Evening Star Newspaper, March 11, 1923, Page 69

Germans Fina T BY FRANK G. CARPENTER. Berlin, Germany. HAVE come to Germany to de- scribe the actual conditions Which have swept over the land beginning with the fall of the wmark and incremsed by the taking ©ver of the Ruhr by the French, en- ®ulfing the people in a maelstrom of destruction. I have crossed the coun- iry from the North sea to Poland, have gone down into the Ruhr val- ley and inspected the great manu- facturing plants and the mines, and spent some timo in the cities talking with all sotts and conditions of men, from laborers in the factories to bankers and the highest officials. I am now in Berlin, but I expect to move back and forth and write just what I sec. So far, I have no fixed conclusions. My head !s-buzzing with the complications and contra- dictions T find eve 4 new view every hour. One day I am convineed that the captains of industry, bankers, socialists and others who are running the republie are the shrewdest rascals who have ever trodden the pike of the nations and that they are fooling the world. he next day-1 feel they are com- paratively honest and want to do all they can to get Germany back on her feet. And then something new turns these premises upside down, and. as the backwoods congressman said, “T <o not know where I am at.”” AIl I shall do in these letters is to describe what 1 see and Lear from day to day, whether it be in favor of- Tmany or not. and let the man on the street draw his conclusions. 1 am not prophet nor the son of a rrophet d 1 shall not predict. E: pression of op 1 shall leave to the editorial columns, ma ng scriptions without fear or favor only of those things which come under my eyes There s L uth, however, th stands out ke a boil on one's Aand this is that these Germans ary a terrible condition. A very few the® people may be making hut tens of millions have lost evel cnt of their savings, milllons have n enough to buy:a scrap of loth nd hundreds of thousands in every district practicaily on the edge of starvation of new P Germa lieve the gre overtu romic \ most be- having originated time and of fina and eco- is paying the price Her condition, past is no th is, @ of us zuiity of r of al e wo. to the u and pres, where be 1l she rmost as 1 row, bed than in 26th, Prophet glory of ancic predicts the fate which upon it. That yrophecy describes the pride and pre- domin ce g Germa of the t and the 2 which she is sitting at pres it to all Bible reade But let us g and it we :rs of the he and me sae can figure out ju what Germany is in these days after the war. 1 have known her off and on for the past forty vears. I came he t upon leaving college, when 0ld Kaiser Wilheln was still throne. T saw that f: Ems his honor. when 1 around the mwany fro sited B h the rest in was here again in 1889, corld and crossed Ge end to the other again in 1892, he you er had just dismissed ismarck and was running the show Tor himself. Prince Bismarck had retired to his 1 where, and 1 get | n the | ous monarch | when | more than three continents has be come a republic, with the French tied to its heels. It is of this new re. public that we wish to know. * ok k% HE Germans claim that they are now down on their uppers. This seemg to me true, but if so, their bare feet are planted upon ‘one . of the very best plcces of property on the European continent. Take your map and see where they are. They are in the very heart of™industrial Europe and in one of the bést trad- ing places of all {nternational mar: kets. Bordered on the north.'by the Baltic sea, they have direct.-sea-access to Scandinavia -and -northesstern Europe, with the vast-possibiities of the Russia of the future. Acroes the North sea lies Great Britaim, ‘with its millions of customers, and over-every 1and -border ‘is* a -hard-wotking na- tlon ready to buy and anxlous to sell. They comiplain of their territorial |losses during the war. “Those losses were great, but Germany in Europe has still an area of a quarter-of a mifiion-square miles. ‘It {s more than thirty times as big as Massachusetts, {elght times the size of South Caro- | { lina, four times thai of NewEngiand, | and ‘bigger than Ohlo. Indiana, 11l | nois, Michigan “and - Wisconsth” com- | bined. Cut jt into patches and ‘carry | it over the ocean, and it would' cover ! Caltfornia, " Pennsylvanid “and New | Yor! nd fit it down upon Texds and it would hide the whole of that great state, excepting'a pat®h ‘about ‘the size of Délaware and Maryland. Even | now, Germany 1s more than twice as |large as Great Britdin’ and,lreland. | Tt is bigger than France by an area 1 as large as Hungar: the main ‘body of the de- United States;, and it has now over L, sixty million lige, actlve Souls, or | three-fifths as many as we. Prussia jalone has a population equal to that of New England, New York, Pennsyl- w Jersey and Illinols, and which is about half the size {of Ilinols, has as many people as that state, including Chicago, with | Cleveland added thereto, one of big cit- citics are growing faster { than an in the United States. 