A main argument in favour of his plan is that the usufructuaries, though their occupancy is hereditary, would be unable to sell, mortgage, or otherwise alienate their possessions. In this manner, the joint ownership of the community would be safeguarded, and the most vital possessions of the nation secured against the secret, sinister and often anti-patriotic operations of big banking, international finance, and stock-market manipulation.

A main aim of Strasser's 'German Socialism' is to promote the back-to-the-land movement in Germany (in England, incidentally, this is an even more urgent need, but no hope of it seems to offer) and to check the process of over-industrialization, the growth of gigantic machine-slave-hives. 'The Liberal-capitalist and Liberal-Marxist ideal of a modern mammoth factory and a maximum output of goods', he writes, 'must give way to the Conservative ideal of a free existence used to the full ... Conservative thought cannot regard a process as retrograde because it will lead to a certain twilight of the mechanical gods. The time is coming for the German to overthrow the tyranny of the mechanical age, the rule of the machine, and to force mechanics and the machine back to their 'due part of servant, from which, to his misfortune, they have been freed ... For the conservative revolutionary, work is but the means to the maintenance of life.' Among other things, Otto Strasser would transfer the capital of Germany from Berlin or any other of the nerve-destroying mammoth settlements of present-day Germany to some such centre of history and tradition as Regensburg or Goslar.

I have explained, as best I can in a brief summary, the basic thought of Otto Strasser's 'German Socialism', which culminates in that stimulating idea of the Erblehen, or hereditary fief. Now for the way he would in practice carry it out.

First, agriculture and the land, which are, in Germany, and indeed in any sound-thinking State, the bases of all reform.

All land and estate would pass into the ownership of the community, represented by the State, and be reconferred, in hereditary fief, upon men able to work it, at the proposal of local Peasants' Councils. The governing principle of the distribution would be that no man should have more land than he could himself farm or less than is essential for the maintenance of himself and his family and a reasonable surplus.

Here Otto Strasser justifies his claim to be called a revolutionary Socialist, or, perhaps still more, a Conservative revolutionary. For his proposal would mean the confiscation of the great estates and their division among a small peasantry holding them in hereditary fee from the State. In practice, this would affect chiefly the great landlords of Eastern Germany; in the rest of Germany, a deep-rooted, long-standing, sturdy, land-owning peasantry already exists, freemen save for debt.

In this proposal Otto Strasser attacks the forces which have led Europe from war to war, which brought Hitler to power, and which have caused the present conflict. He also stakes his own political future, all his hopes, on the turn of a coin. If he were to compromise on this issue, as he has always refused to compromise, all roads to power in Germany might quickly and smoothly open to him, when the Nazi regime begins to disintegrate. If he remains uncompromising, the most powerful group in Germany will oppose his appearance in the political scene tooth and nail, with every weapon at its command. But he believes that the German social Sehnsucht implacably demands this reform and will never rest until it is finally carried out.

Remember that these Prussian magnates, the great landowning nobility of Eastern Germany, overthrew Chancellor Brüning, the man who might have brought Germany through to peaceful and prosperous collaboration in the family of Europe, on this very issue. He, too, wished to divide those vast estates, many of them hopelessly insolvent and deeply indebted to the State ('Help for the Farmer!') and to settle ex-service men on them. Indeed, this was but the fulfilment of a promise made by President, and Field Marshal, von Hindenburg to the soldiers he had led back from the World War when he offered himself to them as candidate for the Presidency. But when he became President, those Eastern German squires clubbed together and bought a great Eastern German estate for Hindenburg, who thus became one of themselves. And when Brüning proposed to partition their insolvent estates, they whispered: 'This is rank Bolshevism' to Hindenburg, who turned on Brüning, threw him out, and made Franz von Papen, the scion of heavy industry, Chancellor in his place.

That began the period of political chaos in Germany which ended in Hitler's triumph. But before his triumph another Chancellor, General von Schleicher, again tried to do that very thing, in the hope of rallying around himself enough Germans to rule against Hitler, and to vanquish Hitler. Again the selfsame thing happened. The squires whispered 'Bolshevism' in the ageing President's ear, and out went Schleicher (who was afterwards shot) and in came Hitler.

So that in taking up this gauntlet, Otto Strasser is doing a very daring thing. I explain it at length because it is the key to the understanding of the whole German situation and the test of his sincerity.

Hitler, even before he came to power, had ensured himself the support of those powerful East Elbian squires in a decisive moment by cancelling that item of the original National Socialist programme, the famous Twenty-Five Points, which demanded the confiscation of the big estates. When he came to power he enacted an Erbhofgesetz, or Hereditary Farmholding law, which alone, in all his legislation, bore some faint resemblance to his Socialist programme and to Otto Strasser's plans for the reinvigoration of the German countryside. It established a system of inalienable, hereditary ownership among the peasants; but among the peasants this already existed in practice, as far as the present capitalist order allows it to exist. What he did not do was to remove those things which in practice work against the establishment of a sound, prosperous, father-to-son peasantry. He left the capitalist order untouched, so that the peasant remains, not really a freeman, but the slave of the credits he has to raise from some bank or moneylender in the nearest town. He left unchanged the prevailing taxation system, that in its endless complication and onerousness demands cash payments from the peasant which repeatedly plunge him in indebtedness. He left unmitigated the burden of mortgage on farms which are supposed to be free, inalienable and bequeathable. And above all, he protected the great estates and thus destroyed the hopes of the peasant's second and third sons of achieving a peasant independence for themselves.

Thus Otto Strasser puts in the forefront of his programme, of his 'German Socialism', this greatest and most dynamite-laden of reforms. A reform that Hitler promised and jettisoned with every other promise he ever made. A reform that a Conservative and Catholic Chancellor sought to make, so that he is now these many years in exile. A reform that a Prussian General sought to make, so that he is now dead. A reform that the German mind undoubtedly longs for.

As I say, that he should uncompromisingly present it is the test and proof of Otto Strasser's sincerity. For if he abandoned it, how much financial and political support, how much friendly regard and influential backing he could find - even in his exile.

