Digest of World Press Opinion

Hamilton Fish Armstrong, editor of Foreign Affairs, in an article on Hitler syndicated by the North American Newspaper Alliance, says:

By adding persecution of the Jews and the German clergy to the persecution of Socialists, Republicans and pacifists, Hitler gave the lie to his own assertion that the Nazis seized power to rescue Germany from Bolshevism. People never have realized that just after the war the Socialists were Europe’s bulwalk against Communism. Millions everywhere would have swallowed without examination Hitler’s statement that the German Socialists, Liberals, Republicans, pacifists and intellectuals were in league with Moscow.

But that lie died beyond revival when along with them into the witches’ caldron Hitler threw Jewish capitalists and scientists, princes of the church and parish priests, Lutheran Bishops and ministers, doctors and musicians and historians, and lit the fires beneath with the books of men of genius from Heinrich Heine to Thomas Mann.

The event shows Hitler’s ignorance about what the world is like. He knew that revolutions are made against rather than for something; he planned that the Jews should be the scapegoat for Germany’s defeat and sufferings. Because he himself cared nothing about morals and abstract justice he thought that nobody else did.

Yet it was sympathy with Jewish sufferers from the Aryan mania, and with the fighting churchmen who refused to abandon the moral bases of their everyday conduct, that induced the world to study and hence reject the whole Nazi concept of life. Gratitude, then, to these victims of Hitlerian ferocity, for their misery made Europe understand Nazism.

NEW POLISH PROPOSAL AFFECTS JEWS MOST

How the proposal to abolish proportional representation in the Polish Parliament will affect the Jewish minority is told in The Manchester Guardian:

The intended abolition of proportional representation in Poland is regarded as a severe blow to the minorities. About thirty per cent. of the total population in Poland belong to the Ukrainian, Jewish, German, White Russian, and other minorities. To give them fair representation in Parliament, proportional representation was introduced by the Constituent Assembly of July, 1922. Now it is to cease.

Today the Ukrainian group has eighteen representatives in the Sejm (out of 444) and four in the Senate (out of 111), the Jews have six in the Sejm, and the Germans have five in the Sejm and three in the Senate. A few representatives of minorities secured election on government lists, but these representatives usually adhere to the policy of the party to which they belong.

In a Sejm in which, as at present, the ruling party has an overwhelming majority (247 seats out of 444) there was little scope for the representation of the minorities, but at least their voice could at times be heard. But with the abolition of proportional representation not even that, in most cases, will be possible. The Ukrainians alone will not suffer much. They live in compact masses in Southern Poland, and will be able to obtain much the same representation as now.

The greatest sufferers are expected to be the Jews and the Germans. Only rarely do the Jews form a compact mass in any constituency, and by redistribution they can be tacked on to another constituency in which they will be outnumbered by non-Jewish voters. Similarly with the Germans. The Jews expect to fail entirely to secure representation at the next elections.

EINSTEIN’S NEW THEORY RECEIVES PRAISE

Professor Einstem’s new theory on energy is highly praised by the entire American press. The New York Herald Tribune, in an editorial, says:

Professor Einstein’s paper before the Pittsburgh meeting of the American Mathematical Society may be taken as another victory for what is reasonable over what has been consistent with mathematical logic. Two items of modern relativity and quantum theories always have impressed ordinary minds as deeply unreasonable. One is the idea that space is finite instead of infinite. The other is that the time-honored doctrine of cause and effect must be abandoned in favor of the idea that effects are not fixed and determined but merely are more or less probable.

Were these new doctrines definitely proved by experiment it might be necessary to accept them, but the experimental proofs never have been perfect. Now Professor Einstein throws the weight of his authority on the old-fashioned side of the balance. Infinite space and definite relations between cause and effect, if we understand him correctly, seem to him more reasonable than their modern alternatives, just as they seem to the rest of us.

A STROKE OF GENIUS

The New York Times, commenting editorially on Professor Einstein’s new theory on energy, says:

By one of those strokes of genius that come to the human mind but once in a few centuries Einstein presented science with a clarifying explanation. Mass and energy are really the same. A pound of sugar is simply so much clumped energy. Make a pound move fast and its mass increases. But there is a limit—the velocity of light. When that is reached the mass becomes infinite and impossible. From Einstein’s simple formula it follows that in a single grain of sugar an enormous amount of energy must be congealed. Hence the talk of atomic energy—of driving liners across the ocean with power derived from a glass of water.

Aby Belasco in 1817 defeated Josh Hudson after a two hours’ battle fought at Woolwich, Kent.