1In {1919 Greater Berlin had 3.800,000. -1t | has now between four and five mil- | lon. 1t is hal?t again as large as Chicago nore than twice as {large as Philadelphia, an’ increase of and . It isone-twelfth | A perhaps three-quarters of a million | within the space @f three years. Ham- | | burg has over a million, and it tramps | lon the heels of Detroit. Cologne s | bigger than Boston, Munich than Pittsburgh and Dresden than Buffalo Leipzig is crowding Los Angeles, chows the | Duesseldort outranks Cincinnati, and | now claims she Issen, the home of Krupps. which! | before “the war had four hundred | thouand people. has six hundred | thousand today. Germany has four | other cities each of which has more ' ! commend | than three hundred thousand inhabit- | half this nfimber before ants. It has eight ranging betwedn | fitteen more 0f one hundred thousand | aplece. Some of these cities are unknown | to the man on the street. How many | of could locate Gelsenkirchen | and Duisburg before the French tooks| charge of the Ruhr? The first s Dig- ger than Memphis and the second | surpasses Omaha, Atlanta or Toledo. Every one of tliese towns is a live| industrial entity, where every man worlks eight hours every day. In none | of them is the proportion of unem~i | ployed ss great as in places of simi- ar size in the United States, England | or France. In all, the population | is growins. | from an agri -WAR MORTEAGE, A INTIL the war began G L was producing enough last her ten months of the She an 5 for only eight months and food for only two-thirds of her people. If this is so, she has 000,000 stomac! which will have to be fe@ from the outside. But she was spoon-feeding the war, o that the number is not so great as it rmany to ar. raise n ot down to brass facks | tWo and three hundred thousand and | seems. G long changed al to an industri ireat Britain, the profits of he shippiy 1 foreign investments must pay the bill. She peppered with up- to-date f: in which m e working a wage per onth th; American machinist gets in one day. IHer shipping is fast coming back on the ocean, and it is said that her profitcers have planted hundrede of millions of dollars in for- aign bamks and other investments. awaiting the stabilization of the mark to use them at home. As to matters of tramsportation has ulty many since nation. aud, is now lior ories at an pure,” as 1 THE HIGH.SPEED PRINTING PRESSES.OF THE BERLIN REICHSBANK ARE TURNING OUT PAPER MARKS BY THE BILLIONS, YET NOT FAST ENOUGH TO MEET THE DEMAND. THIS BANK HOLDS THE BALANCE OF THE NATIONAL GOLD RESERVE, WHICH IS RAPIDLY DWINDLL wrivate estate at Friedrichsruhe, near Hamburg. 1 had the honor of meet- ing him there and talking with him on his ceventy-seventh birthday, and 4 fow days later saw the boy kaiser review the great Germann army at ‘rempelhofer Field, near Berlin. He ay have had visions of world co ouest at that me, It was in 19 ihat T came back again. to find the country in the hands of a military aristocracy built up by the emperor, in which every one had to step aside for the soldier and officer, and it was ot safe to laugh aloud at the kaiser for tear of going to prison. I then had my son with me, and wrote up the American commercial invasion, soing through the factories and studying the industries of the people from one end of the countm to the other. Among other establishments 1 visited that of the Krupps, which | was making cannon and munitions, preparing, as it were, for the war of & dozen years later. Nine more vears elapsed, and on the edge of 1911 I found myself with my wife and daughter at a greag mu- sical festival in Munich, from where we went up the Rhine and traveled about here and there. At that time the military forces were even more in evidence, and had I been a modern Daniel I might have been able to 1ead the handwriting which was then on the wall. Now, in 1923, two-score Jears after my first visit. T am again on the ground. The sun of the v has risen and set, and the em- syhich bed its possssstons -in although that ‘is-largely-gue to the coming in of the Germans who have been crowded out-of Polish Upper-Si- lesla and Alsace-Lorraine.The whole country jmay be on’the way to de- struction, but as far as I can see it is still alive and kicking and cvery where outside thée Ruhr is working | Yard as. it goes. The Germans complain as to the} 11058 of their territory, and one might j think they were crippled for all time agriculturally and minerally. The fact is they still have one of the very ibest national properties in Europe. The greater part of their sofl is equal to that of France, and they have vast mines of potash by which they fertil- lize it at a comparatively low cost. They are now taking nitrates from the air in such quantities that they promise to supplant the nitrates of | Chiler and their production per acre | of grain, potatoes