Does Poland want peace? It is a question which has to be answered in the affirmative if either philanthropists or nations are going to interest themselves in restoring Poland to a sound financial footing. In order to obtain an authoritative answer, I approached Prince Sapieha, the Polish Minister of Foreign Affairs. Rather to my amazement he was not at all elusive, but gave me the most convincing Arguments for Poland's peace desires that I have yet heard.
“The trouble with Poland,” he said, “is that she lies between Russia and Germany. That is not her fault; it is the way it happens. Our nation is in a place where it is not wanted; but you may take it from me that we are not going to get out. Germany has an over-population which increases every year by leaps and bounds. It was her overpopulation that produced the war; she wanted England's colonies and more European territory. She simply had to have room to expand. The Allies have confiscated her merchant marine, broken her military strength and taken away even the colonies that she already had. But they have not taken away her enormous birth-rate, so the problem of what to do with her surplus population is more pressing than ever. Her only possible direction for expansion is eastwards into Russia, which would probably be for Russia's benefit. Unfortunately we stand in the way; anything that would destroy us is to her advantage. It is not to her interest that we should have peace; therefore she tries to lower our prestige and depress our exchange by spreading the rumour that we have imperialistic ambitions. If she can get Upper Silesia to believe this, the vote of the plebiscite will go against us and she will acquire some of the richest coal-fields in Europe.
“As regards Russia, the problem is historic rather than economic. Before the partitioning of Poland much that is now Russian was Polish. Two hundred years have gone by and today the racial claims are about equally divided. We have acknowledged this fact at Riga, where peace with the Bolshevists is nearly concluded. We have divided the debatable territory into two halves as fairly as we know how. If the Bolshevists desire peace, we shall give them no reason for altering their minds. And they should mean it, if internal conditions count for anything, for they are exhausted and their armies, though greater than ours in number, are far inferior in fighting qualities. I can assure you with absolute sincerity that we are losing no chance of arranging trade treaties and making all the neighbours along our borders our friends. We hope and believe that they are as sick of bloodshed as we are.
“But merely to remove the provocations that led to bloodshed will not bring peace. Poland can have no peace till she has regained prosperity and her people have ceased to starve. What I want to say to the world is that there is no reason why we should starve; we have everything within our frontiers that could make us a rich nation. Before the war Poland, partitioned as she was, was self-supporting. And don't let anyone think that we are starving because we like it. Seventy per cent, of our cattle have been carried off by the Russian, German, Austrian and Bolshevist invasions. The machinery in our factories has been demolished or looted. Our agricultural implements have been stolen or destroyed. I think of the Polish People as the landowner of a valuable estate without the capital to work it. What does the landowner do? He keeps on pawning this and that and, in sheer desperation, gambles with the results.
“No big financier will lend money to a gambler. But suppose the landowner gives such proofs that he has ceased to gamble that the financier will let him have a mortgage. He starts to work and buys implements; in a few years his estate pays sufficiently to redeem the mortgage. It is clear of debt and the landowner becomes happy.
“We had to fight to defend ourselves, still I can understand that we may have been regarded as gamblers. We have had wars on five fronts. On four of them we have peace already; the fifth peace is being concluded. We are trying to prove in every way that our only desire is to get to work. But it is physically impossible to accomplish that without outside help.
“There are four things that we require if life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are to be ours. First, we need the belief of the world in our sincerity, when we say that we do want peace. Second, we need credits of food-stuffs to regenerate our workers' debilitated bodies. Third, we need food-stuffs in sufficient quantities to accomplish this purpose. From the statesmanly point of view mere doles are of no good to us. We need to have enough to eat for at least six months; after that we shall be strong to produce for ourselves. After that you will hear no more of Poland going Bolshevist. Bolshevism is the last hope of the man with the empty stomach. And lastly, we need financial assistance to repair our damaged machinery and to make our industries buzz. We want experts to come to Poland to look over our investment opportunities. The opportunities are here and our people are willing. We want to buzz and to pull our weight in the world.”