The peasant, farmer, smallholder, or what you will, who under Otto Strasser's system would thus hold his land in fee from the State, and bequeath it to a son at his death, would pay to the State one single due - a tithe, payable in cash or kind. In practice, the reform would mean that the vast majority of peasants would remain on their present holdings, for of the 5,096,533 holdings counted in Germany at the 1925 census, only 18,668 came into the category of great estates; they comprised, that is, 200 hectares or more (a hectare is 2 ½ acres). But these 18,668 landowners held between them nearly a fifth of all German agricultural land. This is the land which would be taken for the creation of new peasant-holdings.

Under this reform, says Otto Strasser, the great bulk of German peasants would thus remain in occupation of their present farms. But they would for the first time become freemen - because the abolition of the legal status of 'private ownership', and the substitution for it of the legal status of 'hereditary fief' held from the State, would logically and necessarily carry with it the cancellation of mortgages. Land held in fee from the State is of necessity non-mortgageable.

Thus the peasant, freed from the burden of interest-payment, would, though no longer the private owner of his property, for the first time become a freeman, in free enjoyment of it. This liberation of German agriculture from debt, and the impossibility of incurring new debt, is similarly a major piece in the structure of 'German Socialism'. To preserve the creditors from ruin, existing mortgages would be exchanged for non-interest-bearing bonds, paying three-per-cent amortization annually, and these would be financed from the proceeds of the tithe-payments. The dispossessed great landowners would remain in possession of a sufficiently large piece of land, and would also receive compensation from the mortgage-elimination fund.

The process, as Otto Strasser conceives it, would take several years to complete, but he thinks that its practical fulfilment would be relatively simple.

So much for agriculture, the rock on which every well-found and soundly-constructed State must be built. All these ideas would have been described by Hitler, and were so described by him, as the ramblings of an 'intellectual crank', as Marxism, Bolshevism, Liberalism, Democracy, diabolo and whatnot. These are the words with which cheats and halfwits always seek to defeat the strivings of honest men. I leave it to the reader to compare the two men, their ideas, their works, and their lives.

What of industry? That, as Otto Strasser writes, is a very different question, and one which needs quite another solution. Agricultural undertakings rest mainly upon the labour of one man and his kin, industrial undertakings upon the collaboration of the owner and his workers. Agriculture depends upon the land and climatic conditions; industry upon the supply of raw materials and their distribution. The sources of raw-material supply are the German earth itself, for some of them, and imports, for others. In order efficiently to exploit, without plundering, the one, and adequately to obtain the other, Otto Strasser's 'German Socialism' demands an economic and trade policy of the greatest possible self-sufficiency, in Germany, and a foreign trade monopoly, for the supervision of exports and imports, within reasonable limits. By these means the State would gain sufficient influence over the supply of raw materials to safeguard the interests of the nation.

For that reason, the State would be represented, with the other participants, in industrial undertakings. A trinity of interests exists, says Otto Strasser - the interests of the owner, the workers, and the community; none of these has the right to absolute authority - not the owner, as in the capitalist system; nor the State, as in Fascism (though in practice the unchecked rule of the owner continues under that system); nor the workers, as in Communism (though that again is but a pretence, and the real rulers are the State and its officials).

The community, as represented by the State, would, in Otto Strasser's German Socialist Reich, become the owner of industrial undertakings, which, like agricultural land, would be held in hereditary fee from it. It would re-confer the undertaking upon the owner, as usufructuary, and, in place of the present-day taxes, receive from the earnings of the undertaking a single payment, assessed from time to time, which would go to cover the expenditure of the State and would have precedence over profits and reserves.

Thus in industry a common-ownership order, equally shared between State, usufructuary and workers, would be introduced. The head of the undertaking would under that order, as now, depend upon his energy and ingenuity for a greater or smaller income. He, the community, and his workers would hold equal shares in the management, capital and profits of the undertaking. From their third-share, the workers would derive a payment, of necessity not very large, additional to their wages; but they would have the feeling of co-ownership and co-responsibility. They would be raised above the status of machine-serving slaves. Otto Strasser writes that this system would, in his opinion, breed a class of responsible industrial leaders, in sharp contrast to the capitalist privateer of to-day, on the one hand; and on the other hand the present mass of dispossessed, propertyless, dependent, to-be-seen-and-not-heard class of wage-bondmen would give way to a class of free workmen, who would enjoy the status of co-ownership and of co-responsibility for the prosperity of the undertaking.

Otto Strasser explains in this way the differences between his 'German Socialism', as it would affect industry, and 'Capitalism' and 'Socialism', in the contemporary understandings of the words, respectively.

It differs from capitalism in that the private ownership of the means of production would be abolished, and these could neither be bought nor sold, but only conferred by and acquired from the State in fee; so that great possessions in money or goods, though possible and desirable, could nevertheless not lead to the evils which distinguish capitalism unchecked; the workers and the State would be equal partners with the head or heads of a concern, who would thus not be unfettered 'capitalists' but usufructuaries; the obligation to sound economic methods and consideration for the interests of the entire community would be safeguarded by the two-thirds majority of the State and the workers in relation to the heads of the concern.

But it differs also from Marxist Socialism in that the personal initiative of the leaders of industry would remain, and be limited only by the needs of the entire community; within the limits of the State's economic policy, the competition of individual concerns would remain; the identification of 'the State' with 'industry', or of State-officials with the leadership of industry, would be avoided, and so would the exposure of the workers to arbitrary exploitation by 'the State'.

In industry, as in agriculture, the question arises of the practical fulfilment of these proposals. Their fulfilment depends first and foremost on Otto Strasser, or a man like him, coming to power in Germany, and then on the alteration of the laws governing Germany's economic system - on the abolition, that is, of the legal principle of private ownership unrestricted by any national, social, moral or other considerations whatever.