and sugar beets is i far higher than ours and equal to that of almost any other land of the world, ! Before the war Germany had an av- | erage production of 153,000,000 bush- els of wheat, 445,000,000 bushels of, rye, and 592,000,000 bushels of oats every vear. She.was then fmporting 76,000,000 bushels of wheat and it 1s said she needs 126,000,000 bushels of wheat today. Her people clalm they have no money to buy it and It is only by some kind of a de- cision as to thelr trouble with ancfl that this.market will he epem te th “American -{aymers iy O Germany has the advantage over most other countries of Europe. Its northern part js a level plain and practically the whole of it is a gentle slope toward the Baltic. Railraads can be cheaply built and cheaply run. The country now has enough roads to make thirteen solid trunk Iines from Boston to San Francisco, and the passenger and freight rates are lower than in any other part oM Eu- rope. One can travel clear across Ger- many for less than two dollars, and the taxl to the station often costs more than a trip of two hundred miles on the raflroad. The slopes are such that the coun- try has a vast net of interior ,water- ways. It has three navigable rivers which are connected by so many canals that if you could make a great subway through the center of the earth from one side to the other it would not be as long as’ these water- ways upon which freight is carried. I have no figures for the present, but in 1913 more than one hundred million tons of goods were carried on the rivers and inland canals of Germany. More than one-half of this amount was made up of domestic manufactures. I do not know the wages pald on the interior water- Ways, but those of the seamen who handle the big ocean ships are so low that in making a trip from Ham- burg to Calcutta the saflors found their total wage for tha vovage was not emough to allow one to hire a feampan’ 1o take him on shore and Back by Way T OF A CURRENCY GONE CRAZY IS THAT A BUSHEL OF POTATOI D THE FARMERS ARE MAKING THEIR pay the postage a letter to his| people in Germany. 1 have this on | the authority of the assistant secre- | tary of our Department of Commerce, on on his way home from India A captain of industry whose com- pany has controllell more than sixty thousand m in the valley of the Rubir tells me that more than 40| per cent of Germany's coal reserves | were lost by the treaty.” This may | ABAAADS Germany has more coal country in Europe except Great Britain, but by the treaty of Ver- cailles she has to give so much than any coal, buying back through to France. sh coal in the same cars shipped away. As to iron, in which in 1913 Germany t0 | 11 who has just passed through Berlin | France that she is mow importing |dition of the Germans of tod Holland, | number more than sixty millions and {at times, the very coal she shipped | I venture over fifty-nine millions Tt returns labeled “Eng- | have lost practically every cent of but I am told it is often | their savings. This includes invest- it was|ments was | ernment bonds. ncially Ruined, But Have.Fine Savings of Individuals Lost in Brief Period While Great Cities Are Growing With Remark- able Speed—Fate of Militaristic Government Which Kaiser Controlled Compared With That of ¢ Ancient Tyre as Foretold by the Prophet—Millionaires Have - Become Beggars and Prospective .. Brides Are Eating Their Dowries — Many Laboring in Factories for 25 Cents a Day—Coal Shipped to France Comes ES SELLS FOR ENOUGH MARKS TO PAY OFF A BE- LANDS FREE OF ALL DEBT WITH THE PRESENT ITH a country and a plant like this, it seems impossible that owners could be financially ed. but that is the actual con- They the in all sorts of gilt-edged it still runs the interest will be re- daced from $120 to less than_two and one-half cents. If the govern- ment is paying you a Dpension of $500 per year you will get that amount in paper, but when you turn it into goods it will be worth only 10 cents. If vou are a'widow and your husband has left a $10,000 life insurance policy which you can cash in today the insurance company will give you the money, but its gold pur- pchasing value will be no more than two dollars. Tt is the same with eevry kind of investment. All the solid accumulations of the past which have not been put into machinery or material properties have gone up in smoke, and all rented buildings have been practically given over to the tenants by the soclalistic gov- ernment. This means that men who before the war, were worth millions now have to work for their bread. I know of business managers who a short time ago had salaries from $5,000 to $10,000 a vear, and who are now getting $12 a month. I hear of baronesses and countesses who are feeding upon their jewels which have who to buy | clothes . and for their food are selling the linen they have saved dowries. 