Proposed by the Ministry of Finance.
[From Russkia Vedomosti, No. 225, Oct. 1 (14), 1914.]
IN the long list of new Russian taxes the income tax is the most interesting. It is still only a drafted bill. The Government hesitates to press it. Perhaps the Duma will take some steps to make this bill a law. Its main provisions are as follows:
All annual incomes of 1,000 rubles ($500) and above are to be assessed at a progressive rate ranging from 1-1/2 per cent. on 1,000 rubles to the maximum of 8 per cent. on incomes of 200,000 rubles ($100,000) and above. All persons engaged actively in the present war shall be exempt from this tax.
All persons freed from military service within the last four years are to pay an additional tax equal to 50 per cent. of their income tax, provided the incomes of the parents whose sons have been freed reach 2,000 rubles ($1,000).
All persons freed from military service having incomes below 1,000 rubles ($500) are to pay a uniform tax of 6 rubles ($3). A special war tax is to be levied in provinces where the whole population or certain groups of the population are freed from military service.
Note: For a poor country like Russia the minimum exempt from taxation is very high. The large number of able-bodied men in war would cut into this tax considerably. It has been figured out that the special 6-ruble tax on those freed from the military service would yield about 13,000,000 rubles ($6,500,000). The total revenue from this tax would hardly reach 50,000,000 rubles. Commenting upon this bill, critics have proposed to reduce the minimum exempt from taxation from 1,000 rubles ($500) to 750 rubles ($375) and to cut out the special 6-ruble war tax.
PING PONG.
By BEATRICE BARRY.
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FAITH, hear our soldier boys a-sighin' 'Cause Major General John O'Ryan Won't let 'em dance! The hard-wood floors he's goin' to rip— They may not hesitate or dip; I'm told that he was heard to say They're 'sposed to work and not to play Ping Pong! Ping Pong! Ping Pong! No more about a slender waist Shall arm in uniform be placed. He looks askance At signs of happiness and mirth; Soldiers were put upon the earth To sweat and dig in hard dirt floors, And so prepare 'emselves for war's— Ping Pong! Ping Pong! Ping Pong! I cannot say—I do not know Whether the boys would have it so; But if by chance We should engage in carnage grim, And harm, alas! should come to him— Would they feel sorrow then, or bliss, The while they heard the bullets hiss Ping Pong, Ping Pong, Ping Pong? |
Tools of the Russian Juggernaut
By M.J. Bonn.
Prof. Bonn is Professor of Political Economy at the University of Munich and German Visiting Professor to the University of California. The following article by him was published on Aug. 8, 1914, in the first week of war.
AS long as hostile censors muzzle truth there is no use in discussing the European military situation. Where the ingenuity of American newspaper men has failed it would be presumptuous for any one to try. But the question, Why are we at war? can be answered fairly well by anybody conversant with the facts of the European situation.
We are not at war because the Emperor, as war lord, has sent out word to his legions to begin a war of world-wide aggression, carrying into its vortex intellectual Germany, notwithstanding all her peaceful aspirations.
I may fairly claim to be a representative of that intellectual Germany which comes in now for a good deal of sympathy, but I must own that intellectual Germany, as far as I know about her, thoroughly approves of the Emperor's present policy.
She approves of it not on the principle merely "Right or wrong, my country"; she does so because she knows that war has become inevitable, and that we must face that ordeal when we are ready for it, not at the moment most agreeable to our enemies. If intellectual Germany wants to develop the moral and intellectual qualities of the German people she can do so only if there is peace—real peace—not endangered by the fear of some sudden and treacherous aggression.
We approve of the war because we realize that such a peace was no longer possible. Some of our critics are trying to show that we wanted a war, as we wanted the colonial empire of France.
We have, indeed, refused the demand made by England as the price for her neutrality—that we should not be allowed to take any part of France's colonial domains, even in case of complete victory.
We refused this stipulation, not because we were after those colonies, but because a so-called neutral power tried to impose conditions upon us she would never have dreamed of asking from France.
If we were hankering after conquest we would have made war long ago. We would have done so during the Morocco crisis, when Russia had not yet recovered from the Japanese war; when Turkey was still a mighty empire, ready to take our side, overawing the Balkan States and threatening Russia; when Rumania was our ally and when France, trying to swallow up the independent States of Morocco, but put herself morally in the wrong.
