Page:EB1922 - Volume 31.djvu/851

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page needs to be proofread.
LUXEMBURG, ROSA—LUXEMBURG
811

upon the impossible. A fine house at Sonning " Deanery Gardens " is a later important essay in half-timbered design, and the value he has always placed on a varied use of materials, as giving different qualities of texture to a building, found ex- pression in " Daneshill," one of his earliest uses of the small bricks he affects so much. " Marshcourt," again, with its interesting play of contrasting chalk and flint, shows Lutyens, designing a house that would be Tudor in style and treatment if it were not essentially modern and his own. Much of his domestic work has been in the direction of the restoration of, and adding to, old houses. The largest example of his powers in this direction is the treatment of Lindisfarne Castle, Holy I., where he carried out, during upwards of nine years (1903-12), a very complete and yet conservative restoration. Sir E. Lutyens' civic work shows equally with his domestic design a personal quality, in such buildings as that for the Country Life offices in London, and for the British Sections at the Exhibitions in Paris (1900) and in Rome (1911). The Garden Suburb at Hampstead has important examples of his treatment of small houses, as in the large Central Square, and of his method of dealing with church design. His two churches in the centre of the square, planned for use by supporters of differing schools of religious thought, are neither of them on the conventional lines of ecclesiastical design, but show in each case a charac- teristic simplicity and culture.

It was, however, as principal architect of the New Delhi (see DELHI) that the culmination of Sir E. Lutyens' professional career was reached. In 1912 a committee, on which Sir Edwin served, and which included Mr. H. Baker and Mr. Lanchester, visited Delhi with a view to advising the Indian Government as to the practical considerations involved in the scheme for the new capital. The plan adopted was elaborated in detail and in what may be described as " the Grand Manner " by Lutyens and H. Baker. Another conspicuous success of a more popular character was his design for the Cenotaph in Whitehall. The nation's memorial to those who died in the World War, of which Sir E. Lutyens had provided a temporary model for the Peace celebration in 1919, was in 1920 perpetuated in stone as a lasting monument. Its striking simplicity, dignity and proportion lift it above the level of the host of memorials that followed the war.

Sir Edwin was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy in 1913 and a full Academician in 1920. The Royal Institute of British Architects awarded him its gold medal in 1921. He was knighted in 1918. In 1897 he had married Lady Emily Lytton, daughter of the first Earl of Lytton.

LUXEMBURG, ROSA (1870-1919), German Socialist and revolutionary agitator, was born a Jewess on Dec. 25 1870 in Russian Poland. Her earliest political activities in her student days were connected with the Socialist movement in the country of her birth, but about 1895 she migrated to Germany. She there went through the form of marriage with a German workman named Luxemburg with the object of acquiring German nationality. In 1898 she edited for a short time the Saxon Arbeiterzeitung, but soon afterwards became a member of the staff of the Leipziger Volkszcitung. She took part in the Russian revolutionary movement of 1905 in Russian Poland, but soon returned to Germany in order to engage in extreme Communist propaganda and founded together with Karl Liebknecht the Spartacus League. In 1914, after the outbreak of war, she was sentenced to a year's imprisonment for inciting to insubordina- tion and remained throughout the war in preventive custody (Schutzhaft). After the revolution she edited in conjunction with Karl Liebknecht the Rote Fahne, the organ of the Sparta- cist or Communist advocates of violent revolutionary methods. After the Jan. (1919) street fighting in Berlin, of which she and Liebknecht were the chief instigators, both agitators were for some days in hiding, but were ultimately arrested and conveyed to temporary military headquarters of the Government forces at the Eden Hotel in the west end of Berlin, on the night of Jan. 16 1919. The mob and some of the soldiers became menacing in their attitude towards the prisoners, so that it was deemed advisable to convey them to one or other of the Berlin prisons.

Liebknecht was shot on his way to the Moabit prison, while Rosa Luxemburg was brutally attacked on leaving the hotel and was finally shot dead as she was being conveyed, insensible from her injuries, in a motor-car under a military escort. Her body was thrown into a neighbouring canal and was only recovered some months later.

