Chapter III: Part 3

President Wilson comforted himself for any little defects which might have crept into the Peace Treaties by this new instrument of idealism which he had helped to create with a very passionate enthusiasm. It was his great gift to the world and, as he hoped, the fulfilment of the promises he had made to the world in his messages before and after the ending of the war, appealing so poignantly to the secret hopes of humanity that when he came to Europe as the great arbitrator of its councils, he was received as the leader, spokesman, and prophet of the New World which was to be built out of the ruins of the Old. The rejection by the American Senate of all that he had done killed Wilson. It also destroyed all immediate hopes of European recovery based upon the League as an instrument of reconstruction, co-operation and peace. It was one of the great tragedies of history. Yet, looking back now upon the reasons of the American refusal to enter the League of Nations, it is clear that it was not entirely due to the personal antagonism which President Wilson had aroused by certain defects of character—his autocratic methods, his rejection of good counsel, and his mentality in the beginning of the war, nor to a national selfishness on the part of the American people, desiring to withdraw rapidly from responsibilities which they had incurred by their entry into the war. From the American point of view, at that time, the war had proved more than ever the supreme good fortune of the United States in being remote from the hatreds and quarrels of that mess of races in Europe out of which their people had escaped in the past. They did not understand Europe. They had no direct interest in its national rivalries. They could not control or abate its passions. All opponents of the Wilson policy regarded it as a calamity that the United States should surrender its geographical immunity from the evil heritage of the Old World and deliberately involve its future in that arena of ancient feuds. By entering the League of Nations it seemed to many that the people of the United States would be dragged into new wars in which they would have no direct or indirect interest, and that they would have to support and enforce the maintenance of European frontiers, re-drawn by the Peace Treaties, and already the cause of passionate resentment. They did not approve of all that parcelling up of territories which had taken place under the benignant name of “mandates”—British dominion in Palestine and Mesopotamia, French rule in Syria, the gobbling up of German Africa, the Greek Empire in Asia Minor. Were they to use their strength to support that new combination of powers which one day was bound to be challenged and resisted? Above all was the New World to enter into military alliance with France and Great Britain to support a policy of domination in Europe which could only last as long as the German people and their Allies were suffering from war exhaustion—a one-sided pact which would make for the tyranny of certain powers, or at least their military supremacy over other nations of the world? That would be a surrender of the whole spirit of the American people, who believed their destiny to be that of free arbitrators, and not partisans, in the future of civilisation; friends of liberty and democracy everywhere, and not allies on one side of a line. They had come into the war, they believed, as crusaders for that ideal, defenders of liberty wantonly attacked. They hated the thought that the ideal should be narrowed down to the future defence of one group of powers, who might in their turn attack or oppress the democratic liberties of their neighbours. For this reason, among others, they rejected the pact of security given by President Wilson to France in agreement with England. For these reasons, not ignoble or merely selfish—although, I think, unsound—they refused to enter the League of Nations.

This withdrawal of the United States took away the strongest pillar upon which the League had been founded. Its weakness was immediately apparent. It was incapable of world judgments backed by the greatest economic power in the world. The exclusion of Russia, Germany, Austria and Hungary from its deliberations and decisions made it seem—to hostile observers—an instrument designed merely as a partisan body, upholding the opinions of the victorious Allies and giving a sham morality to their policy.

That was unfair, because the Assembly, and its work behind the scenes at Geneva, in which forty-three nations were represented, did very quickly develop a spirit of international co-operation and law rising above the low moralities of national selfishness. The representatives of the League included large numbers of men who were passionately inspired with the purpose of restoring order into the chaotic conditions of Europe after war, healing its wounds, creating good will in causes of quarrel by methods of arbitration and persuasion, for the commonweal of peoples. The work and spirit of Geneva was one source of light in a world of darkness, in those dreadful years from which we have just emerged, and for that reason it raised a standard of idealism round which millions of men and women in many countries—even in the United States—rallied as the one hope of the future.

It may be said without exaggeration that for the six years following the war civilised humanity has been sharply divided into two camps of thought—those who believe in the spirit of the League of Nations, with its message of international co-operation and its faith in peace by arbitration; and those who have no faith at all in this idealistic purpose, and who believe in Force as the only method of international relationship and the settlement of quarrels. Those two camps still exist. The argument between them still goes on, and will never cease until civilisation gives allegiance to a new code of law.

What frustrated the League in its work and decisions, after the withdrawal of the United States, was the interpretation of the Peace Treaties by the Great Powers, and the economic folly which took possession of European statesmen. The League as one half of the Peace Treaty found that its other half thwarted it in every possible way. The left hand worked against the right. It was useless for the League of Nations to press for the economic co-operation of Europe when the Supreme Council and the Allied statesmen enforced decisions which enlarged the area of ruin and thrust stricken people deeper into misery. It was futile for the League to discuss disarmament when France was building up a system of military alliances, creating a Black Army, and lending enormous sums of money to Poland and other States for maintaining their standing armies. It was almost hopeless for the League of Nations to offer its services for arbitration and to talk high moralities about international justice when, to avenge the murder of some officers by unknown assassins, Italy bombarded Corfu, killing innocent children; and when Italy and France were secretly conniving with the Nationalist Turks for a war against Greece, which was abandoned in its agony to the horror of Smyrna.