We refrained from war not because England supported France. The developments of the last week have shown that we are ready to face England, too, when needs must be. We decided for peace because we were convinced that no amount of colonial aggrandizement could compensate us for the dangers and horrors of a big European war.
Our diplomatic methods during those days may have been brusque and annoying, but our aim was peace. Though we are held up continually as the disturber of European peace, driven on by a mad desire for territorial aggrandizement, we are the only big European nation which has not increased her territory during the last twenty-five years.
Russia tried to steal the Far East and is now going half shares with England in Persia. England annexed the Boer republics and is playing with Russia for the Persian States.
France has taken Morocco; Italy, Tripoli; Austria-Hungary has formally annexed Bosnia.
Even little Servia, who is praised just now as the most just and God-fearing nation, has succeeded in wresting a large part of Macedonia, inhabited by Bulgarians, from her Bulgarian allies.
The only conquest we went in for was an exchange of a strip of West Africa, which we got from France as a kind of hush money, for her Morocco policy, England, Italy, and Spain having taken their payment in advance.
We have led no war of aggression for new territories, and we are held up to moral contempt by all those nations who have taken their shares.
We went to war because we had to keep faith with Austria. We do not and we did not approve of every step our ally has taken. But our idea of a faithful alliance is not that you can chuck your partner whenever he has made a mistake, but that you must stick to him through good and evil.
You may upbraid him privately if you dislike his methods; you may give him a fair warning, but as long as your bargain exists you must stick to it.
And our alliance with Austria is not a mere piece of political strategy, not an unholy alliance like that of republican France with despotic Russia or Anglo-Saxon England with Mongol Japan.
Our States have a common history. We are, as far as the Austrian Germans are concerned—about a third of the population of Austria—the same people. We have, and that is perhaps the most decisive point in the alliance, nearly the same position on the surface of the globe.
We are both inland empires situated in the centre of Europe, surrounded by many different nations, all of whom may bear some grudge against us.
As long as our joint frontiers are safe we can stand back to back and face calmly any unnatural confederation like the present one.
We concluded the alliance with Austria because we wanted to safeguard ourselves against foreign attack; it has turned out the alliance has involved us in war. We might have avoided the war at present if we had broken faith with our ally.
It would not have been difficult for us to find some legal quibbles, like those which Italy, following a policy of very sober national egotism, is now earnestly exclaiming to all the world.
If we had done so we should have been knaves, but we should have been fools as well. For surely nobody can believe that the forces antagonistic to Germany would have ceased to act if we had left Austria in the lurch.
Neither France nor Russia nor England would have changed their policy. They might, moreover, have tried to make Austria join in some future conspiracy against us.
There are three main causes to which the war is due:
1. The French have never forgotten their defeat in 1870 and 1871. They have always been thirsting for revenge.
2. We are at war because Russia thinks she has a mission on behalf of the Slavic world; she feels that mission can only be fulfilled by smashing Germany, the bulwark of Western idea.
3. We are at war because England has returned to her old political ideals. She means to enforce anew the balance of power and she wants to cut down Germany to that normal dead-level which alone, she thinks, is consistent with her own security.
As far as our antagonism to France is concerned, we have always looked upon it as a regrettable fact which time, perhaps, might do away with. We are just enough to understand that a country like France, with a glorious past, a gallant spirit and an undaunted courage, cannot forget the blow we dealt her forty-three years ago.
We think we have been right in retaking from her Alsace-Lorraine, belonging originally to the German Empire. But we look with a kind of envy upon her who succeeded in denationalizing the people of those provinces to such a degree that we have not yet been able to make them Germans once more.
We have always regretted that the two most civilized nations in Continental Europe should be rent asunder by an unforgotten past.
We hoped that the creation of a wonderful African empire might in the long run soothe French national feeling. We should have been always willing to come to an understanding on the existing state of affairs, but though there have been lucky statesmen in France who tried such a policy, public opinion was too strong for them. French people preferred to sacrifice the main ideas on which their republican government is based and made an alliance with Russia.
Religious, national, and political oppression in Russia against Pole, Jew, and Finn, against workingman and intellectual, is propped up by the help of liberal thinking France, whose conservatism threw a Western glamour over Russian ill-deeds.
We have regretted more than words can say it that France has annihilated herself as a power for the moral improvement of the universe by making herself a tool of the Russian Juggernaut.
We read in the papers today that after a small frontier engagement in Alsace-Lorraine the signs of mourning were taken off from the statues representing Alsatian towns on Parisian squares.
