against Russia in 1904-05. He added:
"They created a reign of terror in Russia with our money to help that war along. They instigated the separate peace between Germany and Russia, and thus drove a wedge between the Allies in the World War. They financed Trotsky's mass meetings of discontent and rebellion in New York. They paid Trotsky's passage from New York to Russia so that he might assist in the destruction of the Russian Empire. They fomented and instigated the Russian revolution, and they placed a large fund of American dollars at Trotsky's disposal in one of their branch banks in Sweden. ..."
Pointing out that not a dollar could get into circulation in the United States except on terms fixed by the Federal Reserve Banks, Mr. McFadden dwelt at length on the abuse possible in the issue of Federal Reserve notes. These notes can be issued against 40 per cent. of gold and 60 per cent. of commercial paper. Great quantities of United States currency, he said, had been thus issued against mere finance drafts drawn by Germans. "If you desire to obtain the thing of value upon which this currency is based," said Mr. McFadden, "that is, the Limburger cheese, the whisky, the illicit drugs, or any of the other staples—you will have a very hard time finding them. Many of these worshipful commodities are in foreign countries. Are you going to Germany to inspect the warehouses to see if the specified drugs are there ? I think not. And what is more I do not think you would find them if you did."
"The Government and the people of the United States have been swindled by swindlers de luxe," declared Mr. McFadden, "to whom the acquisition of American gold or a parcel of Federal Reserve notes presented net more difficulty than the drawing up of a worthless acceptance in a country not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States Courts, sharpers with a strong banking 'fence' on this side of the water—a fence acting as receiver for the worthless paper coming from abroad, endorsing it and getting- the currency out of the Federal Reserve banks for it as quickly as possible, exchanging that for gold, and in turn transmitting the gold to its foreign confederates.
"Such were the exploits of Ivar Kreuger. ... Every dollar of the billions Kreuger and his gang drew out of this country on acceptances was drawn from the Government and people of the United Stales through the Federal Reserve Board and Federal Reserve Banks. The credit of the United States Government was peddled to him by the Federal Reserve Board and Federal Reserve Bank; for their own private gain. That is what the Federal Reserve Board and the Federal Reserve Banks have been doing for many years. They have been peddling the credit of this Government and the signature of this Government to the swindlers and speculators of all nations. That is what happens when a country forsakes its constitution and gives its sovereignty over public currency to private interests. Give them the flag and they will sell it."
Coming from the Republican Party's ex-chairman of the House Banking and Currency Committee, these are remarkable statements indeed. Nor is Mr. McFadden by any means alone in his views.
In the Paris newspaper Le Figaro in April last the far-flung activities of certain Jewish-American financiers were dealt with at length in a series of five articles by M. Francois Coty under the heading "Financiers who Sport with the World." To this source M. Coty traced the American policies imposed upon Europe by which France is to be deprived of the German indemnities which are her right and of the arms which she needs to defend herself against the new German-Russian aggression which is menacing her. The connection, between international finance and revolutionary movements in all parts of the world were also dealt with in detail by M. Coty.
Evidence of the existence of a virtual alliance between Germany and Russia is given by Mr. Cecil F. Melville in a book published a few months ago, The Russian Face of Germany (Wishart, London, 1932). According to Mr. Melville, Germany since 1920 has used Russia as an arsenal for war materials (in convenient agreement with the Five-Year plan), as a field for military training, and as a prospective ally with an enormous army trained on modern lines outside the supervision of Europe. Mr. Melville has assiduously collected information from German and Russian sources throwing light on these matters and he quotes his authorities. As one reviewer remarks, if one-half of what he says is true the present talk of disarmament is a farce. Britain and France could commit no more perilous folly than to render themselves defenceless while Germany is being thus used as a tool in the hands of Bolshevism and international finance.
There has been much comment on the fact that Russia has been freely supplied with funds from abroad for the prosecution of the Five-Year Plan. For instance, Mr. James W. Gerard, American Ambassador to Germany during the war, stated on September 18, 1931, after a visit to Europe, that Germany "did not need any financial assistance, and that a large percentage of the loans from the United States was lent to Russia." Mr. Gerard added: "If we're going to do business with Russia let us do it directly and not through Germany which has arranged to give Russia millions of dollars credit to purchase commodities in Germany."