“Your Excellency,” I said, “as regards Poland's desire for peace you have convinced me. But do the Bolshevists intend to let you have peace, despite their conferences at Riga? Everybody's talking of a drive in the spring which is intended to wipe Poland off the map.”
He stood for a minute silent. He seemed to be searching for a more clenching argument, which had escaped his memory. Then he smiled gravely and held out his hand. “I have an estate beyond Grodno,” he said. “It is directly in the line of a Bolshevist attack. Three separate invasions have picked it bare. There's scarcely anything but the land left. At the present moment I am rebuilding it, putting in implements and re-stocking it with cattle. As a man in the know, a Minister of Foreign Affairs, should I do that if I had the least doubt that our peace with Bolshevism would prove lasting?”
Dantzig's problem is similar to the problems of the whole of Central Europe; it arises out of the arbitrary creation of new frontiers. To sit in Paris with a blue pencil and scrawl lines on a map was a simple task; to have to dwell within those lines, despite their violation of economic laws, and make a livelihood, has proved less easy. It is one thing to declare Dantzig a free-port; it is another to persuade her neighbours to use her. It is possible that in making Dantzig free, the Peace Conference has only made her free to starve.
Here is the situation. Dantzig, as she is today, consists of seven hundred and fifty square miles of territory, and a population of 350,000 souls. Her former industries were shipping, ship-building and the manufacture of armaments. For the latter purposes, while the war was on, the Germans imported thousands of workmen, many of whom still remain. The manufacture of armaments is now forbidden. There is no demand for ship-building. Ocean-going traffic is at a halt; the nations in whose interests the free-port was constituted are either bankrupt or anxious to develop their own harbours. Poland, who was expected to be her largest employer, is too busy with the Bolshevists to be a producer; hence she has nothing to ship. When she does begin to produce, it is on the boards that she may avoid Dantzig. She acquired a distaste for free-ports last summer when the Dantzig longshoremen refused to unload her munitions. She is already flirting with two alternatives. Germany is coaxing her to adopt Stettin as her outlet; she herself is inclined to build docks of her own on the seaboard of the Polish Corridor.
Meanwhile Dantzig is idle. She has no industries to keep her going. Her agriculture is too limited to support her population. Her neighbours cannot send her food-stuffs; their own needs are too pressing. If times were normal, Poland might be willing to feed her; but Poland herself is only being kept alive by the relief brought in from America. When the free-port was created, a clause was inserted in the Peace Treaty, obliging Poland to act as Dantzig's larder. One of the demands was that Poland should provide the free-port with five hundred tons of flour weekly at a stipulated price. The price named was so insufficient that the flour sent to Dantzig costs Poland twice as much, not reckoning the unloading, as the price which Dantzig pays for it. All of it has to be imported from America.
In 1914 the daily consumption of milk in Dantzig was 50,000 litres, most of which was Polish. Today the maximum she is able to obtain is 10,000 litres and the minimum 4,000. As a consequence babies are the sufferers. I visited ward after ward filled with tiny mites made hideous with rickets. The hospital was so overcrowded and diminished in its resources that it possessed no change of linen. While the rags are washed the little patients go naked. What this means in the sanitary conditions of a babies' hospital can be best imagined. You may see children of six months who have not gained beyond their birth-weight.
In Vienna, where similar conditions prevail, I saw a four year old child who weighed only nineteen pounds.
It is the children, always the children who are the victims, no matter in which country you investigate. When we fought, we believed that it was we who paid the price; but the bill of pain which we settled in the trenches is as nothing to the account which is being rendered to the younger generation. Of the Dantzig children below the age of fifteen who have been medically examined, more than half are under-nourished and of this half only a third are being cared for by the joint efforts of the American Children's Relief and the Society of Friends. Here are the exact figures. One quarter of the children examined is normal. One quarter is badly under-nourished. And one half is sufficiently below the standard to warrant extra feeding. An important fact of the situation is that the majority of the starving children belong to the middle-classes. During the war and until recently the workmen have received special rations to induce them to labour. In addition to this their wages have followed the rise in costs, whereas the salaries of clerks, officials and professional people have been comparatively stationary. The middle-classes are not unionized so they cannot attract attention to their grievances by strikers' methods.
