"No taxation without representation!" was the battle cry of the American Revolution. Last week His Excellency General Paul von Beneckendorff und von Hindenburg, President of the Reich, imposed upon Germans by a stroke of his goose-quill taxes totaling $115,000,000 which had previously been rejected by the Reichstag. After signing this extraordinary decree at midnight, Old Paul went troubled to bed. In the grey Berlin dawn millions of papers were imprinted with the ominous words: VEILED DICTATORSHIP!
The dander of Old Paul had been rising for several days. In the first place the President of Germany, who is Honorary President of the patriotic but illegal Stahlhelm ("Steel Helmet") military organization, had quarreled on Stahlhelm's behalf with the Government of Prussia.
Knowing that Old Paul was about to begin a triumphal tour of the liberated Rhineland, Dr. Otto Braun, Socialist Prime Minister of Prussia, refused to relax his rule that Stahlhelm members may not parade or demonstrate in Rhenish Prussia, which includes such an important city as Coblenz. "This is unequal treatment which I find unbearable!" wrote the President to Dr. Braun last week and threatened to omit Prussia's end of the Rhineland from his tour.
Dr. Braun remained inflexible. Suddenly the acting Stahlhelm leaders, who had previously refused to treat with Socialist Braun, called upon him. They promised that if allowed to parade before Old Paul they would not thereafter stage military maneuvres in the Rhineland. This promise was really a Hindenburg-Stahlhelm capitulation. Dr. Braun accepted it, gave per-mission for the Stahlhelm parades. Disgruntled, Old Paul put Rhenish Prussia back on the itinerary of his triumphal tour (see below).
Smouldering from this technical defeat by a Prussian Socialist, President von Hindenburg was in ripe mood for drastic action when Chancellor Heinrich Briining of all Germany reported that in the Reich- stag the national Socialist party was continuing to hamstring his fiscal program. Already two luckless Finance Ministers had been forced to resign. The Socialists were blocking the Budget. What should two old soldiers do about these pesky Socialists—for Herr Briining too is an old soldier (Iron Cross).
In every German crisis there is always Article 48. Under this emergency provision of the Weimar Constitution: "The President, in the event that public security and order in the German nation should be considerably disturbed or endangered, may take all necessary measures to re-establish such public security and order, and, if required, to intervene with the aid of armed power. To this end he may provisionally abrogate, in whole or in part, the fundamental laws. . . ."