In an interview in Paris on June 6 President Wilson said: "I am convinced that our treaty project violates none of my principles. If I held a contrary opinion I would not hesitate to confess it, and would endeavor to correct the error. The treaty as drawn up, however, entirely conforms with my fourteen points."

In this statement, President Wilson asserts-dogmatically as usual -that the terms of the peace treaty are in accord with his famous Fourteen Points. Almost a month before this interview with the President was published, the New York Sun made a careful analysis of the relation of the Fourteen Points to the peace treaty, and reached the following conclusion:

One after another of the basic Fourteen Points has been traded away by a President in partibus, in a desperate and seemingly unscrupulous effort-in both the moral and the intellectual sense-to preserve at any cost the name, at least, of the League of Nations for the sake of historic distinction and the gratification of an entirely personal pride of opinion.

The price Mr. Wilson has been willing to pay for the comparatively unimportant satisfaction of pulling the League through is through is written plainly in every part of the covenant, in almost every section of the proposed treaty. It is written in terms of the abandonment of fully half of the Fourteen Points originally enunciated by the President on his own responsibility, frequently proclaimed by him in personal pronounciamentos as immutable in principle and

unchangeable in application. Astonishment rapidly becomes indignation when Americans are told that because President Wilson held out to Germany the prospect of a peace founded upon his Fourteen Points, the Senate has no right to exercise its constitutional function even to the extent of deliberate consideration and proper amendment for American interests, and that the Congress is powerless, without breach of faith with a beaten foe, to touch a single hair of the Fourteen.

Here is the balance sheet, stated briefly and comprehensively: Total number of immutable principles...

Points or principles shamelessly traded away already to preserve the nominal existence of the League

Bulgaria

Points or principles yet unapplied because the Peace Conference has not yet settled with Austria - Hungary, and Turkey ... Points or principles preserved in their actual application and not bartered for the minor consideration

.....

The League covenant itself

Total

14

7

...

14

I. Instead of open covenants openly arrived at, the whole process of negotiation has been attended by a secrecy and furtiveness absolutely without example in such a case. The very idea of a new diplomacy, honest, frank and fearless in the sight of mankind, has become the laughing stock of the observant, both here and abroad. All the vicious influences of press agency and underground propagandism has been employed to the limit when

ever possible. While talking noble generalities of peace and harmony and a new order of things in the family of nations whenever a crowd was available in any visited part of Europe, the President has gone out behind the barn whenever the real business of trading was to be conducted, and has completed the transaction with the various parties of the second part in the shadow of convenient seclusion, without wit

nesses to attest or secretaries to make public record.

2. The freedom of the seas, one of the prime aims of the declaration of war against Germany by Congress, has dropped utterly out of sight in the course of the President's trading with the eminent and loyal representatives of Britain's sea dominion. Where in the covenant or treaty do we find the remotest practical reference to the subject which stood so proudly near the head of the impressive category of the international virtues; stood second only to open covenants, openly arrived at?

3. For France's acceptance of the shell of the kernel the President has apparently consented to ignore his third principle. Instead of the removal, so far as possible, of all economic barriers and the establishment of an equality of trade conditions among all the nations consenting to the peace and associating themselves for its maintenance, he has consented without a moral

qualm to the economic straitjacketing, not only of the present Germany but of the Germany of a long future. Just or unjust, the retributive terms to which Mr. Wilson has so readily yielded in Principle Three are unexampled in history. We are speaking now, of course, only of the President's easy surrender of the principle held out to Germany at the time of the armistice

as an inducement not to continue the hopeless struggle.

4. As to the reduction of armaments, the abandonment of Principle Four is as glaring a fact as can be observed in the case of any other of the Fourteen. The question is turned over, in form at least, to the nebulous organization by and by to be housed, under Mr. Wilson's presidency, on the beautiful banks of Lake Leman. Meanwhile the Wilson administration, in its home activities, is rightly proposing plans for continuing and improving an armament which shall be adequate to the defence of this Republic in all contingencies.