THE FRANCE OF POINCARÉ

France, under the leadership of Poincaré, scoffed from the beginning at the League of Nations, although supporting it over the Corfu incident, and although one representative, M. Léon Bourgeois, was a loyal friend of the League idea. After the refusal of the United States to ratify the pact of security for France against another war of German aggression, followed by the withdrawal of Great Britain, the France of Poincaré saw no safety except in the power of her Army in alliance with other forces which she could link in a military chain around her defeated enemies. No one ought to blame France for that philosophy, in view of her agony and her future peril. But it resulted inevitably in actions which checked the recovery of Europe, aroused all the old hatreds, filled the defeated peoples with a sense of profound injustice, and raised the old devils of national pride, vengeance, and belief in force which for a time had been banished to the houses of the German Junkers and had lain low in German hearts. It was the cause of increasing friction, spasms of passionate ill-will, between France and England, and a long campaign of scurrilous abuse in the French Press which poisoned the old Entente Cordiale, wiped out the memories of war comradeship, and was a tragic and painful chapter in recent history.

France under Poincaré demanded her pound of flesh from Germany, including the lifeblood of the German people in the arteries of its economic health. Germany could not recover nor, before recovering, pay. Afterwards, when the Ruhr was invaded, their chief source of wealth and of payment was strangled. The French objects of “security” and “reparations” were in hopeless antagonism, and defeated each other. There could be no reparations, on a large scale, if French security demanded the expulsion of those who directed and worked the Ruhr and its railways. There could be no “security” for France in the long run if, instead of German reparations, she goaded the German people into nationalism and a war of vengeance by every means, fair or foul. While the policy of Poincaré was dominant, Europe sank deep into despair, and the nations most stricken by war saw no hope of revival.

The first three years after the world war provided terrible proofs of the disaster which had happened to humanity in that deadly struggle. Those who wish to convince the future generations of the devastating effect of modern warfare upon highly organised nations, as a frightful warning, must summon up the picture of Europe in 1919, 1920 and 1921. I saw it from end to end, and it haunted me.

THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION

On the Eastern side of Europe Russia was cut off from the family of nations and lay prostrate. Civilisation itself had gone down there in anarchy and misery, and its new government of Bolsheviks were ruling over a hundred million people, hungry, diseased, stricken, crushed in spirit, weak in body, overcome by melancholy and inertia. They had broken first under the strain of war. Four million of their men had died in the fields of slaughter and their labour had been taken from the fields. Corruption beyond words, treachery in high places, inefficiency amounting to murder, had aroused a spirit of revolt amongst soldiers sent forward without arms to fight against men with whom, individually, they had no lasting cause of quarrel; peasants like themselves, gun-fodder like themselves, for ambitions and hatreds which they did not share. They turned to rend their own leaders and made a pact at any price with the enemy outside. All the explosive forces of passion which had been stored up in centuries of tyranny by a brutal Tsardom and its Governors burst out against its present representatives, although the last Tsar was a gentle man who loved his people. Old dreams of liberty, new philosophies of democracy, united for a time to overthrow the Government and all its powers. Revolution, bloody and cruel, raged in Russia, and the beast leapt up in peasant minds. Kerensky tried to control this anarchy but was swept on one side like a straw by stronger forces. Lenin and his crowd took command, and their new philosophy of Communism, fair-sounding, theoretically righteous, based upon the principles of equality and brotherhood and peace, put a spell upon the simple minds of the Russian folk. All opponents, critics, doubters, were destroyed relentlessly. Lenin and his friends, having taken command of the new machinery of Government by Soviet committees, were in supreme power over a people unarmed, half-starving, and submissive to those who had broken their old chains. It was some time before the Russian folk were aware of the fetters which enslaved them, and of a tyranny over their minds and bodies more ruthless than that of Tsardom. They were denied freedom of speech, freedom of knowledge, freedom of movement. The newspapers published the news of the world according to Lenin. The schools taught economic history according to Karl Marx and world history according to Soviet philosophy. Trotsky fashioned a Red Army in which discipline was more severe than under the Grand Duke Nicholas. The prisons were filled with people of all classes who came under the notice of the secret police. Execution became a habit. There was a Reign of Terror undoubtedly as bad as that of the French Revolution of 1793.

For a time the people as a whole were keyed up to a new enthusiasm for what they believed to be a democratic system of Government by attacks from the “White Armies” of the old Royalists, financed, armed and organised by foreign powers, and especially by France and Great Britain. As Republican France had risen against the armies of the _emigrés_, so Soviet Russia rallied against the armies of Koltchak, Denikin, Wrangel and others, and defeated them overwhelmingly. After that the Reign of Terror abated somewhat, internal revolt died down, and the gospel of Communism was seen at work in conditions of peace.