Once that fence has been taken, Otto Strasser foresees no great difficulty in putting his 'German Socialism' into practice in industry, as in agriculture. 'The simplest method', he writes, 'would be to transform all industrial concerns and great undertakings employing more than a certain number of hands into joint-stock companies; the tripartitioning of the property, its management and profits would then be possible without further difficulty. But these "shares" would be quite different from the shares we know to-day. They would be shares inscribed in the National Register of Property, exclusively in the name of the holder; they would be neither saleable nor mortgageable, in accordance with their nature of property held-in-fee from the State.'

The objection most frequently raised to his proposals for industry is, says Otto Strasser, that under his system new capitalists would arise. But this objection, he answers, overlooks the decisive difference between a capitalist, the unhampered money-privateer, and his potential works-leader, or usufructuary. Above all things, it overlooks the fact that 'Capitalism', which means economic and financial power based on the unrestricted ownership of monopoly-goods, could not reappear, for not even the richest man could buy shares in an undertaking, since these would only be granted-in-fee from the State. He could buy unlimited quantities of those goods which can be produced in unlimited quantities, say toothpaste; but he could not buy those things which only existed in limited quantities, that is, land and estate, mineral resources, and the means of production.

After agriculture and industry, Otto Strasser, in planning the structure of his 'German Socialism', approaches his third main problem - that of the small man, the master craftsman and tradesman. Here again, he finds a new and different problem and offers a new solution.

Under this heading come 'the independent small concerns, which employ relatively few hands -- clerks, shop-assistants, workmen, apprentices -- and these have fair prospect of becoming masters themselves. These small undertakings differ fundamentally from the great concerns. In the great enterprises, the prosperity of the works, and therewith the wellbeing or illbeing of each individual worker, depends on the collaboration of all; but in the small ones this depends on the personality of the master'.

Thus, in the big undertakings Otto Strasser would, as I have shown, give an equal voice in all decisions to all three parties concerned -- the leader or leaders, the workers, and the State -- but in the small ones he would leave the management entirely in the hands of the master. 'But', he says, 'in a Socialist system such a degree of personal freedom is possible only if on the other hand the individual is subjected to obligations which safeguard the interests of the whole community.' To this end, Otto Strasser proposes the revival, in a form suitable to our times, of another good and well-proven German institution - the Guilds.

Under Otto Strasser's 'German Socialism', handicrafts-men, or if you will manual workers, traders, and men of the professions, would be organized in Guilds, which would receive from the State certain rights and in return undertake the collection from their members of the sum assessed as the contribution of the Guilds to the State's expenditure. The Guilds would bestow the master's title and the right to practise a calling, craft or profession. They would also decide how many apprentices might be employed, and the like.

'By these means it would be made impossible for any individual ruthlessly to promote his own especial interests or to misuse his economic freedom.' Under this system, says Otto Strasser, the workers in the small concerns would not, like those in the great ones, have a share in the ownership, profit and operation of it. They would thus seem to be put at a disadvantage; but in practice this is not so. As employees and apprentices they would have the certainty that, if they passed the necessary tests, they could themselves become masters.

'The supply of candidates, and their direction through the schools or universities towards the callings where they were most needed, would need to be regulated in accordance with demand and with the interests of the community; but such intervention with freedom of choice as this would entail would be compensated by the fact that assured existences would be available for those who sought them and that this intervention would not be from the State but by these self-governing

bodies themselves, who would only themselves be subject to a minimum of supervision by the State.'

(It is a most interesting point, which I think deserves to be recorded here, that in one branch of German professional life the ideas advocated by Otto Strasser already exist in practice, or rather, have never ceased to exist. This is in the profession of the apothecaries. Only the State can in Germany confer the right to open an apothecary's business, and these cannot be bought, sold, founded, bequeathed or inherited. On the death of a holder, the title reverts to the State, for bestowment upon the next candidate.)

The practical fulfilment of his proposals for the organization of small concerns and of the professions in Guilds, says Otto Strasser, would best be achieved by taking up such threads of the old Guild system as still remain in Germany. Here again he sees reinvigoration for a most important branch of Germany's economic life in the abolition of the fiendishly complicated and onerous burden of taxes as it has taken its satanic shape in our modern life; the Guilds would pay a lump sum to the State, recoverable in one contribution from their members.

The legal principle of unrestricted private ownership, under Otto Strasser's 'German Socialism', would remain intact in respect of house property - with the sole exception that any newly-built property would arise on ground not acquired freehold, but held, as in the other cases, in fee from the State.

I have given a brief, but I believe sufficient, description of Otto Strasser's 'German Socialism', of the economic system he would build in his Fourth Reich, of the just social order which he envisages.

The question follows, what would be the political structure of that State? Would it be a monarchy, a republic, a centralized or a decentralized State? Here again I find much that is of the greatest interest in Otto Strasser's plans. Those who now read his theory of the State should always bear in mind that it was put on paper ten years ago, and this lends the more importance to the fact that some of its ideas are those which the outbreak of the war, and the uncertainty of our future, have now, ten years later, caused vaguely to take shape and to surge and simmer in the minds of men in many countries:

First, the principles on which Otto Strasser would found the political structure of his German Socialist Fourth Reich. His governing principle, his golden rule, he says -- and in this book I have shown how he came to this conviction --, would be at all costs to avoid the demon of officialdom, of an enormous bureaucracy wedged in arm-chairs from which nothing can dislodge it. This is almost an obsession with him, and a healthy obsession.

Secondly, -- and this is particularly interesting, as dating from the time of the breach with Hitler -- the fullest possible self-government in every branch of German life. Farmers, and not officials, should decide how to milk cows; master-bootmakers, and not officials, should decide how to make boots; master-butchers, and not officials, should decide when to slaughter cattle; doctors, and not officials, should decide what reforms are needed in the medical profession; Saxons, and not Prussian officials, should decide Saxon affairs. (Hitler has imposed a horde of Prussians upon his fellow-Austrians.)