Dantzig's future is distinctly gloomy. Germany has her own Baltic ports to encourage. Poland is her sole hope of prosperity and Poland is in bitter want herself. Moreover, if Poland recovers, which may take years, she may prefer to construct her own harbour—that is to say, if she does not yield to the inducements held out by Stettin.
The muddle is economic and racial. But such a statement leads to no solution. The fact remains that before she was commanded to be nobody's property her harbours were thriving. Today, as far as one can see, all that her freedom means is that her harbours are free to stand empty and her children are at liberty to die of hunger. No doubt the gentleman in Paris with the blue pencil had the handsomest of intentions, but he collided head-on with economic forces which it was his business to have apprehended. Whoever he was, he has made good his escape, while the children, as usual, pay the penalty.
The youth of Germany have established an invisible system of trenches in every home, every school, every university. Though they may not know it and would perhaps disown it, they are banded together to withstand that same intolerance of autocracy which hurried lovers of freedom from the ends of the earth that it might be crushed on the Western Front.
These new armies which are re-winning the old battle Have given themselves a name; they call themselves the Freie Deutsche Jugend—the Free Youth of Germany. Their ranks are made up of girls as well as boys. In isolated instances they are organised, but for the most part they are knights-errant. I asked a young man today how he had been elected to the companionship. He looked troubled, not grasping my meaning. After further explanation he smiled. He had elected himself. That was the way it was done. One felt in his heart that he ought to be free. He talked with some friends. Then he joined the movement.
The Free Youth of Germany range in age from mere children to University students. They are against tyranny in every form, against meaningless conventions, against conscription, against war, against inherited hates, against all traditions and institutions which hamper and curtail their self-expression and capacity for self-development. If you ask them to formulate their doctrine, they grow vague. Each one answers in terms of his or her personal idealism and disillusionment. They want to be happy—that is what it amounts to and they have never been happy. They are determined to be happy at all costs. The world of grown people has proved itself cruel. They will have nothing to do with it. They refuse to accept its authority. They will build society afresh. They make these confessions with a haughtiness which is as ridiculous as it is pathetic. Because you are older, they address you as an enemy. For fear you should laugh, they over-emphasize and grow visionary and grandiloquent. From time immemorial, they tell you, the youth of all countries has been hectored and abused; they are going to harness the youth of every race in a titanic effort to correct the injustice of human affairs.
Humanitarians at the duckling stage, a cynic might call them, and then add as his verdict, “They'll grow out of that.” God forbid that they should; their attempt to break chains is the most hopeful sign in Central Europe. Consider the experience of life they have had. Those of them who are old enough can remember pre-war Germany, with its harsh demands of unquestioning obedience. The military idea permeated everything. Force was the argument that was most respected—force in the home, the school, the university. A child was drilled from the cradle to the grave. As with a private in the army, it was a crime to answer back. His business was not to think, but to obey. Fear of punishment was the spur of all his endeavours. He was gorged with knowledge that he might prove efficient. Life was a battle, which called for efficiency rather than kindness. A home was a miniature headquarters mess in which the father was the general and the mother his adjutant.
Then came the assault upon civilisation, to which all these sacrifices of liberty had been the preface. The children of Germany were still further despoiled. Their formative years were embittered in an atmosphere of harrowing uncertainties. Every day was irritable with dreads and gray with unrelieved privations. There was never an hour from which the knowledge of horror was absent. The Armistice for a moment seemed to promise freedom, but the peace terms sentenced them to a life-time of servitude. Can you wonder that they refuse to be associated with the unwisdom of their elders? They have seized on the dream of a new generosity. They believe that in the eyes of all youth there are visions. They will appeal over the heads of adults to the youth of the nations for friendship. “We children were never enemies,” they say. “We did not make the war. We were the victims of it. We were not consulted.” They insist, with impotent passion, that the fathers' sins shall not be visited upon their generation. “We want to be young,” they plead. “We have never been young. We have only been little.”