It failed to work. It was all very well for the Communists to hand out tickets for bread, clothes, boots, education and operas to all those who were registered for service to the State, but those who presented the tickets found that there was not enough bread to go round, that no clothes or boots were forthcoming, that education is a poor thing on empty stomachs in schools where the teachers died of starvation, and that the opera, beautiful as it continued to be, was not nourishing after a day of hunger. The workers fled from the factories because they could get no food. In the fields the peasants resisted the soldiers who tried to requisition their grain for the cities. Transport broke down. Grass grew on the railways. Horses and cattle died for lack of fodder. Typhus was rampant for lack of soap, medicines, decent conditions of life. Then famine struck the Volga region after two summers of drought. Twenty-five million people were threatened with death by actual starvation, and all over Russia there was hunger, fear, and despair.

From the famine districts the roads were black with fugitives moving to districts where they hoped to find food, while, from those very districts, people were trekking away from barren fields. Parents abandoned their children. When I went down the Volga the people were eating dried leaves, chopped straw and clay. The children were dying. The old people awaited death. And far away in Petrograd and in Moscow the factories were deserted, the hospitals were stone cold for lack of fuel, and there was not a single man or woman who had any comfort of body or soul.

Communism had failed. Its failure was proclaimed by Lenin himself. Russia was _in extremis_ after a war which had broken the machinery of its life and a revolution which had failed to fulfil any of its promises, except equality—in misery.

That downfall of Russia was the worst thing in Europe, and was the cause of some of its general poverty. Trade was cut off from a hundred million people. Their purchasing power had been extinguished, so that neighbouring countries could not sell to them. Their own sources of wealth had perished, so that neither wheat nor oil nor flax could be exchanged for manufactured goods. The wealth of the world was so much less.

At that time the new Baltic States were unable to support themselves on any decent standard of life. Their children also were underfed. No trade came into the port of Riga, which once had been busy with the world’s merchandise.

In Poland there was the spiritual warmth of national independence, but not much else. Misery was widespread. Food for the army was taken from the people. Commerce was stagnant, industry at a standstill. Germany was not buying from Poland. Poland could not buy from Germany or Russia. Underneath its new military ardour there was desperate need in the homes of the workers.

THE AGONY OF AUSTRIA

In Austria there was utter hopelessness, and the health of the people was breaking down. The Reparations Commission, under Sir William Goode, established to exact indemnities, saw the folly of such action and became a Relief Mission to save the life of those people, the most charming and brilliant and civilised in Central Europe, before they sank under the doom pronounced upon them by a Treaty of Peace which had left them with the capital city of a great Empire from which the Empire had been lopped. I went into the Austrian hospitals, homes, babies’ crèches, and children’s clinics, and saw little Austrian children so weak from under-nourishment that they could not sit up in bed and crippled with rickets. Children of three and four had no solid bone in their bodies, but only gristle. Where their arms were crossed at night there were deep sunken hollows. Sixty-eight per cent. of the Austrian children were in a state of semi-starvation in the year that followed war.

THE GERMAN PEOPLE

In Germany it was not so bad—but bad. For the last year of the war the people had been reduced to the bare limits of food supply. After the war, when the blockade was maintained until the signature of peace, the children went without milk and fats and there was general shortness of provisions, not amounting to actual starvation, but weakening the working men and women. Factory workmen told me that they never ate meat, and existed on bread and potatoes. It was enough for life, they said, but not enough for physical strength. They felt tired. Women fainted in the tramcars. There was stinting and scraping in every home, except those of the “profiteers,” who by some genius of finance were making a good thing out of the fall of the mark.

Coming across Europe like that, and seeing the spreading track of financial and commercial ruin, the lowering of the standard of life in many countries where it had been high and splendid, the loss of purchasing power for anything but the barest necessities, and all the new frontiers and customs lines between new States and old States, checking the free interchange of goods, slowing down world trade, an observer like myself was staggered by the gravity of this state of things. It seemed to me that we were all heading for disaster. I was convinced that all those fair promises of quick prosperity, German reparations, revival of British trade, stabilising of international exchanges, would be utterly falsified unless there was a new co-operation among the countries of Europe on lines of economic commonsense, and a truce to the policy of demanding from the defeated countries immense sums of money beyond their ability to pay. It seemed to me very clear that if Germany went down into real economic disaster the whole of Europe would go down too, and that what was wanted most was not payment of fantastic reparations but a return to the normal exchange of goods and energy. I was afraid for England.