Thirdly, federation. This is the exact opposite of Hitler's theory, which he has put into practice, of centralization, of the merging of all power in the hands of one man, so that his word is law to the uttermost corners of the land, one capital, one parliament, and so on.

Otto Strasser would destroy the last vestiges of this system (his plan, as I say, dates from 1930, long before Hitler built his Third Reich) and build anew, on a federal basis. Local differences of religion, tradition, custom and character are too great in Germany, he says, for this central rule to succeed.

This as I think is the most important thing in all Otto Strasser's political thought - at all events, the most important thing for us to-day. At this very moment, statesmen and politicians, plotters and intriguers, are racking their brains to know what sort of Germany should be left after this war -- providing, as I say, that it can be decisively won -- and how to ensure that it does not again arise in awful militarist guise to destroy us, or try to destroy us.

The first, and vital, condition for that longed-for peace, if I may again interject a word, is that after this war the other countries shall be resolute to crush any new German attempt to alter frontiers by force, and shall not in dithering irresolution sit by and watch her destroy one country after another until the danger becomes so great that they have to rush to arms in a last-minute stampede.

If that resolution does not exist after this war, no conjuring-tricks with words, no appeals to Germany's better conscience, no urging of others to give Germany a Fair Deal, and no new regime in Germany, will preserve the peace. That is the fundamental condition, and without it, no Germany, not Hitler's Germany or Göring's Germany or a Hohenzollern Germany or even a Strasser Germany, can be counted on to keep the peace, for peacemakers would again be outlawed, tortured and killed, as they were by Hitler. Not Germany, but we, shall have the peace in our hands after this war, as we had it in the years 1918 to 1939.

But assuming that this simple truth somehow penetrates the minds of people in this country, and that our policy be shaped accordingly, it is nevertheless of the utmost importance that a Germany should arise after this war which would be led by men who wanted peace and which would see that peace paid better. What sort of Germany should it be?

To-day, men behind the scenes are playing with various ideas. They think vaguely of restoring the two Germanies, the Hohenzollern and the Habsburg Germanies, of putting back in power the Houses which the World War was fought to oust, the princes whose incorrigible imperialist ambitions can never he stilled. Others think of restoring all the monarchies, of resurrecting all the 'dear little Germanies' of the dear old nineteenth century, the little Kings of this and that. Very soon, these little Kings would be swallowed up once more by the King of Prussia, and the game would begin all over again.

Otto Strasser's conception of the future structure of Germany is extraordinarily interesting, considered in the light of these problems of to-day. It is as if he had looked ten years ahead and seen that these problems would be racking the world. Hitler's reign in Germany has proved to be nothing more than the triumph of Prussia, once again. His one-man-rule from Berlin is just that, and nothing else. His Grossdeutschland, his Greater Germany, is nothing but Great Prussia, with everything else in the Prussian stomach, and a new Prussian war of conquest on its hands.

That is why it is so remarkable that Otto Strasser, ten years ago, should have made the destruction of Prussia the foundation stone of his proposals for the structure of the new German Reich. (It is his main proposal to-day.)

'I know', he wrote, 'that every proposal for the dissolution of the Prussian State is attacked as anti-patriotic, because the creative energy of the Prussian spirit would allegedly disappear. I know too well the great part that Prussia and the Prussian spirit have played in the history of Germany to give way to any anti-Prussian feeling possibly deriving from my Bavarian homeland. But the very study of the German character and German history show that this Prussian solution for Germany's problems was but an emergency-outlet, though this does not diminish the services of Frederick the Great and Bismarck in using it. In the Liberal era the dominance of Prussia alone could form a firm basis for the Reich. But to-day the German people are becoming a nation, and this demands the melting-down of this exclusive, Prussian, little-German spirit and all its manifestations.' It was wrong, he proceeded, to stamp 'made in Prussia' on all Germans alike. The times demanded, not the subordination of all types of German to the one, but the merging of these types, the wedding of the 'Prussian' and the 'Austrian' spirit, so that the real German could be born of them.

This real German, wrote Otto Strasser in prophetic words which command admiration, for he was writing at a time when Hitler was telling Germany that all the world, and especially all Europe, was Germany's relentless enemy, 'will then have that European conscience the lack of which is so sinister in the Prussian product'.

I have stressed these words because they are of vital importance. Great courage was needed to say them, when they were written; they ran dead counter to the tide that was then flowing in Germany. They show a man who thinks as men of goodwill in other lands think - a man of peace.

For that reason, wrote Otto Strasser, the German Union of the future must not be centrally governed from one place. It must be a uniform Reich, but federally constructed, in Landschaften (say, Cantons) formed by breaking-up the arbitrarily-born States of to-day. There would be from twelve to fifteen Cantons, their boundaries drawn according to religious, traditional, historical, and stammesmässigen (say, tribal) considerations.

This was a bold proposal in 1930. To-day, it is becoming practical politics. It is the only proposal I have heard that really offers hope of a Germany that after this war would collaborate in the family of Europe. That this new Germany should be inspired by the will to peace, depends entirely on the will of others to compel her to keep the peace; if that will is lacking, not even Otto Strasser's Germany would keep the peace, because he, or another man like him, would in time be overborne or overthrown by the old, powerful, warmaking groups inside Germany; but given such support from outside, a man like Otto Strasser could make out of Germany a land that wished to keep the peace, because the men who wanted peace would come to the top.

His proposal, prophetically inspired as it was, was for the destruction of Prussia. If Prussia remained, bigger than all the other German States put together, Prussia would, he knew, sooner or later impose her sway upon them all, exclude them from the European family, and lead them to war again - and precisely this happened, through the instrumentality of Hitler.

So Otto Strasser would destroy Prussia, and the other dynastically-derived States and Statelets, rub out the memories of princely feuds, and draw the map of Germany again - in Cantons. Of Prussia, nothing would remain but the Brandenburgers, in the historic Mark of Brandenburg - the Landschaft or Canton Brandenburg. Bavaria would be partitioned to yield the three tribally-derived Cantons of the Bavarians, Swabians and Franks. Hanover, the Rhineland and Hessen would reappear, as Cantons. Thuringia would become bigger through the incorporation of Erfurt, Saxony through the incorporation of Magdeburg. Swabia would swallow up Württemberg, Baden and the present Bavarian province of Swabia.