“Poor kiddies!” is one's first comment. But their demands are not to be dismissed so cavalierly. The Free Youth have already commenced a revolution—it is a revolution of ideas—ideas in the main which have not become articulate. But these child enthusiasts will be men and women soon. They will have to be heard. No one can foresee to what lengths their yearning for freedom may carry them. It should be the business of the Allies to show them sympathy and give them direction.
There are three points in their movement which deserve to be made emphatic. The first is that they are absolutely correct in their assertion that the children of the Allies were never at war with the children of Germany. The second is that the Free Youth of Germany are fighting for precisely the same ideals for which the Allies fought, and are doing their fighting on German soil where it will be most effective. The third is that they are showing a spirit of regeneration which, if it is encouraged, will become the national spirit of tomorrow. For the safety of the world, if for no less selfish reason, their movement deserves the Allies' consideration. A part of their ideal has already found expression in the new German Constitution, which was passed two months after the signing of the Peace Treaty. The clause is number 148 and reads, “Our schools must educate our children not only in a spirit of patriotism, but also in a spirit of international reconciliation.” As Dr. Simon, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, said when he pointed it out to me, “That wasn't so bad as a beginning when only two months had elapsed since our humiliation at Versailles.”
All the American and British relief work done in Germany is being concentrated on the youth. For the American Relief the Society of Friends are the dispensers. The work starts constructively with the unborn. Feeding stations have been established at which under-nourished expectant mothers attend daily. The main reasons for their undernourishment are the scarcity of work and, before that, the blockade. One of them told me that her husband had had nothing to do for six months. How did they live? On their unemployment pay. But hadn't her husband been in the war and didn't he receive a pension? Yes. He had been in the war for four years. But he received no pension, for, alas, he had not been badly wounded.
At the present moment 600,000 children are being fed at American Relief Stations, which the Friends are operating; but there are at least 400,000 more who ought to be included. Whether they are included depends on what funds are forthcoming within the next few months.
The schemes for saving the youth of Germany are exceedingly thorough. Starting with the unborn child, they finish with the student at the University. By far the larger part of the funds for the student feeding are contributed by Great Britain. They are administered by a personnel made up of the British and American Society of Friends.
The thirst for learning since the close of the war has become abnormal. Students attending the universities are one-third in excess of the capacity. They are young men and women drawn from every class and welded together by an almost painful enthusiasm for democracy. The sacrifices which they make to gain an education sometimes reach the point of martyrdom. One girl, who is by no means exceptional, attends her lectures by day and scrubs floors as a charwoman by night. If it were not for the one substantial meal in the twenty-four hours which the Friends provide, she would collapse. It is to such people that the American and British Friends are ministering. They realise that, if there is ever to be peace between the sons and daughters of the nations who fought, the peace must commence in the heart.
Very naturally while middle-aged Germany is caviling over reparations and eluding engagements, the charitably disposed publics of the Allies are unwilling to respond to appeals for help. Their old war hatreds have no sooner shown signs of subsiding than some new cause is given by Berlin for suspicion and offence. In spite of this, the point which cannot be made too emphatic is that it is middle-aged Germany, the contriver of the war, which is creating these offences. Young Germany is no party to them. It is just that a distinction should be made between the new and the old. The new is fighting our battle for us. In the universities it is fighting the professors who insist on teaching reactionary doctrines. The students being young, are sick and tired of the glorification of the old, bad past. They insist on starting with today and looking forward. If we desire it, we can have them for our friends.
Not to desire it would be a crime which is unpardonable. We fought a war which we said was to be the last; if through our lack of generous response we fling the youth of Germany back into the arms of the reactionaries, we are preparing a future war. Quite apart from decency and humanity, it is statesmanly and economic to hold out hopes of magnanimity. If we hoard foodstuffs today and insist on a policy of revenge, we shall be expending tomorrow on shells a thousand times the money we have saved. The rejected idealist is the least forgiving antagonist and the Free Youth of Germany are a volcano of idealism. They deserve our sympathy. They sincerely want to be our friends. They have rejected their own elders and look to us for guidance. They are young birds who have been wounded. They have never spread their wings. In listening to their talk, all the time one has the picture of fledglings trying to lift themselves from the ground. To destroy a bad world was necessary; but to help build a good one is braver. As far as young Germany is concerned, the hour is ripe for relenting. If we allow it to escape us, it will not be ourselves, but our children who will have to bear the consequences.