THE BRITISH ILLUSION

The British Government, after the Armistice and the uncertain Peace, had behaved for a while as though victory had re-established her old strength. Superficially, indeed, and in moral prestige, among the nations of the world, the British Empire had emerged stronger than before the war. The menace of the German fleet was at the bottom of the sea. New territories in Africa had come under British dominion. British spheres of influence had been extended through Palestine, Mesopotamia and Persia. But those new “mandates” were a source of weakness and not of power. They were very costly at a time when there was no money to spend on new adventures in Imperialism. At least the vast sums of money poured into Mesopotamia and other Eastern territories on extravagant administration and development could not be justified to British taxpayers confronted by a staggering bill of costs for war purposes which drained the old reserves of wealth. British statesmen, not yet taught the elementary lessons of economic law, behaved with a kind of splendid madness, as though a new Golden Age had arrived in which their people would possess an Oriental Empire such as Alexander had carved out of the old world. They forgot, or did not know, that poverty and something like industrial ruin was creeping over English life. They did not realise that after a devastating war they could not call upon the last reserves of manhood to support military adventures in far lands. They did not understand that the effects of war in Europe from the Rhine to the Volga, and beyond, had so lowered the purchasing power of the defeated peoples, the neutral countries and the new States, that Great Britain, for a long time to come, would lose many of her old markets for the export trade upon which her life depended, as well as the shipping of the world’s merchandise from port to port which had been so great a source of her old wealth. Winston Churchill, with his restless imagination and wide-reaching Imperialism dreamed dreams of British rule extending from the Cape to Cairo and from Tooting to Tibet. Even Lloyd George, for a little while, was intoxicated with the magnificence of the victory in which he claimed a chief share, not to be denied in history in spite of some blunders and a feud with the Army Chiefs.

THE LESSON OF REALITY

Then, quicker than in France, all this illusion was smashed in the face by reality. The British nation became aware of its dwindling trade, the stagnation of its industry. Unemployment began to creep up in a steady tide, until two million men were out of work and existing only on Government “doles.” Factories were closing down or working half time. The Mersey, the Clyde and the Thames were crowded with ships without cargoes, and all the ports were filled with seamen without berths. After demobilisation ex-officers as well as men could not find jobs to do. They tramped the streets in search of work, wearing out their boots and their hearts. They played piano-organs, moved in dismal processions with banners flying the words “We want work,” shook street collecting boxes in the faces of the passers-by. The Trade Unions were hard and selfish. They refused to admit untrained labour to their ranks. Without Trade Union tickets men who had saved the country were turned away at the factory gates. Labour put up a fierce fight to maintain the standard of wages and of life which had been established in time of war—no longer possible in time of peace with failing markets and a world in ruin. One cannot blame them. None of us likes to reduce his standard of life and go back to miserable conditions of stint and scrape. Strikes and lockouts beat them down, but did not relieve the strain or increase the nation’s wealth. Things looked very serious below the surface of English life. There was a bitterness in the minds of men who had been promised great rewards for heroic service, and now found themselves destitute, in overcrowded slums—where were the “homes for heroes”?—maintained on a miserable “dole” that just saved them from starvation but was not enough for decent life. There was for a year or so a danger of revolt, a spreading of revolutionary ideas, among men like that. Russian Communism put a spell upon many minds who knew nothing of the agony in Russia but were stirred by the Bolshevik doctrine of equality and the “dictatorship of the proletariat.”

When Germany failed to pay the immense reparations which had been demanded from her the British Government was faced with the necessity of balancing its yearly Budget without those payments, and, unlike France, which still banked upon them, or like Germany, which created false money by inflation, determined to sustain the national credit by taxation and sound finance. It put the most tremendous burden upon the nation that has ever been sustained by any people in modern history. It was accepted with a resignation and courage which will stand for ever to the credit of the British folk, and especially to the credit of those who paid at the cost of all that was dearest to them in life apart from national honour and family blood. Income Tax, Super Tax, and Death Duties fell upon the people who lived on inherited wealth with a terrifying ferocity. There are only two and a half million people in Great Britain who pay any Income Tax at all, and only eighty-five thousand who are subject to Super Tax, but it was from that small minority that the Government demanded the revenue necessary for the upkeep of its services. It caused, and is causing, a social revolution which is changing the whole aspect of English life. The old aristocracy are abandoning their houses, selling their estates, becoming shabby genteel, losing their old splendour, prerogatives and power. To pay their Income Tax and Death Duties they are eating into their old capital, selling the old pictures on their walls, abandoning old mansions haunted by the ghosts of history in which their pride and spirit dwelt. They have done this not without anguish, not without a sense of tragedy, not without bitterness, but with an acknowledgment of inevitable necessity. Bloodlessly the revolution in England is being accomplished, though the hard road has not yet been travelled to the end.

THE PRICE OF WAR

More crippling in its effects upon the nation as a whole was the taxation of capital in trade and industry. At a time when it was most necessary to limit the costs of production and to stimulate the adventure of trade, the business world was crushed under a burden of taxation which limited its reserves, put heavy charges upon the cost of manufacture, and reduced the capital available for new enterprise. The price of war, and of victory, lay with an almost intolerable weight upon the spirit of the British people, even before they had to shoulder the burden—rejected by every other nation—the payment of War Debt to the United States of America, amounting to £35,000,000 sterling every year. With an export trade less than 75 per cent. of what it reached before the War, with a population which had increased by nearly two millions in spite of all the slaughter, with new and ruinous expenses, and with a higher standard of life demanded by the labouring class, the people of Great Britain breathed hard, became very anxious, faced up to realities, and saw, with almost blinding clarity of vision, that their own national life depended upon the peace and recovery of Europe, including that of Germany and the defeated peoples. This realisation changed their whole attitude of mind towards the problem of peace. It made them draw farther and farther away from the French policy of Poincaré, which was based upon the prevention of German recovery and “security” by military force. But above all these financial considerations England believed in fair play even to a defeated foe, in generosity rather than vengeance, and in future peace by conciliation rather than by a military combination which one day would be challenged in another “inevitable” war, more ghastly than the last. All that sounded like weakness and treachery to the mind of France. The Entente Cordiale was strained and broken....