In this way the Reich would emerge as a Federation of twelve or fifteen equiponderant Cantons. The old bogy of Prussian domination, of militarism, of war, would disappear - providing always (this is my interjection) that the outer world were resolved to resist any rebirth of that spirit.

This is, in my view, a scheme that does justice to the Germans, and promises hope for Europe, and for my part I would commend it to the most careful study.

How, by whom and by what would this German Federation be ruled and governed?

The principle that the most competent Germans are those who should come to the leadership of the State excludes, says Otto Strasser, a hereditary monarchy. Human experience does not suggest, and human probability denies, that qualities can be bequeathed in such measure that the son of a leader should automatically become the next leader of the people. The system of hereditary rulers is also opposed to the principle that each member of the nation should have the same start in life. A system by which a man is assured the highest office in the State by reason of his birth is contrary to 'German Socialism'. The choice remains between an elected monarchy or a republic. Both have this much in common, that the head of the State is elected, in the first case for life, in the second usually for a limited term.

But such limited periods, writes Otto Strasser, carry with them the danger that the candidate, in order to secure re-election will make concessions to the electorate, and this in turn endangers the principle of impartiality in his office. It may lead to corruption, to cheap vote-catching methods. These dangers disappear if the head of the State be elected for life. This would give him independence of the electorate and enable him to make far-sighted plans, without taking account of the fickleness of public favour.

So Otto Strasser sees at the head of his federalist German Socialist Reich a Reichspräsident elected for life. History, again, votes for him; for centuries Germany knew this form of elected rulers. The name - Emperor or President - is a thing of indifference, he says.

Thus the Fourth Reich, as Otto Strasser would build it on a basis of German Socialism, would have a Reich President, a Reich Parliament, and a Reich Federal Council. Each Canton would similarly have a Cantonal President and a Cantonal Parliament, and the Reich Federal Council would be composed of the representatives of the Cantons, preferably the Cantonal Presidents. The Federal Council would elect the Reich President, as the Cardinals the Pope.

All parliaments, Reich and Cantonal, would be elected; not by political parties, however, but by five corporative groups: those of the peasants; the workers; the employees and officials; the employers and tradesmen; and the professions. The workers could only elect a worker, the professional men only one of their own kind, and so on.

Thus it would be impossible for 'the workers' and 'the peasants' to be represented in parliament, as they are in most countries to-day, by university professors, journalists, alien intellectuals and the like conglomeration. No one group would be allowed more than 49 per cent of seats in any parliament, but every group must be represented; this to avoid little local dictatorships of farmers in a predominantly rural district, or of workers in an industrial district. The officials in the Cantons would be natives.

Little more remains for me to say, in this brief summary of Otto Strasser's German Socialism, than to gather up a few loose ends. Under his Cantonal scheme Austria -- if at the referendum which he proposes it decided to stay with the Reich -- would immediately emerge as a self-governing Austria, called Austria, and administered only by Austrian-born officials.

In the Jewish question, Otto Strasser has the deepest contempt for the methods of Hitler, not only because they are vulgar and repugnant, but because they are stupid; the Jewish question has not been solved, any more than any other question save that of militarism and war, by these methods, and the sum effect of them has in practice been a world-wide publicity campaign in favour of the Jews in which the things they have suffered have been exaggerated and the evils which they promoted have been forgotten.

Gregor Strasser, as I have told, expelled Julius Streicher from the party many years ago; Hitler paid Streicher the most marked honour. Otto Strasser bitterly attacked Streicher's methods, in the newspapers of his Kampfverlag, the independent attitude of which was the main reason for his quarrel and breach with Hitler, years before the Hitlerist triumph; for instance, in an article published in 1928 which was called 'Anti-Semitism is dead; long live the national idea'. In his book on German Socialism, similarly, he attacks the 'idolatry of racialism', and indeed, as I have shown in this book, he regards Hitler's racial doctrines as beneath the contempt of a thinking or educated man.

But then again, these racial babblings of Hitler are no more seriously meant than his anti-Bolshevist ravings or anything else that he ever said; a Jewess, in the meaning of his own anti-Jewish Act, was his intermediary in important international negotiations with foreign politicians. He presented her with his signed portrait, and even gave her a testimonial, through his aide-de-camp, to the effect that she had made the Munich Agreement possible. Hitler's Gestapo, similarly, habitually uses Jewish agents.

Strasser's view on the Jewish question is the view that is coming now to be more and more widely accepted - that the Jews are an alien community, with a fiercely anti-Gentile religion that gives them a concealed inward feeling of antagonism towards the non-Jewish communities among which they live, and anti-Gentile religious laws far more rabid than Hitler's anti-Jewish laws, which are but a pallid inversion of them. That being so, and as they have this inborn, overriding, super-national, international, mutually anti-Gentile allegiance, they cannot claim, as they do claim, the full and unrestricted rights and privileges, and more, of the native-born citizens.

'Plenty of Englishmen, for instance', he says, 'live, in Germany, and trade there, and thrive there, but they do not expect to become leaders of the German people, to dominate and even monopolize professions and callings and trades, to obtrude an alien way of thought and way of living upon the Germans through literature and newspapers and the stage and the films. Then why should the Jews feel themselves the victims of discrimination?'

In Otto Strasser's Fourth Reich, therefore, methods of the Streicher kind would immediately cease. He would place such restrictions as the welfare of the whole community demands upon the spread of immoderate Jewish influence in the thought of the country, in the professions, and, through the power of money, in the control of power. His endeavour would be to find, in agreement with the Jews, a means by which they could lead a dignified and worthy existence in the State, subject to the limits which their own religion, ineradicable traits and implacable refusal to be assimilated dictate.