The words are Trotsky's. They were his verdict on the humiliating Peace which Russia was compelled to accept at the hands of Germany. You may see them scrawled on the wall of the old Jesuit College at Brest-Litovsk where the Peace was signed: “Neither Peace Nor War. Trotsky.” If they were true of the Peace of Brest-Litovsk, they are equally true of the Peace which has befallen Central Europe as the crowning achievement of the war which was to end all wars. It is not stating matters too strongly to say that up to date Peace had caused at least as much misery as the four years' fury of embattled armies. But there is this difference: the heavier portion of the present misery is being borne by women and children.
As one who was a combatant, I think I know what urged the fighting-man to his sacrifice. He considered his own welfare as of paltry consequence if, by foregoing it, he could help to create a social order which would be more righteous. He gladly took his chance of wounds and annihilation, believing that his pain was the purchase-price of a future and enduring happiness. A tour through contemporary Central Europe would leave him sadly disillusionized. The victory, which his idealism made possible, has been turned to a cruel use—a use which he never intended and for which he would certainly never have agonised. Killing men in fight is comparatively decent and an essential accompaniment of the technique of war; butchering their families with slow starvation by the Peace that comes after is revolting and savage.
And whose is the fault? Part of it belongs to the enemy nations themselves who perpetrated the crime of war and, when they found that they were losing, fought themselves to such a point of exhaustion that they were left with no power of recuperation. Part of it belongs to the internal race-hatreds which were only kept in check by the economic interdependence of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire. Part of it belongs to a Peace of Idealism imposed upon peoples historically unprepared for it and imposed at a time when they found themselves on the brink of insolvency. The only chance that such a Peace had of achieving the pacification that was intended, was by the Allies taking control of Central Europe and constituting themselves sole arbiters of administration until the newly created nations were sufficiently balanced to function for themselves. But in the final analysis the fault was yours and mine—we who are the plain people of the Allied Nations.
It is more fashionable to lay the blame on a group of elderly statesmen who met in Paris to arrange the pacification. They were the leaders who had piloted their nations to triumph—men of unstained integrity who, having survived incredible anxieties, had the right to be more war-jaded than any of their countrymen. They met at a time when the nerves of both conquerors and defeated had reached the breaking-point. They had no sooner assembled than the clamour arose, “Make haste. Make haste.” Overnight they were compelled to attempt solutions for race-problems which had eluded astuter minds than theirs for centuries. They were forced to decide the fates of nations whose language they could not speak, whose lands they had not visited, whose geography was unfamiliar to them and whose very histories they were not given time to study. They were not permitted to consecrate to peace a hundredth part of the industry that victory had required. As a consequence, in order to abbreviate debates, they cleared the room of critics and carved up the map of Europe behind closed doors. They were good men, animated by a desire to help humanity. Civilisation was crumbling while they delayed. The loud boom of threatened ruin thundered through their council-chamber like the cracking of Arctic ice.
It was not their reparation clauses that did the damage. The reparation clauses were just. The least you can ask of a boy who flings a stone is that he shall replace the pane which he smashed. The damage was done by clauses conceived in the finest spirit of altruism, but with no practical knowledge of what was possible. You may pitch your ideals so high that you render them useless. The weakness of the Peace Treaty lay in the fact that its framers had to rely on books and hearsay for information which, to be accurate, ought to have been obtained by first-hand investigation. And they were not business men. They were journalists, professors and oratorical inspirers; whereas their task from first to last was a reorganizing of the world's big business. When the doors were flung wide on their deliberations, they presented humanity with exactly what we might have expected—a paper peace. It was a noble performance for the time it had taken. It read beautifully, but in practice large portions of it have proved wholly unworkable and have produced an economic stagnation which is neither peace nor war. It is fair to state, however, that whether because of or in spite of it, Europe has shown a marked improvement in the last two years.