PHYSICAL RECOVERY IN EUROPE

In many ways the recovery of Europe was more rapid in its fundamental needs of life than seemed possible after the devastation of war. Human energy, faith and hope repaired the material damage of war in an almost miraculous degree. Walking day by day across the battlefields of France and Flanders it seemed impossible to me and to all others that the ground upheaved by high explosives, criss-crossed with deep trenches, and sown with unexploded shells would return within the lifetime of the present generation to harvest fields and pleasant pasture. It was incredible that all those villages blown off the map, so that there were only rubbish heaps to mark their site, should be rebuilt within half a century with new walls and sheltering roofs for the people who had fled from them.

I never expected to see a new city of Ypres, or to walk past shop windows in Arras, or to see a harvest gathered on the outskirts of a new Peronne. The infernal track of war from Belgium to Switzerland, littered with dead bodies and the wreckage of battle, could not be wiped out, I thought, from the eyes of living men. But that has happened at least along some parts of the line ten years after. There are red roofs and busy streets in Ypres and Arras. The fields are smooth and green around Peronne. There are houses at Passchendaele. It is difficult to see the scars of war in Amiens. It is hard to find trenches and dug-outs or places where monstrous battles happened beyond the Menin Gate of Ypres or down by Lens, beyond the Vimy Ridge. Peasants dug out the unexploded shells. The trenches silted in or were ploughed in. The Belgians were as busy as bees when they returned to the hive. French contractors hired Poles and Czechs to supplement their French labour and made enormous fortunes in the reconstruction of destroyed towns at the cost of the French Government, which accepted all their claims until an orgy of corruption broke all bounds. In East Prussia, destroyed by Russian cavalry, little red houses were put up even more quickly because of German industry. In Italy many wounds were hidden and healed. There is still much work to be done, especially in France, most terribly mutilated; but, ten years after, the work of reconstruction by the energy of men and women, desperate in their desire to blot out the years of agony and get back to peaceful labours and their old home life, is a splendid victory over the forces of destruction. Life triumphs over death, as always in history.

So also the stricken peoples staggered up from the bog of misery into which they were deep sunk after war. The land saved the cities, and the peasants found the source of life in the kind earth again. One nation above all helped them to tide over the lean years and live until they could reap new harvests. Without that rescue, millions more would have died and Europe would have been swept by pestilence and famine. The people of the United States did a work of charity on behalf of the starving folk of Europe, more especially in the rescue of the starving children, which absolves them, if they need absolution, from the charge of utter selfishness and indifference to the sufferings of that Europe from which they drew back in a policy of isolation.

It is one of the paradoxes of recent history that while the American people, hardened against the Wilson ideal of co-operation with Europe, drew away from the League of Nations as an accursed thing with which they would have no part or lot, and reasserted the Monroe Doctrine with a new interpretation of narrow exclusiveness, they gave with their left hand, nearest to the heart, what their right hand refused. Publicly they said, “Let Europe stew in its own broth.” Privately they poured out their dollars in charity for European relief.

THE “A.R.A.”

Early in the War the American Relief Administration, organised by Herbert Hoover, fed day by day many millions of people in the areas of enemy occupation. A great deal of these food supplies were contributed by Great Britain, Canada, Australia, and other countries, as it is only fair to say, but the American contributions were enormous, and the organisation by American officials was a model of efficiency and zeal. As soon as the War ended, the A.R.A., as Hoover’s administration was universally known, extended its operations and intensified its appeals to the charity of the American people on behalf of the stricken populations on both sides of the war zone. The American Government supported this work by immense subsidies of surplus stocks, which perhaps was good business as well as good will. But the good will was there, and it was reinforced by a volume of generosity which welled up from an almost inexhaustible source of private charity. The A.R.A. sent its officers and its food trains into Austria, Germany, Poland, Czecho-Slovakia, Serbia, Hungary, Armenia, Esthonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and many other countries. It established feeding centres and kitchens in the most necessitous cities and areas. It measured millions of children by a rough-and-ready system which showed the standard of under-nourishment and vital debility. It rushed food out to the innocent victims of war’s cruelty, and helped, prodigiously, to save the world’s childhood, without distinction of race, religion or politics. It was a divine work, inspired by God’s love, after four years of hate and horror. In Europe other societies, like the Save the Children Fund, the Society of Friends, the Imperial Relief Committee, and the International Red Cross, did splendid work too, with less means and out of increasing poverty, on behalf of all this mass of human suffering left as the heritage of war, but the A.R.A. was the most powerful crusade of rescue, and by its far-reaching aid did undoubtedly give the stricken peoples time and chance to recover their power of self-subsistence after a period when physical weakness, moral despair, and the ravages of war had deprived them of the means of life above the hunger line.