1 have gone thousands of securities and all municipal and gov- | 1t includes stocks of Lo true, but in 1913 the vallev of | producing only three-fourths of what | all kinds and even pensions and life the Ruhr, which rmany still has, although French hands. contrib- uted 60 per cent of her outpuf of £oft coal. while the fields she has lost had only about 30 per cent. The Ruhr is just about as big as Rhode Isiand and it has over fifty billion |as those of many other manufactur- | mortgagee can satisfy it by | tone of coal still to be mined. Today | much larger quantities. She is get- ting her iron from Sweden and Spain, but the market is competitive, and it merely puts her on the same plane ing countries of Europe {she consumed. She has lost a great | insurance policies. | deal. and will now have to buy in|the actual value of any such invest- In order to get ment yoy must divide it by five thou- sand and the result will give you what it is worth today. If you own a 6 per cent mortgage of the pay ment of 40 cents gold value, and i 000 the | | i “HER INCOME FROM SELLS NEWSPAPERS CORNER.” come down as heirlooms, and of girls | | laboring at 25 cents a day, und have talked with ail classes who are earn- ing barely enough for their food and cannot purchase new clothes. Real estate here in Berlin is being sold for a song, and valuable indus- trial properties are being peddled out to the capitalists of other countries The intellectuals, by which I mean students, professors and sclentists are so reduced that the future of Germany as one of the great forces in advanced thou is in danger and the moral condition of all seem= to be on the downgrade. All this has taken place within less than a vear and the gituation promises to grow worsc and worse unless something can be done to give a basis upon which sound business can be planned for the future. Not only this, but the same fate ma come upon France, and it is sure that if the franc onco starts on the to- boggan slide of the mark that coun- try will gothe same way. If it does. the savings of the thrifty French peasants will disappear in a night. and no one can foretell the results They will affect the whole world and the pocketbook and welfare of every man, woman and child in our country Tt is to describe this situation th I bave come into Germany. The re- erults of my investigations will be told in plain language in my letters | through facfories where tens ot|to follow. expert workmen are | (Copyright, 1923, Carpenter's World Travel SAVINGS REDUCED TO NOTHING BY THE FALL OF THE MARK, THIS WOMAN, WEALTHY IN 1914, NOW ND MAGAZINES ON A BERLIN STREET ViceSquad Gets Convictions in 95 Per Cent of 5,000 Cases 1 BY JAMES A. BUCHANAN. F you are looking for excitement. | coupled with a -large amount of work and a considerable degree ! of danger thrown in for good measure, spehd several evenings with the vice squad. Your longings will be satisfied. and at the end of vour probation. or qualifying period. as a guardian of the public's morals, you | will appreciate the fact that in order {to make arrests and to secure evi- dence that will stand the onslaughts of keen lawyers the mergbers of the | squad have to be on their toes every | minute of the time they Are awake. Washington is not, by any manner of means, without vice of different | sorts. and this statement is borne out | {by. the records of the department. | | The nation’s capital is not “chemically ras once sald of Los An- | geles. Neither is it the wogst city in | the country, but, as Lieut. O. T. Davis, | | in charge of the vice squad, said: | ! “There is no denying that vice exists in this city. To make a state- | ment to the contrary would be stat- | ing something that was not so. We are confronted with a condition, not { mere theory, not hearsay. We of the squad know, for we are constantly on'| | the job, fighting the different evils | that exist in the city. and, while we have made progress, our work is not | done by any manner. of means, nor | { will it be‘done for some time to| come, from the way things look at present. There.is-an element here that dqes not make for a clean town.” HE vice squad proper is composed of Lieut. Davis, Sergt. J. D. Mc- Quade -and “Private Harry Brower. augmented by R. E. Ruby of the pro- hibition forces, Who, Witl his assoct- ates, works il conjunction With the| squad. i The.headquarters of the vice squad | is in the second precinct station house, and it hardly has what one might call sumptuous quarters. While there has been an effort to make the | place presentable, it Is far from be- ing what it should be. Neither is the, force large eénough for a city,of the size of Washington, for almost any other municipality has a force many times as large, but it is the.old atory ST almost anything being good enough for the District of Columbia. The squad should be comiposed 8t at least twenty more officers if the work i8 to be carried on to the degree that the citizens desire. - While those who are membera of this little band work day and night, it 18 _only ‘a question as,to how: long thelr bodies will be ablée to