HIGH TIDE IN THE ALPS

Germany, like "The Varmint", will never allow its neighbors to become bored. Not content with assuming the financial obligations of half the world, the Germans have decided to dig a little deeper into their pockets and their Fatherland. Having stumbled on an odd billion or so (marks not dollars), they have, according to an Associated. Press dispatch, organized a canal corporation at Munich to construct a two thousand mile waterway by joining the Rhine, the Main and the Danube. The engineering details will tax the German imagination as much as the Allied Reparation Demands will tax their pocket books; but there seems to be as little worry about the one as the other. The statement that it will take "at least twenty years to complete" the project is not surprising. Having lost all track of the ciphers, the Germans plan to construct forty power-plants which will develop two billion five hundred million kilowatts per hour. This enormous store of energy will be employed in hoisting the canal boats over a twelve hundred foot elevation. To check the resulting precipitous descent no less than sixty locks, judiciously distributed along a route of four hundred and fifty miles, will be required.

Newspapers in this country have been conjecturing as to the reason for this elaborate exploit. Various suggestions have been advanced, many of them as interesting as they are unusual. One possibility, however, has been overlooked: perhaps Santa Claus stuffed the stockings in Deutschland with paper marks. But if he has been kind enough to hand out real money, we cannot retrain from reminding the Germans that the Allied bills, like most others, are payable on the first of the month.