It was when famine took possession of the most fertile territories of Russia that the A.R.A. did its greatest work. In the United States of America, as in England and France, the cry for help that came out of Russia, so long cut off from human intercourse, so long hidden by closed doors behind which lay the tragedy of a great people, many men and women, shocked to their inmost soul by stories of Bolshevik atrocities, refused to listen to the voice of charity. Many were certain that any food or help sent to Russia would be used by the Communist leaders to save themselves from destruction or to support the Red Army and the Reign of Terror. In any case, as some of them said, why feed Russian peasants who have adopted the pernicious philosophy of Bolshevism, or submitted to it; and why feed Bolshevik babies who will grow up to threaten the civilised code of decent peoples? Let Russia pay the penalty of its atrocious crimes.

There was no country in the world where there was a greater loathing of Bolshevism than in the United States. It was to the majority of American citizens, as it is still, the Unspeakable Thing, because it denied the rights of private property, declared war upon Capital, and conspired for the overthrow of all Governments based upon the Capitalist system. So much the more wonderful then is the charity of those people who, with that enormous prejudice in their minds, heard the voice of charity.

THE RUSSIAN FAMINE

I went into Russia with some of the first officials of the A.R.A. and travelled with them to the Volga region, where twenty-five million people were threatened with starvation and starving. It was Governor “Jim” of Indiana—Governor Goodrich—whose wise, temperate and humane report was a document which helped to save those millions. I read it as he had written it in a slow-going train from Kazan to Moscow on the way back from dreadful scenes, and I gave the homage of my heart to that serene-eyed man who, with one lame leg, travelled through Russia on a diet of apples, went fearlessly into typhus-stricken places, and saw all things with a great pity, sound commonsense, practical judgment, large humanity.

He was only an observer. Colonel Haskell and his little band of officers were the organisation and the administration in the field of action, of a great campaign of rescue which flowed out from America. They had to contend with the inertia of Russian character, with the suspicion of Soviet officials who feared a political purpose behind the work of charity, with a broken-down railway system, with no material for printing or packing, with immense distances and lack of transport, with the Russian language and bad interpreters, with Russian labour weakened by being under-nourished, and with millions of starving and disease-stricken people who had hardly the strength or will to help themselves or co-operate with others for their own rescue. It was a formidable adventure in which the young officers of the A.R.A.—like those of our British relief societies—risked their lives by disease and were strained to the utmost of nervous energy. And they brought the food to Russia and distributed it to the starving folk. Millions died—Dr. Nansen reckons four millions—but eleven million people were fed every day by the A.R.A. for nearly a year. In addition to that mass relief, millions of food packages addressed to individuals in Russia by relations and friends in the United States reached the starving and distressed people outside the area of actual famine, and gave new hope of life to those who had been reduced to misery and despair in Petrograd, Moscow, and other cities. When we think of the organisation and labour required in time of war to feed our armies in the field, it is almost miraculous that eleven million Russian peasants could be supplied at a distance of 6,000 miles, after the breakdown of the very machinery of their life. History will record it as the greatest campaign of relief and international charity ever attempted or achieved.

It is only right to say that, after the first suspicions had been overcome, the Soviet Government and its officials played fair and did all they could to facilitate this work. The food did reach the starving children and their parents. The railways and engines were repaired. Trucks were built. A new hope dawned in Russia, which learnt something from American methods of efficiency. The Reign of Terror had worn itself out, the actual practice of Communism was abandoned, the rights of private property and private trading were, to some extent, restored, a great shadow passed from the spirit of the people, and in many ways life became endurable after the years of agony. The utter failure of the Communist experiment was acknowledged by Lenin within Russia itself, though its propaganda and revolutionary doctrines were still used to stir up trouble in the outside world. Slowly the life of the Russian people staggered up from misery, and although there is still great distress in many districts and a new threat of famine, the ninety million peasants, controlled by a small body of Communists whose economic philosophy has no appeal for them, are getting a bare life out of the soil, with now and then a surplus of grain for export in return for manufactured goods. Even Russia is on the road to recovery.

Other countries revived, at least to the extent of providing their own means of subsistence, in peasant states like those of the new Baltic nations. Even international trade recovered some of its old activity in countries, like Czecho-Slovakia, newly carved out of the old Austrian Empire and successors to its sources of industrial energy. But it was impossible to hope for any general and complete recovery of trade conditions in Europe so long as there was no stability in the value of monetary exchange and no political peace. The printing presses in many countries were issuing paper money which had no reality behind it, and the time came when it proved worthless either for internal commerce or for foreign business. Russian roubles had long ceased to have any purchasing power. A million roubles brought from Moscow would not buy a glass of schnapps in Riga.