We know in our innermost hearts that they will have to be attached for a long time to come to those three emblems of human progress for which France is supposed to stand, liberty, fraternity, equality, if our arms are not successful.
We realize that the gallant spirit of the French people has furnished the mainspring which has made this war possible.
We honor her for her courage. For we know well enough that it is she alone among the partners who runs real risks. We know that she is not moved by sordid motives. But as we know her unforgiving attitude, as we knew that she was helping Russia and egging her on against us; that she was instigating Britain and Belgium as well as Serb and Rumanian, we had to take her attitude as what it was; as the firm policy of a patriotic and passionate people, waiting for the moment when they could wipe out the memory of 1870, putting nationality to the front, sacrificing their own ideals of humanity.
Would France have given up this attitude if we had not stood by our Austrian ally? Would she have broken her word to her Russian friend if we had been a little more conciliatory?
I think we would commit a libel on French honor and on French patriotism if we assumed that any step on our part could have prevented her from trying to redress the state of affairs produced by the events of 1871.
Fate of the Jews in Poland
By Georg Brandes.
[From The Day, Nov. 29, 1914.]
Georg Brandes, Denmark's critic and man of letters, has lived in many European countries and spent the year 1886-87 in Russian Poland. His books on "Impressions of Poland" and "Impressions of Russia" show his interest in the political and social conditions of the Russian Empire.
THE war raging in and out of Europe does not give the experienced much reason to hope. The immense mischief daily caused by it is certain enough. The benefits which are believed to be the result of it and of which the various nations dream differently are so uncertain that they cannot possibly be reckoned upon. Before those whose sympathy was with the deep national misfortune of the Polish people, there rose the image of the reunion and emancipation of this tripartited people under extensive autonomy, and most probably under the protection and supremacy of a great power.
For the present we are far away from that goal. Poles are compelled by necessity to fight in the Prussian, Austrian and Russian armies, against each other. Not the smallest attempt at emancipation has been made either in Prussian Posen or in the Russian "Kingdom" or in Austrian Galicia. We might even say that the dismemberment at present is going deeper than ever, as it is now cleaving the minds as well.
The only indication of a future union is the manifesto of the Grand Duke Nikolai, the Russian Field Marshal, to the Poles, issued in the middle of August. It began: "Poles, the hour has struck in which the holy dream of your fathers and grandfathers may be fulfilled. Let the borders cutting asunder the Polish people be effaced; let them unite under the sceptre of the Czar. Under this sceptre Poland will regenerate, free in religion, language, and autonomy."
And it ended in the following way: "The dawn of a new life is beginning for you. In this dawn let the sign of the cross, the symbol of the sufferings and the resurrection of the people, shine."
How clearly this manifesto, with its surprising love of liberty, its pious reference to the cross, bore the stamp of having been enforced by circumstances, and how accustomed one had become to disregard promises from the Russian Government of full constitutional liberty and the like, as those given before had not meant very much either in Finland or in Russia itself. Still the manifesto, as a sign of the time, was well apt to make an impression on the great masses who had always heard the authorities stamp as criminal plots, as high treason, what was now suddenly called from the supreme place "the holy dream of the forefathers."
The purpose of the proclamation was probably, above all, to prevent a revolt in Russian Poland the moment hostile troops invaded it. On the Austrian Poles the manifesto seems to have failed to produce its effect. As these Poles enjoy full autonomy in Galicia, and for a century have witnessed the severity and cruelty with which their kinsmen in Russian Poland have been oppressed, they received the proclamation with loud vows of faithfulness to the house of Hapsburg; nay, all the sokol societies which in time of peace (keeping a decision in view) had trained their members in games and the use of arms, placed themselves as Polish legions at the disposal of the Government against the Russians. But that was not all. The Ruthenian inhabitants of Galicia, one-half the population of the country, founded a League for the Release of Ukraine and flooded Europe from the 25th of August with notifications and descriptions hostile to Russia. The founders did not withhold their names. They are D. Donzow, W. Doroschenko, M. Melenewsky, A. Skoropyss-Joltuchowsky, N. Zalizniak and A. Zuk.
And it has very soon proved that, in spite of the proclamation of the independence of Poland, the Czar, at any rate, includes East Galicia in Poland as little as the inhabitants are regarded or treated as Poles or Ruthenians. The Russians were hardly in Lemberg, before this town and the whole of East Galicia were called in the orders of the day old Russian land and the inhabitants described as Russians, whom their brothers had now come to set free.