He knows that a limited number of Jews always can be assimilated, or as nearly assimilated as makes no odds, particularly in Germany, a country for which nearly all Jews feel a deep admiration. He knows too that the unassimilable core always remains and in its works is covertly hostile to the people among whom it lives. Otto Strasser, incidentally, has no anti-Jewish feeling; I have remarked this. He has had Jewish friends and in Prague, as I have shown, he had, or thought he had, a Jewish collaborator; this nearly cost him his life, and did cost the life of his best friend. His attitude towards the Jews in his contemplated Fourth Reich, nevertheless, is one of conviction, not of prejudice.

His attitude in this question is a further proof of his sincerity, for his years of exile have been always financially straitened and sometimes penurious, and he could have had all the financial backing a politician could desire if he had modified his views in this particular matter. About that, I too, as a writer, could sing a song.

In all his political philosophy, Otto Strasser has confined himself to the drafting of a 'German Socialism'. He believes, as he is entitled to believe, that he knows what is good for Germany; he does not claim or presume to know what is good for other countries. But he does think that the conception of Federation, which he laid down so long ago for Germany, should ultimately be extended to Europe. To-day, many people are saying and thinking this; he said and thought it ten years ago. He thinks indeed as a European, and is one of the very few Germans I ever met who do so think.

Many Germans talk as good Europeans, but you need only to put to them a question deftly designed to prick the skin - and immediately that spirit which Otto Strasser calls 'Prussian', which the world calls 'Prussian', peeps out. I did not find this so with Otto Strasser. As I said and repeat, with Germany the only guarantee of peace is for Germany to know that force will recoil upon Germany with even greater force; if that knowledge is not always present in the mind of the German masses, they will sooner or later become again the instruments of the warmakers, and such men as an Otto Strasser will be repeatedly thrust aside. But all his life and works show that here is a good German who is a good European.

I think I have given a true picture of Otto Strasser, of the man, of his struggles, of his fight against Hitler, of his ideals, of his plans for peace, and of the German Socialist Reich which he would set up.

For my part, and there can be few men more wary about the Germans than I am, as my other books have shown, I think that this is a German who, if he could, would work for the welfare both of his country and of Europe - in short, for peace. Whatever the future hold for him, and for us all, I am glad to have known him and to have written this book.

POSTSCRIPT

With regret, after a rousing and carousing farewell evening chez Perouse, I shook hands with Otto Strasser for the last time, said 'Well, I'll get along and write that book now', and, wishing to clear my head a little before I turned in, I set out to walk home.

The hour was before midnight, yet Paris was an empty shell. The city was not blacked-out, as was my native London; the lighting was just subdued, but the unpeopled streets stretched clearly enough before me in all directions. The night was fine and starry, with an invigorating breeze, and I thought, I may never have a chance to see Paris like this again and so, I wandered about, for some hours, until I was hopelessly lost and wondered how I should ever find my way home, for in those adequately lighted streets not a soul nor a taxi was to be seen. I had begun my wanderings somewhere on the Rive Gauche, I knew that, and had eventually to find my way back to the Avenue de I'Opéra in time to catch a train at eight o'clock in the morning.

However, it suited me very well, and I did not worry. All roads roam to Leeds, I thought, and I roamed. The moon came up, and I had never seen Paris so lovely. What man ever thought to see an unpeopled Paris, beneath the moon? I came upon the Seine, but did not know at which end of it I was, so I took a chance and turned left and after a while I came to the Ile de la Cité, and knew where I was, so that I set forth again along the Boul' Mich', thinking of Henry Murger, and walked and walked until I came to the Rotonde, which was black and dead, and I wondered whether any good pictures were on the walls there now. Then I came back through the narrow streets of the Quartier to the Seine again, strolled along and said Good-morning to a Zouave, about the only thing in the semblance of a man I had seen for some hours, and crossed the bridge and came presently to the Arc de Triomphe, which had one sandbagged leg and looked gouty. I am all for this sandbagging, I thought: one good thing might come of this war if someone would sandbag the Albert Memorial.

Paris, as I say, was never lovelier to me than in this night, when I walked its streets for hours and barely saw a soul. I could never have imagined a city so still, least of all Paris, which of old never quite went to sleep. Yet two ghosts accompanied me in this nocturnal stroll - the ghosts of Victory and of Peace, both of which I had known, scarcely twenty years before, in this very Paris. I saw the empty streets full of the men I had known, Britishers from the four corners of the earth, down from the line for a respite. I saw myself, spending spellbound days in Paris a few days before that Victory, the first time I ever saw Paris at all. I saw the girl who cheered those days -- gosh, how invigorating she was, after four years of war -- and her flat in the Avenue de Wagram, and wondered where she was now. I saw the actress who danced on a table at Maxim's. And now all these streets were empty, the lights were low, the tumult and the shouting had long since died, the men-depleted shops were shuttered, the glory of that Victory had long departed, and once again, after only twenty years, the politicians were fearlessly proclaiming that they would not furl the sword or sheath the umbrella.

Hell I thought, in lonely fury, brimstone and perdition take them all, these well-banqueted fearless ones.

By the time I had found the Place de la Concorde and the Place Vendôme and the Faubourg Sainte Antoine, where the Czechs had a recruiting office, and the Madeleine, Paris was astir again and I could take the breakfast I liked best of all breakfasts, coffee and a crescent, before going to pack.

When I had it before me, I sat back, slowly enjoying it, and thought, 'Well, here I am, in 1939, and here I was, in 1918, and there was a war then and there's a war now, and in between were so many things, lean and hungry days in England, and unemployment in London and map-selling in Wiltshire and nights in Fleet Street, that flows with ink and money, and Berlin and Hindenburg and Brenda Mary and Hitler and Austria and the mountains and the Wienerwald and the Little Rocket and the invasion and Budapest and Belgrade and Moscow and Sofia and Prague and another invasion and homecoming and now the sum has worked out to the same total again - a café in Paris, a cup of coffee and a crescent roll.