THE RELIEF OF AUSTRIA

In Austria money went the same way. The Austrian kronen, unsupported by gold or goods, became a mockery in the markets of the world and in Vienna itself. The professional classes were dying of starvation, the middle classes were reduced to an extreme destitution; labour, paid false wages, had no heart to work. Several loans granted by the British Government and others, after abandoning all immediate claims to “reparations,” withered away in supporting crowds of needy officials and struggling with financial chaos. Austria declared itself a bankrupt State, appealing to the world for help, and at last her immense distress was recognised by all other States, and the League of Nations was entrusted with the task of administering a new loan of something like fifteen millions sterling, with a strict control of Austrian revenue, expenditure, taxation, and financial measures.

It was a lesson to the world of what may be done by good will and commonsense rather than by political hatred and international hostility. As a foster child of the League of Nations, Austria recovered in a way which seemed beyond hope. As soon as her money was stabilised to a fixed value, because of its gold backing, trade began to flow back a little, capital came to the rescue, with a sense of security. The Austrian people were able to buy food in return for their merchandise at prices which no longer fluctuated wildly according to the downfall of paper money. They were able to accept contracts for future work and to fulfil them with a certainty that the money they received would not melt in their hands like summer snow. They recovered hope, worth more than gold, and physical strength restored their mental and moral health. The nightmare lifted. The city of Vienna to-day, in spite of much poverty and a disappearance of its former luxury among the old classes who dwelt in the splendour of Imperial Courts, is as different from Vienna in 1920 as the day from the night. The Viennese, once the gayest people in Europe, have learnt to laugh again. There is music in the cafés once more. The streets are lighted again. The children are no longer weak with rickets. The bitter cup has passed from them, except for those who remember their former state and the old world of the Austrian Empire that has gone down with all its pride.

THE PROBLEM OF GERMANY

Germany remained the great problem of Europe and the great peril.

After the war, when “something seemed to break in them,” as a German wrote to me, they were for a time stunned and dazed by defeat. To German pride of race it seemed incredible, even in the face of dreadful facts, that they had lost everything for which they had fought and struggled with such desperate and stubborn will-power. After all their victories! After all that slaughter! “_Deutschland über Alles!_” Now they were in chains, hopeless and helpless, disarmed, under the heel of France, Britain, Belgium—done and down!

The military chiefs hid themselves in their castles—sullen, broken. They put all the blame on the German people. It was they who had blundered and had been defeated. The invincible German armies had never been defeated. Never! Only Ludendorff in an incautious book confessed the truth that he had not been able to hold the line against the overwhelming assault of the Allies. But his argument was the same. It was German will-power that had broken behind the lines. It was Bolshevism and Pacifism that had let down the fighting men. When the Peace Treaties were published the German people gasped and, for a time, despaired. They were confronted with conditions which would crush them for all time. However hard they worked, all the profits of their labour would be seized by their enemies. However much they pinched, more would be demanded. There was no fixed sum which they could wipe out by stupendous effort, but only sums rising higher in fantastic figures for ever and ever. They were the bondslaves of the world.

That mood did not last, though it came back again. A new mood followed and buoyed them up for a year or two. They had lost the War, but they would show the world that they could win the peace. German genius, organisation, and industry would rise above even the monstrous penalties exacted by their enemies. They would capture the markets of the world, smash all competitors by an industrial war, regain their liberty and commercial power. The Krupp works which had made great guns and all the monstrous machinery of war converted their plant to the instruments of peace, produced ploughs, steam-engines, safety razors, cash registers, everything that is made of metal for the use of life. Every factory in Germany got to work again. There were no unemployed as in England, because the workers accepted low wages, and desired work almost as much as bread in a fever of industrial energy, to wipe out the War and build up the prosperity of a peace. Defeat was better than victory in its moral effect upon the German people. At least they did not fall into that idleness, that craving for gaiety, that moral lassitude and indiscipline of spirit which overcame the victorious peoples. When I went to Germany, several times after the War, I was amazed at its energy and industry. There were no scenes in Berlin like those in London, with processions of unemployed and innumerable beggars and crowds of loungers round the Labour Exchanges. There was an air of activity in Germany, startling and rather splendid. The whole nation was working full steam ahead, and the products of its industry were being offered in the markets of the world at less than the cost price of similar goods in England. It steadied them and gave them a purpose in life.

And yet beneath this superficial appearance of renewed prosperity and industrial power there was, as I could see, something rotten. Misery was not to be seen in the open, as in London, but it was there, in middle-class homes and mean streets. The whole of this new industrial adventure in Germany was based upon underpaid and under-nourished labour, upon cut-throat prices, and upon the temporary advantage of a falling exchange.