What impression the imperial manifesto made in Posen can scarcely be proved, as each hostile remark against Prussia would have been punished as high treason.
The German Emperor has, however, no less than the Russian Czar, been courting the favor of the Poles and trying to win them through promises. One month after the issue of the Czar's manifesto, a proclamation from von Morgen, the German Lieutenant General, was displayed in the Governments of Lomza and Warsaw. In this the following sentences are to be found: "Arise and drive away with me those Russian barbarians who made you slaves; drive them out of your beautiful country, which shall now regain her political and religious liberty. That is the will of my mighty and gracious King." Knowing the passion with which the Poles have hitherto been driven away from their soil and persecuted because of their language, we learn from this proclamation that the German Government has felt the necessity of outbidding the Czar.
As far as may be seen, the Czar's manifesto made very little impression on the intellectual in Russian Poland, who, of course, received it with much suspicion. The masses in Russian, as in Austrian, Poland have for some time stood passionately against each other, hurling accusations of treason to the holy cause of their native country, until a new party has now been formed which is politically most unripe, but for that very reason has an enormous extension. Its password is this: "We do not want to hear of Russia or of Austria; we only want one thing: the Polish State without guardianship from any side." In other words, we want the quite impossible. Political oppression for almost one and one-half centuries brings its own punishment to a people. In such a people political skill too easily becomes local patriotism, or it remains in the state of innocence.
Of what use is it to begin singing: Polonia farà de sè? That Poland cannot become free by itself is evident to anybody who has any political idea.
Still I am inclined to say, never mind the forms which the Polish independence and thirst of liberty are taking: they seem to pass like a purifying storm through all Polish minds. Many times before this has a glorious future risen before the Poles—1812, when Napoleon began the second Polish campaign; 1830, when the Poles were buoyed up by the sympathy of Europe; 1848 and 1863. But hardly has a change of established conditions appeared so possible and painful barriers so near the point of falling, as in this great and dreadful crisis.
He who for a generation has been busy with Polish and Russian affairs can therefore, without much difficulty, imagine how many young Polish hearts are now beating and burning with hope, expectation and the most noble aspirations.
Nevertheless, the state of affairs in Russian Poland is at present more desperate than it has ever been before, during war and revolt; and this is not due to the pressure of the conditions or the horror of the situation, but is due to the Poles themselves, to the overstimulation of the national feeling which sends forth its breath of madness all over Europe and now whirls round in Polish brains to drive out magnanimity and humanity, not to speak of reason, which, on the whole, has no jubilee in Europe in the year 1914.
I dare truthfully say that for no other people have I felt the enthusiasm that I have felt for the Poles. I have revealed this feeling at a time when they were not the order of the day, and only very few shared my sentiments. I pronounced this feeling long ago, but it had slight effect in drawing the attention of the Poles to my writings about them or in winning their thanks. The Poles did not discover my book about them till ten years after it had appeared, and when it had been by chance translated into German. To write in Danish is as a rule to write in water.
It would be very ungrateful of me, on this occasion, when I am obliged to use sharp words to the Poles, not to remember the indescribable affection and kindness they have shown me in Russian Poland as well as in Austrian Poland. Among them I have found quite incomparable friends.
For a long time I have therefore refused to say an unkind, not to mention an offensive word. As far back as in 1898 I refused so absolutely to make myself the advocate of the Ruthenians against them that the Ruthenian leaders became my bitter enemies, who never tired of attacking me, and I was mute as a fish when Björnstjerne Björnson, not long before his death, upon application of the Ruthenians, attacked the Poles, fortunately for them with such unreasonable exaggerations that the attacks did no harm. (Björnson maintained that the Pole as such was the devil himself as the Middle Ages had imagined him.) I knew better than Björnson what might be said against electioneering and pressure on electors in Galicia, but I remained silent because I considered it unworthy to attack a people which was in such a difficult position and which was able to defend many minor injustices committed by it as self-defense. I considered it especially impossible for me to attack the Poles to whom I was bound by honor and toward whom I bore the warmest, most sincere sympathy.
It is therefore with no light heart that I write these lines.