The London National Review in April last recorded that whereas Britain in the previous five years had imported goods to the value of £135,000,000 from Russia, her exports to Russia in the same period totalled only, £25,000,000, and even this had been sold on credit. The balance Russia had apparently expended on purchases made in other countries.
In the third edition of The Alien Menace (Boswell Publishing Co., London, 1932) Lieut.-Col. A.H. Lane quotes the following from the "British Russian Trade Gazette and Outlook" for December, 1931: "It must be ironic for them (British manufacturers) to view the forced cessation of work on the giant Cunard liner, which is attributed to this country's ‘frozen' credits in Germany—credits which have been used in great part by Germany to finance orders from Russia. During 1931 orders amounting to £45,000,000 have been placed with German firms by the Soviet buying organisations."
Colonel Lane further wrote: "Though the Communists profess to hate Capitalism and order their paid agents in England to cry ‘Down with the Capitalists', the leaders in Russia never fail to give the international financiers a hearty welcome whenever they visit the U.S.S.R. When Felix M. Warburg, of New York, visited Russia in 1927 he had a great reception, and the speeches delivered on that occasion indicated that the Bolshevist leaders and the leaders of world finance understood each other very well, that their aims were not dissimilar, and altogether they were a united family working in their respective ways for a common end." According to M. Coty in the Figaro, the wife of another partner in the firm of Kuhn, Loeb and Company, was received in Russia in June, 1931, with ceremonial exceeding that on the occasion of the Russian visit of King Amunallah of Afghanistan, and the Red Army lined the streets at the present arms.
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It is worth noting that among the manifold activities of the Schiff-Warburg group of financiers has been a close association with the enormous Jewish migration from Europe to the United States. In Jewish Life in Modern Times, (Methuen, London, 2nd edition, 1929) Mr. Israel Cohen points out that the migration of the Jews in recent times "far exceeds that of their previous history." From statistics quoted by him it appears that in 1867 the total Jewish population of the world was 10,342,000; in 1928 it was 15,218,734. In 1897 there were in North and South America 986,000 Jews, and in 1928 this number had increased to 4,640,748, of whom about four million were in the United States, the largest number of Jews in any one country in the world. Mr. Cohen added:
"The city of New York alone contains 1,873,390 Jews who form 23 per cent. of the total population. It can boast not only of the largest Jewish community in the world, but of the largest known in the entire annals of Jewish history." We are further told that Chicago has 325,000 Jews (which is more than Great Britain), and in eleven of the principal cities of the United States is concentrated about three-quarters of the total Jewish population of that country. In Australia and New Zealand there are 24,189 Jews, of whom 8000 are in Sydney and 6000 in Melbourne.
A prominent organisation in connection with this migration has been the Jewish Colonisation Association. This was founded and endowed with £11,000,000 by Baron Maurice de Hirsch, an Austrian Jewish financier long resident in Paris. Associated with him was Sir Ernest Cassel, and in 1891, according to M. Coty in the Figaro, an American branch was formed under the sole and independent management of the late Mr. Jacob Schiff. Baron Hirsch started this off with a gift of £493,000, and it later acquired colossal funds.
It is curious to reflect that the actual transportation of this Jewish addition to America's population was largely in vessels of the Hamburg-America and North German Lloyd lines, both controlled by the banking house of Warburg and Company of Hamburg.
Persecution, Mr. Cohen tells us in his book already quoted, has been the principal cause of the dispersion of the Jews. Of that dispersion the Jews themselves take two views. The orthodox regard it as a divine punishment for past transgression, and believe in the coming of a personal Messiah and the return of the Jews to Palestine. The Reformers, on the other hand, regard dispersion as the Jews' final lot, and as "the divinely appointed mean, for universalising the teachings of Judaism." The world to-day, however, provides a spectacle of a great concentration of Jewish power. In New York there is the concentration of Jewish financial power dominating the entire world in its material affairs, and side by side with it is the greatest physical concentration of the Jews ever recorded. On the other side of the globe, there has taken place in Russia the greatest concentration of Jewish revolutionary activity in all history.