In Paris every second woman had put on black. There, you didn't see Lady Deliria This and Lottie That 'doing their bit' in the illustrated weeklies, for which alone, seemingly, they live. You saw no doing-their-bit pictures of nude-revue actresses, wearing earsplitting smiles and a few beads in the first illustration, and in the second putting on clothes, as their sacrifice to the country's need, and going off in a cock-eyed steel-helmet to do duty as Air Raid Wardresses. No picture-papers suggested that this war was a Les Girls war, run entirely for the benefit of the Home Front and of people needing advertisement.

The French have a sense of dignity and congruity. Paris had not the soul-destroying black-out of London, which looks craven but is actually only silly. No civilian carried a gas-mask, and not many soldiers. But every street had its shuttered shops, where the men up to late middle age had been called away overnight.

At the Gare du Nord, where I caught my train, I saw the real black-out, the black-out of the spirit, the weeping women that I had seen, those many years past, all over Europe. Alongside my train was another, filled with French soldiers returning to the front, and until it left they stood on the platform, kissing, embracing, fondling, whispering to their womenfolk, and then the train steamed out and left the black-clad figures alone, waving, on the platform, and then it disappeared and they turned and came back and went out, with blinking eyes, and disappeared too.

Once more, after twenty years. How little has changed. Indeed, only the young men going away to war have changed. Many of the old politicians are the same men now as then. So are the armament lords, and this is more important.

I felt strange to be on a cross-channel steamer, a revolting substitute barge, in wartime, among British soldiers, and not to be of them. I was the only civilian on the boat, save for two ladies of such venerable age that I assumed them to have been entertaining the troops.

On the boat I saw a man I knew but who did not know me. I suppose most people have had this experience. Somewhere, sometime, a man has been pointed out to them and they have learned certain things about him which cause them to look at him with respect or dislike, and then, by chance, they continually see this man, who has no notion that they know him or are watching him, and each time they see him they think of that certain thing they know about him.

This was such a man. I knew of him that he had, long years ago, been a regular officer, in the last war; that for some reason he had retired or been retired from the army after that and had never found himself capable of doing a job of honest work in civilian life; so that he had lived on his wife, a hard-working woman and sometimes took the dog for a walk; but he never failed to remind anyone who would listen that he belonged to a higher caste, that his rank was captain, and that he held himself to be a superior person.

Now I saw this man on board, wearing on his shoulder the three stars which had been his in that other war. I watched him, thinking how glad he must be that another war had come and that he need not take the dog out any more. As I watched, I saw that he chatted, with what seemed to me unusual familiarity, with a sergeant-major.

A little later I sat in the dining-saloon, not far from this sergeant-major, who had a sergeant by him. Suddenly I heard the sergeant say, 'Here he comes', and make a disparaging remark, and from curiosity I looked in that direction. So did the sergeant-major. The man I knew strolled lazily in. The sergeant-major half rose and called 'Have a drink, sir?' The man I knew came over, leaned lazily over the sergeant-major's chair and murmured, just as lazily, 'Aren't you getting fearfully broke?' Apparently he had had a few from the same quarter already. The sergeant-major, a man, as I thought, of the too-knowing, old-soldier type, said jovially, 'That's all right, sir, I'll rub my magic button', whereon the man I knew murmured again, 'Then I'll have a whisky and soda'.

Well, thought I, that's not so good. But I suppose, I hope anyway, that this was an isolated incident; a leech of this kind can always find somebody to buy him drinks, in war as in peace, and if nobody else is available, why then he will take them from his own sergeant-major, and the contempt of his own men means nothing to him.

I watched this man with interest from my corner of the saloon, for in a small way he represented a type that I detest more than any other - the class that thrives on war. When I was in the British Army you would have needed to go a long way to find such a man as this, and you would, I imagine, need to go just as far to-day; it was the greatest fluke that I happened to run across him on that cross-channel steamer and to see him behaving in a way that showed the things I had heard about him were true. But there he was, anyway, and for him the war meant return to glory, and embroidered gold stars, and drinks at the sergeant-major's expense.

I contemplated those British soldiers. The last time I had travelled in a cross-channel steamer with men in khaki, homeward bound, had been when the other war was finished. It was night, and moonlight. I stood on an upper deck and thought 'Well, here I am, the war's over and I'm alive and how now?' In the stern of the ship, below me, soldiers -- not 'Tommies', I loathe this Tommy-rot -- many of them, stood in a group, leaning against the sides, the dark profiles of their faces clearly drawn against the moonlit sea, and sang softly, in harmony:

Sing us a song of bonny Scotland

Any old song will do

Round the old camp fire, a rough and ready choir

Will join in the chorus too.

You take the high road, and I'll take the low ...

Not much of a song, I suppose, and I think hardly any of them were Scotsmen, but we English have no songs left anyway, and have to borrow from the feelings and melodies of the Welsh, Irish and Scots on these occasions. But I have never forgotten the song or the scene. Callow youth, a hard war, and a hard-fought victory lay behind; the uncharted future lay ahead; and this song, softly sung in the moonlight aboard the steamer England-bound, seemed to say everything. It was a song of home and hope, and yet was sad.

Now, twenty years later, I found myself in another such steamer, again among such men, and I studied them closely. They were good-looking soldiers, better, I think, than the men who went that way before them, But they had none of that roistering, short-and-gay, here-to-day-and-gone-to-morrow spirit of those men, who believed, many of them, that a better world would come of their victory. These men were quiet and businesslike. They looked to me as if they were without illusions. Not even the youngest of them, I should imagine, had much hope that their victory would save freedom, or the liberty of small nations, or national independence, or whatnot. They could not believe such things, unless they had grown up deaf and blind to all that happened around them.

But, in contrast to the hundreds of politicians and writers who claimed to tell them every day what they were fighting for and never did, they knew, as I think, what they were fighting for. It is quite simple, indeed, though for some reason none of our politicians has ever said it.