Recriminations are cowardly. The mistakes of the Peace Treaty were the direct result of our culpable indifference. We displayed little interest in what our pacifiers were doing. World-happenings no longer concerned us. Few of us troubled to read the terms when they were published. We had become provincial and were concentrating all our energies on our personal futures. Things being as they were, it is probable that no group of men, differently selected, could have done better. In the spring of 1919 we were not ripe for peace. Most decidedly we were not ripe for altruism. We were spendthrift philanthropists in dread of our creditors. We were too panic-stricken to be considerate, too needy to be magnanimous, too unfortunate to have pity on the unhappiness of the peoples who had caused our embarrassment. If the elderly statesmen made too much haste in Paris, it was we who urged them to hurry. The paper peace was the common people's doing quite as much as it was theirs. By the same token the starvation of five million children in Central Europe is our doing. And the righting of the disaster which our indifference made possible, should be ours.
What do the peoples whom our Peace has tortured, have to say about it? Their criticism is summed up in one word—hypocrisy. They say that we employed the language of the Beatitudes, while we cast lots for their raiment. They say—though certainly they exaggerate—that they would not have minded so much if we had been boldly ruthless; what they can't forgive is our high-flown talk of democracy and justice at the very moment when we were condemning them to generations of servitude. They accuse us of having paid our debts out of their pockets in a manner which had nothing to do with reparations. A case in point was the reward that was allotted to Roumania for having come in on the side of the Allies. The Russian Front was crumbling. For the Allies it was the blackest hour. Something had to be done to create a diversion; if the diversion had not been created, we might have been in the condition that Central Europe is in today. Roumania offered to join us if, in the event of victory, we would concede to her certain territories. As Admiral Horthy, the Governor of what is left of Hungary, said to me, “Your very lives were at stake. You would have promised Roumania the whole of Hungary at that moment if she had asked for it. I, for one, would not have blamed you. What I blame is not that you kept your promise after you had won the war, but that you stole from us in the name of idealism, disguising your theft with a lot of talk about self-determination. You paid your debt by handing over Transylvania, which was Hungary's granary and absolutely essential to our economic regeneration. We are a trunk of a nation now, shorn of our arms and legs. We cannot rise from the ground or stir. You have spared us our head, so we lie on our back and think, and die by inches.”
What is it that the Peace has really done to Europe? It has created a dozen Alsace-Lorraines by taking away territory from one people and bestowing it on another. It has manufactured new nations, with new paper currencies, negligible reserves, experimental constitutions and no previous experience to guide them in the restraints of self-government. It has multiplied frontiers and spun a spider-web of tariff-walls. It has fenced in the local hatreds which it was intended to abolish, so that they grow savage like dogs perpetually chained. It has established free-ports for the use of mixed populations who are too distrustful to use them. It has entrusted to plebiscites the deciding of their own fates, with the result that they have become hot-beds for the hostile propaganda of rival claimants. It has so lopped and changed the political landscape that railroads now converge on cities which have ceased to serve their purpose. Vienna, the great pre-war middle-man city of Central Europe, is a case in point. Today it stands isolated and unself-supporting in the scrubby patch of tillage which is the new Austria. Its currency is so unredeemable and varying in value that even Austrians prefer to make their contracts in terms of a foreign currency which is stable. Their neighbours refuse to accept it and hoard their goods within their own borders. Their goods have a tangible value, which the paper money of Austria has not. But the railroads still converge on Vienna. The case is similar throughout partitioned Europe. Money is a commodity in which to speculate; it is no longer a medium of barter. When you cross the border from Czecho-Slovakia into Poland, you have to pay your train-fare in French francs. Polish marks are refused, although you are already on Polish soil. When nations show this distrust of their own issue, they can scarcely expect other nations to accept it. At all the frontiers you are searched by officials of the country from which you are departing, to make sure that you are not carrying away too much of their worthless currency. If you are, it is confiscated. The amount that you are allowed to carry is utterly inadequate. It is impossible to travel unless you are a person of sufficient standing to purchase a letter of credit. As a consequence of these restrictions, trade has ceased to circulate and raw materials, which would mean life if trade-confidence were restored, lie hoarded in idle accumulations.
