ARMS AND THE MEN

France stands at the very top. She stands at the top in the amount her government spends on armaments; at the top in the amount of arms she exports to other nations, at the top also by virtue of the billion francs she has spent to build a military Chinese wall of forts, many of them underground, along her eastern boundaries. But these mere quantitative details do not reveal the true significance of her position.

She stands today as a queer paradox: France, the democracy, a quiet pasture land for the world's most famous peasantry, coexisting with France, the greatest military power of modern times, with an army which all but equals in numbers and far surpasses in equipment Germany's vast militaristic machine in 1914.

At the head of this latter France stands the figure of General Maxime Weygand (Vice President of the Higher War Council, Inspector General of the Army, possessor of the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor, Member of the French Academy), ruling an army (including Colonials) of 650,000 men. But despite his decorations, his medals and orders, and the power he has, once a new war begins, to order several million men to death, General Weygand, a devout Catholic, represents' not the urge for war but, on the contrary, France's desire for peace -- by means of "security." The French threat to the peace of the world lies elsewhere -- in France. For in France, and only in France, a new situation exists: the armament makers are no longer, like Alfred Krupp or Sir Basil Zaharoff in his younger days, humble petitioners of government, hat-in-hand solicitors of orders--their influence is so infiltrated into the industrial, social, and political affairs of the nation that they have power in some ways beyond the State; a power so mighty that they are all but able, for their own individualistic reasons, to sweep the State along in a course of action against its own will. They are all but anonymous, these men. They are displeased by publicity and are well able to enforce their displeasure. But we must now displease one of them and present the figure of M. Charles Prosper Eugene Schneider.

Charles Prosper Eugene Schneider is a man of many offices the executive head of hundreds of armament firms throughout Europe. He is President of the Schneider-Creuset company, armament manufacturers with mines, smelters, and foundries scattered through France. He is director of the Banque de I'Union Parisienne, one of whose most profitable sources of business is the financing loans for armaments. In 1920 he founded and became the President of the Union Europeenne Industrial et Financier--a holding company, capitalized at 140,000,000 Frances. Through it Schneider-Creusto controls 182 French companies that manufacture heavy ordnance, machine guns, tanks, shells, ammunition, and warfare chemicals. Out of the $300,000,000 which, at the most conservative guess, represents the annual billing of France's armament concerns, Schneider-Creusot or subsidiaries takes the lion's share.

*One independent armament firm is the Ancients Establishments Hotchkiss et Cie, founded by Banjamin Berkelyey Hotchkiss, American engineer and inventor of the Hotchkiss Machine Gun, born in Watertown, Connecticut, in 1826. British, French, and American capital are intermingled in the company now, but the managing director is a self-expatriated ex-ensign of the U. S. Navy. Lawrence Vincent Benet, uncle of Stephen Vincent Benet, the poet. His American citizenship did not stop him from selling tons of guns and other war materials to Japan at the same time that Secretary of Siate Stimson was vainly trying to keep the Japanese out of Manchuria.