"When we sink we become a revolutionary proletariat, the subordinate officers of the revolutionary party; when we rise, there rises also our terrible power of the purse." So wrote Theodor Herzl, founder of the Zionist movement, in his book A Jewish State, published thirty-six years ago.
The enormously significant thing in the world to-day is that both this power of the purse and revolutionary activity are working in the direction of destroying the entire existing order of things, and that not only are they working in a common direction, but there is a mass of evidence that they are working in unison.
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As some readers have asked for further evidence of Jewish participation in the Russian revolution, it may be pointed out that in a British Foreign Office White Paper issued in April, 1919, is a despatch from the Netherlands Minister at Petrograd under date of September 6, 1918, in which occurs the following passage:
"I consider the immediate suppression of Bolshevism is the greatest issue before the world, not even excluding the war which is still raging, and unless, as above stated, Bolshevism is nipped in the bud immediately, it is bound to spread in one form or another over Europe and the whole world, as it is organised by Jews who have no nationality and whose one object is to destroy for their own ends the existing order of things."
Such was the opinion of one observer on the spot after the Bolshevists had been in power for twelve months. In evidence given before a committee of the United States Senate, the Rev. Dr. G.R. Simons, formerly in charge of an American congregation at Petrograd, stated that in December, 1918, out of 388 members of the government of the northern communes only 16 were real Russians and all the rest Jews, except one American negro, and that 265 of these Jews came from the lower East Side of New York. Another witness, the commercial attaché of the United States Embassy at Petrograd, described the revolutionary leaders as two-thirds Jews, and an officer of an American bank in Petrograd said it was well known in Russia that three-fourths of the Bolshevik leaders were Jews. This evidence was taken in 1919 and is in Vol. III of U.S. Senate Document No. 62, 66th Congress, 1st session.
In the London Times of May 10, 1920, a correspondent stated that a list of the principal State functionaries of Russia compiled from Soviet sources showed that out of a total of 556 no less than 458 were Jews and only 17 Russians, the rest being Letts, Germans, etc. Innumerable books by eye-witnesses of the revolution remark on the preponderance of Jews among the leaders, and many comment on their conduct as that of invaders in a conquered country.
According to Bolshevist figures, as published in the London Times of September 1, 1922, "the Tcheka executed 1,766,118 persons before being renamed the supreme political organisation last February." Estimates of the total loss of life in the revolution, including that consequent on starvation and disease, put it at upwards of twenty millions.
In his book The Soviet Five-Year Plan (Lane, London, 1931) Mr. H.R. Knickerbocker says: "The terror has become a permanent institution. ... It is much more active to-day than three years ago. ... Methods of the terror heighten its dreadful effect. All arrests are made between midnight and the dawn. ... Most prisoners are condemned by the collegium of the G.P.U. [secret police] without trial, without witnesses, without a chance to defend themselves. ... Their execution is in secret, their burial places unknown. The G.P.U. allows no martyrs." Mr. Knickerbocker adds that under the G.P.U. "the nerve net of the most extensive and intensive espionage system in history reaches almost to each individual family in Russia."
In his hook Art Treasures in Soviet Russia, Sir Martin Conway records that although treated most kindly in Russia, he experienced a feeling on departing into Finland as though a great weight oppressing him had been removed. He did not notice this feeling on entering Russia, but as the days passed it slowly accumulated. "The sense of freedom gradually disappeared. Though everyone was kind, one felt the presence of an oppression, not on one-self, but all pervading. Never have I felt so completely a stranger in a strange land; with successive days what at first was a dim feeling took more definite shape and condensed into an ever-increasingly conscious oppression."
The highly international outlook of the rulers of Russia is evidenced by their ceaseless propaganda with a view to promoting revolution throughout the world. Such an obsession is foreign to the Russians, but entirely characteristic of the international Jewish revolutionary. The total expenditure upon this propaganda must be enormous. That it should be possible to pursue it contemporaneously with the stupendous, task of industrialising Russia is in itself evidence of the unlimited financial resources behind Bolshevism.
Summed up, the position is that international finance, by enticing the world into enormous debts and then withholding the means of payment, is goading man kind into the arms of the international revolutionaries established in Russia. The remedy is to take away the goad by restoring the means of payment. And the place to begin is here at home in our own country.
A N. FIELD
October 31, 1932.