and German Austria may be hereafter sanctioned by the League of Nations. On the other hand, the two articles which refer to the War Criminals are clearly in conflict with the Treaty, but, as they are to be carried out by German officials, it is quite unimportant what view the Entente jurists may take of their validity. One of them has been already conceded, and, as to the other, it is certain that, whether the article of the constitution itself is valid or not, the sentiment which the Germans have thrown into a Latin dress will be held to justify the law. In fact, the use of a Latin rubric in connexion with this clause of the constitution-to all the others German rubrics are prefixed-may reasonably be supposed to be a cleverly thought-out vindication of the refusal of the German people to punish the men who fought for them or to permit them to be punished. The maxim is of old and acknowledged authority in German strafrecht, and will carry weight even in wider circles. The translation of this document which has been issued by His Majesty's Stationery Office suffers, as official translations very commonly do, from the inattention of the translator to the significance of what he was translating. It would seem to have been the work of a scholar to whom the words are more familiar than the ideas, and consequently his choice of synonyms is often unfortunate. The translations of the words' Reich' and Land' seem to have been made very much at hazard. For no obvious reason Reich' is rendered by 'Federation,' to which it is in no strict sense equivalent. It is quite true that the secondary sense in which alone the word 'Federation' could be the equivalent of Reich is familiar in such a phrase as 'the Federation of British Industry,' used as the name of a particular society. But the word is only used when the society so named is constructed on a federal basis. It is therefore an unfortunate choice of a word for designating the new German body politic, for the question whether it, like the Russian Republic of Federated Soviets, is a federation or, like the French Republic, a unitary state, is a question hotly discussed and has been decided, so far as it is decided at all, in favour of the unitary state. The advocates of a Federation in the Weimar Assembly were the Minority Socialists, who took their inspiration from Russia. They were beaten and turned out of the Government by the Majority faction, which carefully avoided any recognition of sovereign rights in the constituent Lands.' This question of translation cannot be dismissed as one of mere verbal propriety, for the point of view from which the German system is regarded will be materially affected by the circumstance that it is called a Federation or an Empire, as the case may be. The truth seems to be that neither of these words is quite apposite. An Empire does not necessarily imply an Emperor, or we could not speak of the British Empire; and it is, no doubt, in that elastic sense that the word Empire is used to render the German word Reich' in the Versailles Treaty. But a federation implies constituent federative bodies, the character of which it simply reflects. A federation of academies should not include industrial corporations, nor should a federation of industrials include academies. A federated State consists, strictly speaking, of constituent States with general legislative powers; and in such a case the legislative powers conferred upon the federation are expressly delegated, as in the case of the Australian Commonwealth and the United States of America. When the general legislative power is conferred upon the central authority and only delegated powers of legislation are in the hands of the local assemblies, as in the case of the Dominion of Canada or the Union of South Africa, the whole body politic cannot be accurately called a federation, for it is a federation of provinces; and, although a federation of provinces may be the basis of a State, the State erected on such a basis is a unitary not a federated State. The new Deutsche Reich resembles the Canadian, not the Australian, model in this respect, inasmuch as full legislative authority resides in the Reichstag and only delegated legislative powers can be exercised by the Landtags. The foregoing considerations would apply even if there were no historical considerations to be taken into account. But the circumstance has already been alluded to, that the exact nature of the Union was hotly debated in the Constituent Assembly and throughout Germany when the name of the new State was being considered. Three parties contended for three different views. The Conservatives wished to erect a federation of sovereign States on the model of the Imperial Bund. The extreme Socialists desired to erect a Federation of Workmen's and Soldiers' Councils. A third, which may be called, for lack of a better term, the Prussian Party, desired to abolish historical boundaries and erect a unitary State. The outcome was a compromise which resulted in the official Deutsche Reich'; and, if in rendering that in English the Treaty formula 'German Empire' is to be cast overboard, it would seem better to substitute some equally vague term such as German