Denial of the rights of man to Jewish subjects belongs to the nature of Russia. Now and then Europe has been startled when an uncommon massacre of innocent Jews has taken place, as in Kishineff, but all have known and know that Russia stows her Jewish population together in the Polish outskirts of the realm, stows them together so tightly that they can neither live nor die, denies them the liberty of moving, the liberty of studying, even the right of school—and university—education beyond a certain (too small) percentage. Only such Jews who hold a university degree are allowed to live in the capitals of the Empire. No young Jewish woman is allowed to take up her abode near the universities in Petrograd or Moscow, unless she has been enrolled as a prostitute, and it has happened that the police have made their appearance and accused her of forgery, complaining that she did not carry on her profession, but was reading scientific books instead. If a man is, for instance, a doctor of medicine, he may take up his abode in Moscow; in case he is married his wife may live there with him. But if the couple has a two-year-old child, the mother is not allowed to take it with her into the railway carriage and let it live with her in the capital. For the child has no right to live there. If this right is wanted a detailed petition must be sent in to the Governor General, in whose power it is to grant or refuse it.
In a few of the cases where plunder and murder of a Jewish population in Russia have taken place, the outrages have partly been excused, or at any rate explained, through the almost incomprehensible ignorance of the peasants. Russia's most famous political economist, who at the same time is a great estate owner, has told me himself that when the elections to the First Duma took place he was informed that each of the peasants on his estate had voted for himself. He asked them, surprised, what they meant, and explained to them that in this way none of them could be elected; but they answered with the question, "Does not each Deputy get so many rubles a day? Yes. And do you think that we should let so much money go to another if we, perhaps, might get it ourselves?"
The same prominent estate owner told me that one day he asked some of his peasants if they really had partaken in a Pogrom which had taken place in the neighboring parish—he could not believe it, as they looked so good-natured. To his astonishment they answered yes, and when he asked them about the reason they replied: "You know it very well." They then explained that they had killed these Jews because the Jews had killed their Saviour. He: "But that was so long ago and it was not they who did it and it did not happen in this country." To which they, again astonished, exclaimed: "Was it long ago? We thought it was last week." It appeared that they had understood from the priest's explanation that the crucifixion had taken place then and there.
Under such conditions one is not surprised by any outrage. But to see the hatred of the Jews spread in Russian Poland, where people understand how to read and write, that must surely fill one with wonder. The great number of Jews in the old Polish Kingdom originated in the days of Casimir the Great (1309-1370), who out of love for his concubine, Esther, opened his country to the Jews and made conditions favorable for them. Since then the number has increased, as the Czars locked up all their Jewish subjects there. So they have been living separated and with a special dress like the Jews of Denmark at the time of Holberg. They have, however, felt and suffered as Polish patriots. As early as 1794 a regiment of Jewish volunteers fought under Kosciusko; their Colonel fell in 1809. In 1830 the shallow Polish national Government refused the Jews' petition to be allowed to enter the army. As they then ventured to apply for admission to the Polish public schools Nicholas I. punished them, allowing 36,000 families to be carried away to the steppes of South Russia, where the regulation for the enlistment of children overtook them. All their small boys from the age of 6 years were sent to Archangel in Cossack custody to be trained as sailors. They died in multitudes on the way.
The evils which befell all the inhabitants of Poland regardless of their creed for some time suppressed the hatred of the Jews which is always lurking in the masses. The great men of Poland checked its development. Adam Mickiewicz, Poland's greatest author, went so far that in his chief work, Poland's national epic, "Pan Tadeusz" (1834) he makes a Jewish innkeeper one of the most sympathetic leading characters. He is introduced in the fourth canto as a genius in music, the great master of the national instrument, the cymbal; and Mickiewicz makes the culmination of his poem the moment when Jankiel before Dombrowski himself plays the Dombrowski marche, symbolical of the whole history of Poland from 1791-1812, the year in which the poem takes place, the Napoleon year.
In the year 1860 the equalization of the Jews with the Catholics was a reality in Warsaw, and when, in February, 1861, at two large public places in Warsaw, the Russians had shot on the kneeling masses singing the national anthem, ("Zdymem pozarow,") the Jews felt impelled to show their national feeling through an unmistakable manifestation.
In masses they accompanied their rabbis into the Catholic churches just as the Christians in crowds entered the synagogues to sing the same hymn.
This last feature, the processions of the two creeds into each other's churches singing the same song, made such an impression on Henrik Ibsen, the great Scandinavian poet, that again and again he returned in his conversations to this as one of the greatest and most beautiful experiences he had ever had.
And now under the whirlstorm of madness which nationalism has driven across Europe, all this is lost; nay, from a religious reconciliation it has been turned into flaming hatred between the races.