LUXEMBURG (see 17.145). The Grand Duchy as a whole is a plateau 1,000 ft. above sea-level on the N. and N.W-, sloping down to S.E. into the Moselle valley, a deep and winding gorge which forms its frontier on this side.

The whole district is furrowed by deep river valleys, and falls into two contrasted divisions, the Osling or northern portion and the Gutland or southern. The Osling forms part of the Ardennes-Eifel massif, a high and bleak plateau with a cold, swampy clay soil over-lying Devonian and Silurian rocks. Here only the river valleys are fertile or at all thickly inhabited; the plateau, which is over 1,300 ft. above sea-level, has little agriculture (oats, rye, potatoes; hay in the valleys) and a thin population. The Gutland, so called on account of its relative fertility, is a part of the Lorraine plateau, geologically composed of Jurassic formations (mostly oolites and marls) with some Triassic sandstones. Here the lower elevation and the comparatively good calcareous soils, even apart from the presence of iron ore, enable the country to support a denser popula- tion. Even here the soil is not rich ; on the oolites it is thin and dry, on the marls cold and heavy ; but a good deal of wheat is grown , some barley, beets, peas and beans, and some lucerne.

The Luxemburg section of the Moselle valley, like its German continuation north-eastwards, is warm and sheltered, and contains extensive vineyards which, together with orchards, occupy the greater part of the Moselle valley communes. The main centres of wine-growing are Wormeldingen, Wellenstein, and Remerschen: Grevenmacher is the chief market. A few vineyards may be found in the lateral valleys, but never very far from the Moselle except up the Sauer, where isolated examples occur even as far up as Vianden. The total vineyards occupy I % of the cultivated area.

The amount of live stock kept is negligible except for pigs, which are common everywhere.

The average density of the pop. is 246 per sq. m. for the whole country. The valleys generally, the centre round the capital, and the iron-working district of the extreme S.W., are somewhat densely inhabited, especially the last named, which has a pop. of 1,000 3,000 per square mile. The main river valleys have a density of 200-400, rising in the neighbourhood of the towns: the Gutland plateau an average of 150, and the Osling below loo. The rainfall varies from rather over 30 in. in the extreme W. to 25 in the E.

The Grand Duchy possesses a small portion of the extreme N. end of the famous minette iron-field of Lorraine. The ore occupies a continuous stratum in the so-called Dogger beds of the Jurassic oolite. Its importance is due to the great size and continuous char- acter of the deposits, and to the special suitability of the pig-iron produced for conversion into steel by the basic process. The Luxem- burg portion of the field (14 sq. m., of which the unexhausted portion was estimated in 1913 to contain 270,000,000 metric tons of ore) yields 7,000,000 tons of ore per annum ; this is mostly smelted in the Grand Duchy, apart from a certain amount exported to Belgium. The output of iron and steel is declining; that of pig was 1,950,514 tons in 1916 as against 1,266,271 in 1918, while the output of steel declined in the same period from 1,296,407 tons to 857,937.

Industries occupy over a quarter of the population. Of the total industrial population one-third works in the mines and furnaces of the iron district, which also contains mechanical construction, electrical and other factories of similar kinds. The centre of the country has a fair number of industrial establishments, including foundries, potteries, textile works, saw-mills and quarries. In the capital there are 4,000 industrial workers, especially engaged iri the production of food-stuffs and hardware. The northern districts have practically no industry, and the same is true of the east, which lives chiefly by its wines and fruit.

The population is prevailingly Germanic in speech, but this has only been the case since 1839, when the present western frontier was drawn, whose claim to be a natural frontier rests on the fact that it roughly corresponds with the linguistic frontier betweep Teutonic and Romance dialects.

The entry of the Grand Duchy into the German Customs Union (1842) marked the beginning of a close economic union with Germany which was the chief cause of Luxemburg's industrial development. Her railways, on the other hand, were in 1857 taken over by the Eastern Railway Company of France. After the Franco-German War Germany deprived the French Eastern Co. of its rights and worked the Luxemburg railways herself as part of the Reichsland system, pledging her- self not to use them for the transport of troops or munitions in time of war, a pledge which, however, was not taken into account in the plans of the German general staff.