If they had not fought, at that moment, the Germans would have been in London next. We did, by the skin of our teeth, catch a bus that was nearly out of our reach. I think the inner voice of these men told them that, and this enabled them, uncomplaining, to go to a war which should not have been allowed to come. They have already shown that they can fight, if anything, better than their predecessors of twenty years ago. But in them is a seed of scepticism and disbelief, born of that other war and the things that happened after it. These men would be dangerous if they found that this was but another profiteers' war, at the end of which the soldier would again be the least honoured of men.

Leaving the saloon, where the little captain was still drinking with the sergeant-major, while the sergeant- major's comrades looked on with unveiled scorn in their eyes, I went on deck, found the windiest corner I could, and exchanged thoughts with the ragged and slate-coloured sea.

I thought back to that last war and to the high hopes with which the youth of the British Empire went into it, men from all the corners of the earth who were ready to come and fight to make the world a better place. Is that not inspiring, and is it not in gruesome contrast with the eternal humbuggery and word-juggling of the politicians? It is the difference between idealism and tactics, between a patriotic German and Hitler.

Incidentally, what greater dishonour was ever one to the spirit of the nation than the introduction of conscription in England - in Great Britain, if you prefer it. This is the one country in the world where you do not need conscription, where you could at a moment's notice have all the men in the land worth having as volunteers. Some months after the war began a call came for volunteers for the mine-sweepers, and within twenty-four hours, I believe, about twenty-four thousand men volunteered. At that time a German I know said to me, shaking his head in bewilderment, 'That is the thing I can't understand. Germans are patriots, and will immediately rush to die in the cause of patriotism, if they are ordered to; but to volunteer like this? No, that couldn't happen anywhere else.'

What an opportunity was lost, in 1934 and 1935 and 1936 and 1937 and 1938 and even in 1939, to show the world that it may yet believe in an ideal. Why conscript men you can have as volunteers, and then try to slur over the transaction, in that awful jargon of Eton-Balliol-Whitehall-Palestine, by calling them 'militiamen'? Universal military service is, socially considered, a just and honourable system, if it be justly and honourably applied, as in Switzerland, for instance. But if you have, by chance, a country where that conception of conscription has never been explained enough for it to be understood, and where the real men of the country are willing to serve at any moment without it, why make them conscripts?

If I had the decision in these things in this country, I would repeal conscription; and I would five minutes later show the world as fine an army as any it can produce, made of volunteers. Not all the politicians, publicity experts and cretinous film producers in the world could think out a better propaganda campaign -- unfortunately I have to use the disgusting jargon of our time -- than this. But its merits would never occur to them; their minds are too subtle to comprehend anything sincere; and they have not an ideal between them.

Moreover, they prefer conscripts. They do not want free men, who fight in their own birthright; they want morons, who will do what they are told.

Besides, under my scheme those volunteers would have first preferment in the life of the nation in peacetime, and the people who arrange wars would not like that. They never fight, anyway.

Thinking about these things, in that windy corner of the deck, my mind ranged over the years between these two wars, or these two instalments of one war, and turned to Germany.

I had seen this Germany after the World War which she professedly lost. I knew that, within ten years of her ostensible disaster, she was as mighty in trade and commerce as the countries that believed they had vanquished her. She was debt-free, through the conjuring trick of the inflation. After that, she incurred another enormous foreign debt in all the richer countries of the world, and spent the money on improving that handsome and valuable property, Germany. New stations, new power plants and gasworks, new sewage works, and civic improvements of every kind were made with that foreign money, so that, within fifteen years of the disastrous war, the country Germany, as I saw it, was better, house for house, town for town, street for street, park for park, sportsground for sportsground, than any other country I knew save the small, thrifty, diligent and prosperous democracies of Northern Europe and Switzerland.

That money, too, is lost; after this war Germany will not continue to repay it - save in exchange for new loans. But the things it bought remain, and make Germany, as the estate agents say, a first-rate property, with every modern improvement and in a perfect state of up-keep. She, the loser of that war, and as we think the potential loser of this one, has no slums or derelict areas in our understanding of the words. Is the same lunatic process to continue after this war? Then what are the fruits of our victory or victories?

After that period of foreign-paid civic improvement, Germany was left free to devote all her own money and strength to armaments, and in less than twenty years from the catastrophic defeat she was mightier again in arms, on land and in the air, than any country in Europe. By just leaning her weight in this or that direction, she was able to destroy, one after another, every penalty of the peace treaty, to regain all that she had lost and more, without any cost to herself. She was not only mightier than the others in arms, she was greater in territory, less than twenty years after her downfall, than she had ever been.

At that point -- put the date of it at August 1939 -- she was, as I think, one of the most enviable countries in Europe. The world, which has no conscience, was ready even to forget the annexation of Bohemia and Moravia; ready to look the other way if she annexed Danzig; ready, I think, to do nothing more than deplore and deprecate if she took a small slice of Poland, namely, the slice which she called The Polish Corridor; and ready, as I am pretty sure, to give her colonies in some form.

The world was ready to connive in all that, if she would then rest on her laurels and abstain from further conquest; in other words, if she would leave the Great Powers alone. At that point, I think nothing could have stopped her from becoming the greatest power in the world if she had then changed over, if only for the time being, from the method of armed conquest to the method of commercial, diplomatic and political conquest. That Hitler did not do this, when he had already gained so much and could gain so much more, is to my mind the proof that in his inmost heart he is a traitor to the German people.

And yet, how could the world hope or expect that Germany would do this? The Germans have an inherent passion for soldiering and war, and why should they not? Any German who at that point looked back over the preceding twenty-five years would perforce have said to himself that war paid Germany. Nonsense to say that war settles nothing, war achieves nothing. A German would have seen about him a country that, on balance, had profited even by a defeat commonly described by historians as the greatest in history. Not only that his Reich was greater, his army mightier than before that lost war: but the civic condition of his country was better. Why, then, should his inner voice prompt him, at another decisive moment, to take the path of peace? Even a lost war would not seem to him an all too appalling prospect; while a victorious one would offer the most golden visions of wealth, territorial aggrandizement and glory.