Klein's Diagnosis

Nearly everyone in the U. S. wants to believe, does believe, that Germany is prosperous and can pay the sums demanded of her in Reparations (see Inter-national). The majority may be right again, but last week some very pessimistic information about the Reich was vouchsafed by an expert known to have the ear and confidence of U. S. President Herbert Hoover. Indeed this expert, Dr. Julius Klein, was responsible for building up under Secretary of Commerce Hoover one of the most favorably-known trade in formation bureaus possessed by any state. He has just returned from a series of conferences with U. S. commercial attaches in Europe. President Hoover welcomed him home by promoting him from Director of the Bureau of Foreign & Domestic Commerce to be Assistant Secretary of Commerce. When studiously self-effacing Dr. Klein slipped into Manhattan on the Hamburg-American liner New York, last week, he issued this brief, important statement to the press: "Throughout the German republic there is a feeling of unrest and dissatisfaction among the laboring classes. If this feeling brings about the expected strikes in many industries, 3,000,000 persons will be thrown out of work, adding a severe problem to a nation which, without the strikes, is endeavoring to absorb the 2,000,000 already unemployed. "Germany is looking to neighboring Russia as a means of economic preservation, for should trade with that country be developed to a considerable extent, many of the men who are without work today would find occupations. England and France are keeping their commercial eyes on Russia, too, and at the first sign of a stable working arrangement with that country, all Europe would look to the Soviet Union as a market for goods that are not being sold fast enough in other places.

"England and France enjoy an advantage over Germany in rehabilitating because they have enormous colonies. Both countries are doing their utmost to make their colonies great buying centres for the products of the homelands. As a result of this. England's trade with her dependencies is 46% of her total export business, while, before the War, it amounted to but 36%."