5. The "free, open-minded and impartial adjustment of all colonial claims, based upon a strict observance of the principle that in determining all such questions of sovereignty the interests of the population must have equal weight with the equitable claims of the Govern

ment

whose title is to be determined," turns out as practically interpreted by the President to mean the transfer, by the old method of arbitrary partition, of Germany's late colonial territory throughout the world to Great Britain and her several Dominions. The sole exception in this extensive transaction is the case of the few islands which Japan acquires.

6. The evacuation of all Russian territory is not a fact. The treatment accorded to Russia is not that which a fixed principle dictates, but the result of a feeble, vacillating policy suggested in great part by the astounding set of socialist and international advisers with whom the President has seen fit to surround himself. We are not inclined to hold the President responsible for the failure of Point Six in the same degree as in some of the rest of the

Fourteen; but it belongs among the enumerated failures.

7. The great principle of self-determination, the adjustment along the clearly recognized lines of nationality, has been played with by President Wilson as a juggler plays with gilded spheres of tin emptiness. Self-determination has meant determination by himself. It has worked any way and all ways for the advantage of the self-determined league idea. England and France and Japan have secured everything they have had the face to ask for or demand. Italy has achieved the aim of her natural and rightful, though nationally selfish, desires, by swinging over the President's head the shillalah, or whatever may be the Latin equivalent of that essentially Celtic weapon of menace. China has been outraged almost beyond human belief in order that Japan might not follow Italy's example and threaten destruction to the all precious covenant. Self-determination in Poland, it is true, and perhaps by some of the peoples of

Austria-Hungary and the Balkans, and the Turkish vassal provinces, when those cases come before the President in his consideration of the peace treaties not yet concluded. But what of self-determination for Egypt, for Shangtung, for Ireland even?

Such is the score; study it! Such is the tale up to date of the bargainings and tergiversations of an American President who without warrant except for his own volition has put on the purple of a world reorganizer. Study it, The Sun begs its readers in Congress and elsewhere, with regard to the legislative action needed to untie this nation from a frightful and unnecessary entanglement, involving us in the future sacrifice of thousands or hundreds of thousands of American lives and in expenditures beyond the thirty billions or so already spent and cheerfully contributed for a definite and legitimate American purpose. Study it, in order that we may get as soon as possible back on the straight American road.

Once more, apparently, an effort is being made to revive interest in silk raising in this country. In April the newspapers announced that a farm of 1000 acres in Texas, was being developed by the Austin Silk Plantation and Manufacturing Company, capitalized at $500,000; that the "prospects are encouraging for the production of silk on a large scale," and that "the industry has been already placed upon a commercial basis, it is claimed, by the men who have been devoting much time and effort for the last six years to experiments in the raising of silkworms and the growing of cocoons."

The prime mover of the enterprise is Dr. V. K. Osigian said to be a "practical silk grower of long years' experience" and to have been prominently identified with the industry in Armenia and other countries. tries. Describing the success of Dr. Osigian in Texas it was stated that he began his experiments near Austin with one acre planted to wild mulberry trees and in the first year harvested six crops of cocoons weighing 75 ounces; in the second six crops of cocoons weighing 225 ounces, and in the third year six crops of cocoons weighing 675 ounces, which quantity "was more

than doubled the fifth year." It was also stated that "equally good results were obtained from the farm as it was enlarged to embrace more acreage." Dr. Osigian was quoted as having asserted "that as many as twenty-one crops of cocoons may be produced each year and that the industry as far as Texas is concerned has no known natural enemy."

The purpose of the company, it was stated, is "to provide mulberry trees for planting silkworm farms and to supply the necessary original stock of eggs which are to be furnished free of charge, the company agreeing "to purchase all cocoons produced by the farmers at a price of seventy-five cents a pound." It was added, "it is thought that a very large supply of raw silk will be coming from this source within the next few years."