Commonwealth, instead of the singularly inappropriate German Federation.' It is a point not to be ignored in this connexion that the English word Commonwealth is very nearly the etymological equivalent of the German Reich.' For the translation of the word 'Land' by 'State' there is more to be said, for this word 'State' is used in that sense in the Treaty of Versailles. But, as the status of these Lands' had not at that time been settled, it was doubtful whether they would become States in a true federation or provinces in a unitary State. The language of the Treaty is perhaps not quite conclusive on this point. What is now clear is that, whatever they are called, Prussia, Bavaria, Württemberg, and the rest are now Provinces, not States. Less defensible, as it seems to us, is the decision to omit from the translation the rubrics which are prefixed in the original to the several articles. The light which such headings throw upon the text is sometimes considerable; how considerable it is in the case of the article relating to war criminals, the foregoing discussion has shown. The omission of the Latin aphorism from that passage is very much like striking out the Prince of Denmark from the play of 'Hamlet.' J. W. GORDON. Art. 9.-BOLSHEVISM AND DEMOCRACY. 1. The State and Revolution. By V. I. Ulianov (N. Lenin). Allen and Unwin, n.d. Written August-September 1917. 2. The Proletarian Revolution and Kautsky the Renegade. By V. I. Ulianov (N. Lenin). The British Socialist Party, n.d. Written November 1918. 3. The History of the Russian Revolution to Brest-Litovsk. By L. Trotsky. Allen and Unwin, 1919. 4. The Dictatorship of the Proletariat. By Karl Kautsky. National Labour Press, n.d. Written towards the end of 1918. 5. Terrorisme et Communisme. Paris: Povolozky, 1919. Par Karl Kautsky. 6. Labour Conditions in Soviet Russia. International Labour Office. Harrison, 1920. 7. Report of the British Labour Delegation to Russia. Trades Union Congress and Labour Party, 1920. 8. The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism. By Bertrand Russell. Allen and Unwin, 1920. 9. Through Bolshevik Russia. By Mrs Philip Snowden. Cassell, 1920. 10. The Constitution of the Russian Soviet Republic. THE first Revolution achieved by men calling themselves Marxists has been brought about in strange defiance of all the teaching characteristic of Marx. Marx, indeed, was two persons in one: a revolutionary agitator and an evolutionary philosopher. But it was his evolutionary doctrine which marked him off from his Communist predecessors: it was that which, in his eyes and in the eyes of his closest disciples, converted Socialism from a Utopian' dream to a 'scientific' theory. And, according to that doctrine, a country could only be transformed into a socialist or communist society-in his vocabulary the two adjectives had the same meaning-after it had passed through a capitalist stage, which had removed Vol. 235.-No. 466. L from the workers all property in the instruments of production, concentrated wealth in the hands of a relatively small class, and converted the overwhelmingly large majority of those engaged both in agriculture and in manufacture into a wage-slave proletariat. He remained so far a revolutionary that he never believed the final transition could be effected by peaceful legislation : force, he declared, is the midwife of every old society when it is pregnant with a new one. But this very metaphor makes a long gestation the unescapable prerequisite: force applied too soon can only produce abortion. And Marx's passionate hatred of bourgeois self-satisfaction on the one side was equalled on the other by his cold scientific contempt for those who sought to 'clear by bold leaps, or remove by legal enactments, the obstacles offered by the successive phases of normal development.' Russia, when the Bolsheviks seized power, was far from having reached the stage which orthodox Marxism had hitherto postulated as the indispensable preliminary to socialism. In proportion to its extent and population, it was less industrialised than any other considerable country in Europe. The country was still mainly an agricultural one: the peasants were commonly reckoned eighty-five per cent. of the population. In all other lands the peasants have been the despair of the socialist; and though in Russia the joint ownership of the parish or mir was only slowly giving way to individual property in the soil, there was no reason to suppose that Russian peasants would cling to their land less tenaciously than peasants elsewhere. In particular districts there were, of course, great large-scale manufactures, both textile and metallurgical. But numerically, the Kustarny or cottage industries were even yet considerably more important. They were going through the same evolution as the domestic industries' of other lands in earlier periods; they were being slowly detached from agriculture, and becoming more or less dependent on capitalist middlemen. But they were still very far from having reached the stage in which they could readily be socialised. A common estimate of the number of 'peasants engaged in one or other form of cottage industry' reckoned them at between ten and twelve |