The German Government was tinkering with its money, speeding up the printing presses, issuing notes beyond the backing of real securities. The illusion of a Germany capturing the world’s markets had no great basis of truth. The world markets had lost their purchasing power, however cheap were German goods. Russia was not buying much from Germany, nor Austria, nor Poland, nor Hungary, nor Turkey. Looking into the figures given me by experts—English as well as German—it seemed certain that there was an adverse trade balance against Germany when her national expenditure was reckoned with her revenue. The reparations she was beginning to pay, the deliveries in kind she was making to France, Belgium, and Italy, the costs of the Armies of Occupation on the Rhine, were eating into her capital wealth and swallowing up her last gold reserves. She had to pay her indemnities by buying foreign money—dollars, sterling, francs—and after each payment her own money depreciated by irresistible economic laws.

THE ADVENTURE OF INFLATION

The financial advisers of the German Government used the method of inflation to keep the German people working on cheap money to avoid a revolution which they feared would happen if unemployment prevailed, to wipe out their internal debt, and to dupe the world. At first, no doubt, they believed that they could control this system of postponing the evil day of reckoning, but, once having started the ball rolling, it increased with frightful velocity down hill. Every time the mark fell in value more marks had to be printed. When its purchasing power fell so far below the real value of wages that the workers clamoured for increased pay, the printing presses had to be turned again to provide the additional money which again fell in the foreign exchange while more slowly prices rose in Germany. The German financiers never checked this wheel in its mad revolutions. They protested that they were unable to check it. To some extent it was a gamble with loaded dice. They were bound to win—up to a point. As long as foreign money was paid for worthless paper—whatever the figure of exchange—they would be taking good money for bad, which is excellent business. As long as by increasing the quantities of paper they could enable their industrialists to employ cheap labour, it was good business. As long as the paper itself and the labour of printing were not more costly than the purchase value represented by fantastic numbers on the note, they could carry on the economic life of the country and at the same time abolish all their internal debts. People who had invested all their savings in war loans found that their income had withered away. Industrial companies who had borrowed real capital could pay it back in false notes. And private individuals who were ruined by this means could at least recoup themselves a little at the expense of the foreigner by selling German paper for pounds, dollars, or francs, and gambling on the exchange. It was a great game, which absorbed the interest of large numbers of the German people. Waiters in hotels, clerks in offices, vendors of newspapers, middle-class housewives, did their little bit of daily speculation, and secreted foreign money for rainy days. The great industrialists and professional financiers speculated on a large scale and made enormous profits, while the game lasted. But it was a game bound to fail in the long run. It was bound to fail when no other country would buy German marks at any rate of exchange, and when those who possessed real things, such as potatoes, meat, milk, or manufactured articles, refused to part with them for any number of German notes. That time came during the occupation of the Ruhr, when, to subsidise the passive resistance of the workers, the German Government poured out a vast tide of paper money, and when the German nation was cut off from its chief source of real wealth in that great industrial region.

I saw from time to time the progress along the road to ruin. Although it enabled a minority to get rich quick, it caused intense suffering among the mass of the German people. The wages of the workers never kept pace with the fall in the purchasing power of their wages, although they were raised week by week on an ascending scale. What five marks would buy in 1913 a million marks would not buy in 1923. It made trade impossible, because no sooner were prices adjusted to the new note issues than a fresh burst of inflation made them less than the cost price of the goods a week before. It was futile to save when thrift was mocked by this depreciation and disappearance of money values. German people had to spend quickly in food or drink or foolish things, because what they had to-day would be worthless to-morrow. The German housewife despaired. She could not keep pace with these rising prices. Some of them went crazy over millions of marks that had no meaning. Germany, apart from its profiteers, stinted, scraped, and toiled, without decent reward for its labour, and with certain ruin ahead.

Looking back on that amazing adventure of inflation, one must ask oneself the question what would have happened in Germany if its Government had endeavoured to stabilise its finances by not issuing money beyond its real backing, and trying to balance its Budget according to sound methods. It is my opinion that the illusion of German prosperity would have been more rapidly dispelled and that their default in the payment of reparations would have happened earlier. Foreign speculators would not have been “bitten in the ear,” German speculators would not have made profits over exchange gambles; but the Allies would not have received more payments, and there would have been widespread unemployment and revolt among the German people. They were between the devil and the deep sea, and though they chose the devil of inflation, it postponed the plunge into the deep sea for a year or two more.

In fairness to Germany, it must be remembered that she did make very heavy payments in money and kind, amounting all told to more than £400,000,000 sterling—that is to say, nearly half the amount of the British debt to the United States of America, which the British people, richer than Germany at the present time, find an almost intolerable burden, although they are paying only £30,000,000 a year to reduce it. In Germany’s post-War state it was a drain upon her dwindling capital which she could not sustain at anything like that rate, and with or without inflation it crippled her. The Dawes Report was an acknowledgment of that fact, although it took into account the immense sums of money secreted abroad. Previous default had caused the French occupation of Düsseldorf, Duisburg, and Frankfurt, arousing a flame of hostility in German minds. But when France marched into the Ruhr against the will of the British, and without their co-operation, the whole of the German people, without difference of class or political opinion, denounced it as a violation of the Peace Treaty, and as a sentence of ruin, not only to Germany herself, but to the whole of Europe.

THE OCCUPATION OF THE RUHR