The attempt to grow mulberry trees, raise silk worms, and reel raw silk in this country, because of our experience in earlier years, must be approached with caution, and hopes and expectations are not substantial assets.

It is a case where

to make haste slowly would seem to be the wiser course.

It is well to recall that in the years preceding the commercial revulsions of 1837, many silk culturists believed implicitly that they were opening the pathway to national wealth and individual prosperity. Wild speculation in mulberry trees, the morus multicaulis, continued for some years after the panic until 1844, when a general blight affected all the trees, and the rearing of silk worms was aban

doned throughout the eastern sections of the United States.

One

In California Louis Prevost, a French botanist, tried to start the silk culture from 1856 to 1861. In 1866 a German silk weaver began to raise silk worms and others followed his example. Likewise an Italian in Louisiana from 1871 to 1874 made a business of rearing silkworms and shipping the eggs and cocoons to Italy. In Kansas a Frenchman established in 1870 a colony of operatives engaged in silk culture and manufacture; but Dr. L. P. Brockett says in his book 'The Silk Industry in the United States,' "as yet he has not made the culture a success.” The tone of that volume, published by the Silk Association of America, was unfavorable to the renewal of silk culture in this country. difficulty was the wasteful method of reeling the silk, respecting which Dr. Brockett said, "it would have been difficult to educate the American women, accustomed from childhood to the careless ways of reeling practised here for seventy years, to the patient, slow and skilful methods of the Chinese, Italian or French women who do well if they produce a pound and a half or two pounds of perfectly reeled silk in a week." In California it was proposed to employ Chinese labor; but even that in the seventies was too dear to compete with that of China and Japan or the peasant labor of France and Italy. In China and Japan a skilled reeler who can perfectly reel from one and a half to two pounds of silk in a week receives but a few cents a day. In this country even the poorest Chinese reeler would

demand twenty or thirty times as much. Certainly few, if any, American girls would be willing to undertake the difficult and painstaking work, though unskilled in the processes, for less than ten dollars a week. And the waste from unskilled workers would make it impossible to compete with the products of the present silk producing countries.

In 1876 the prospects for a renewal of silk culture did not seem alluring to Dr. Brockett, though a few faint hopes were held out. On that point he felt that the vision of the coming time are not so rose colored as those of our fathers in 1855-1840. "No one expects to see," he wrote, "in the present generation every citizen sitting under the shade of his own multicaulis trees or gathering the leaves to supply the ravenous appetites of the million of worms in his cocoonery." To obviate the difficulty of reeling, the author suggested the building of large reeling establishments in which reeling could be conducted by steam or water power under the management of skilled and competent operators. At the same time he confessed that up to that time in the history of silk culture in this country no filature had ever been financially successful, nor had the highest price such establishments paid for cocoons been enough to make the rearing of silkworms profitable. He did suggest, however, a possible alternative and that was to raise silkworms for shipment to Italy and France and to sell the pierced cocoons to domestic manufacturers producing spun silk.

twenty-one crops of cocoons may be produced each year." Yet it has been stated on good authority that "obtaining more than two crops a year is considered a very doubtful advantage by some of the more skilled culturists abroad."

It is evident that serious obstacles must be overcome before this industry, which is a household one, requiring infinite patience, great care, experience and skill, can be established on a large scale. Even in Japan this has not yet been accomplished according to Mr. Robert P. Porter who, writing in his recent book, "Japan: The Rise of a Modern Power," of silkworm rearing and raw silk manufacture in Japan, says: "Conducted on a large scale sericulture has never been successful, but in the hands of nearly 1,500,000 families scattered throughout the Empire from Hokkaido to Formosa it thrives admirably."

We wish this new enterprise success, but at the same time we appreciate the obstacles which must be overcome before the industry can be established on a sound financial basis. It is, of course, a period of adventure and as great barriers have been met and levelled in the world war, so it may be that difficulties hitherto regarded as insurmountable may now be overcome and this industry established to furnish the raw material to a growing, flourishing and firmly established manufacture.