stand the strain, for the work is of sugh & character that it calls.for every ounce of energy that a:man pofsesses. You. start out some evening with the men. who have charge of this work. You have no idea where they are going, for you have not been tipped oft ‘as to- their destination. They don't talk much about what they are golng to do, They have ‘mapped out thelr program. are quite sure that they will find what thev ‘ara golng after dnd thay strike with i = “THE,HEAD OF THE VICE SQUAD SAYS WASHINGTON IS NOT CHEMICALLY PURE.” a suddenness that is startling. There is a thoroughness about their method that would warm the cockles of the heart of any efficiency expers When' they enter a place that they have determined to rald they take their positions as agreed upon’and there is very little chance of any one in the structuré being able to make his or her getaway. Generally the ones that have been caught make no move in the direction of a polaible escape, for the members of the vice squad are not men to be fooled with. They have their own ideas of what is to be done if any one starts a yough house, and it is not conducive to health or‘happiness to try to fool these men. They are there for a spe. cific purpose and, no matter what may happen, they carry out their ‘inten- tions. You cannot coax them, they cannot be bribed, neither can they be intimidated, for they know that thelr actions, all within the law, will be upheld not only by their superior officers but also by the Commission- ers, A case in point: Some time ago not very long either, the squad ralded the home of a citizen who stood rath- er high in the community and when saw several men and women whose positions in life hmd long been the envy of others. Did the fact that the owner of, the home and his asso- clates moved in - select circles make any difference to the officers? It did not. They proceeded just as If they had been directed to raid one of the commonest dumps in the city. Neither did frantic appeals amount to anything.. The crowd was made to feel the heavy hand of the law, and it is a safe bet to.make that there will be no more “carryings on” in this particular domicile. * % % ¥ IEUT. DAVIS has been called “hard as nails” by those who! have watched his work. He does not hesitate to go after any one; the big- ger the better or, as he says, it af- fords an example to others. Sergt. McQuade is the sort of a man that one would like to have by his side when a scrap is imminent—a good clean but hard fighter. Harry Brower is of like character and a man who knows his business. Ruby, who co- operates with the squad, has been of material assistance to the local men and many arrests have resulted from Contrary to the general beligf. part in the work of the vide squad. There are two réasons, the first be- ing that they are adapted only to a very limited extent to the character of the work, and the other that sorge of it 1s nto the kind of labor that the department cares to force upon mem- bers of the fair sex. In case of emer- gency any member of the local police force can be called upon to assist the squad, but this is seldom done for the reason that the character of the work is such that specially trained officers are necessary. It is totally unlike any other police work and a man must not only show a special aptitude for this form of police activity but he must also be one who can do without sleep and be willlng to forego all amusements and give up all thoughts of a happy home life. That there is & real need for the vice squad {n the city of Washington can best be realized, after one talks with Lieut. Davis, who has no illu- slons. He is a cold, practical man, who views conditions as they are and does not mince words In his descrip- tion of exlsting conditlons, for, as he anidd- women do not play a very important | | I “While Washington is not the worst city in the world, there exists here today a condition that is far imore serious than the average citizen ap- preciates. Why, every day we are getting on track of law violators, and if the public could follow us around the clock, they would see that vice in many forms does exist in this city. “There is vice here of the most de- praved character. It is not confined to any one class of citizens. We have made arrests that would shock the community if they took the time to read the papers and followed the cases to the end. “What is the greatest menace” That is a question that can hardly be answered, for they are all & menace. Every sort of vice is a menace to a community. We have people who are immoral, some are un- moral, we have gamblers, bootleggers, dope flends, women of loose morals, to phrase it so that it can be printed;: we have people who parade under the gulse of respectability, but who are not unlike those who lived in the days of Sodom cnd Gomorrah, sup- posedly respectable people who are on a par with those of the worsl centers in Kurope or in the big cities T AContinusd on Sevenih Page -