Which brings one to the question of transportation, which lies at the heart of the mischief. So great is the bitterness occasioned by the transfer of territories, with the multiplying of frontiers and hostile tariff-walls, that every nation is at enmity with its neighbours and determined at all costs not to co-operate. One irritating way in which they show their venom is by refusing to return freight-cars which come across their frontiers. Very naturally no freight-cars come across. Goods which are being exported, are unloaded at the border and then re-loaded into cars of the country through which they are to travel. The belief in honesty has perished; the carving up of Europe is largely to blame for it.
And what is the solution? The nations who have been most despoiled say, “War.” They have neither peace nor war at present; war would give them the chance to snatch back some of the territory that has been filched from them. The disaster of a neighbour might prove to be their opportunity. If they missed their chance, they could not be worse off. They are starving by inches. I never believed that it was possible for so many people to be so hungry and still to go on living. After a certain point of agony has been reached, when the majority of the population possesses nothing, Bolshevism with all its brutal crudities will be welcome. Bolshevism practises at least one principle of social justice: in crises of destitution it sweeps aside property rights and insists that the citizens who have shall share. Day by day, as the tide of hunger rises, sane thinking is being overwhelmed. The goal towards which Central Europe is driving is undoubtedly Bolshevism.
But there is another solution, besides war and Bolshevism, which has not yet been tested—peace. Not the “near” peace and the paper peace of Paris; but the practical peace, tempered with magnanimity, which was the peace we were promised when we fought, and the only peace that any decent man intended.
As a preface to such a peace it is necessary to prevent people from starving. The American Relief Administration is trying to keep pace with the strides of famine. The British Save the Children Fund, is concentrating on Austria. The American and British Society of Friends are operating in Germany. Many of the neutral countries are doing something. We are all doing something and none of us are doing enough. For the moment all of us are trying to save children because, whoever else was guilty, they at least were innocent of offence. The effort is finely conceived and states-manly; children whose lives you have rescued will always be your friends. It is one way of wiping out animosities. Whatever happens to the League of Nations you are making sure of a League of Grateful Children. But there is something cruel in leaving their parents to die of hunger. None of us who has a surplus, whatever his nationality, should be able to rest easy in his bed, till the nations who starve have been nourished.
The first essential of peace is that Central Europe should be supplied with food-stuffs. The second is that she should be allowed credits, so that her currencies may be restored to an actual value, the third is that her flow of transportation should be assured. The fourth is that she should be compelled to break down her internal tariff-walls which we, through our short-sightedness, enabled her to set up.
The answer to this is that no government will be prepared to allow credits to a Central Europe which acts spitefully among its component members and so adds daily to its own tribulations. But as regards the spitefulness, if we condemn it too much, we become like Pontius Pilate washing his hands. The spitefulness existed racially before the war and helped to bring the war about; but we, the Allies, are responsible for its most recent and intense development. Our Peace partitioned economic entities, which had proved workable, and substituted in their place a series of political experiments. These experiments, when imposed upon social and financial conditions which were already shaky, instead of restoring equilibrium, precipitated insolvency. It was as though in trying to rescue a boat-load of shipwrecked mariners, we had collided and, instead of accomplishing the good we had intended, had flung them all into the water. Their instinct for self-preservation comes uppermost. They drown one another as they struggle for a hold on the upturned boat. It was our clumsiness that upset them, so we are scarcely in a position to condemn. If we had wanted to impose our peace experiments, there was only one safe way in which to do it. We should have taken control of partitioned Europe and made ourselves responsible for its new countries, till they were sufficiently stabilised to function for themselves.
Their dire necessity has again given us this opportunity. They must be fed and set to work; if not, the anarchy and distress which are now confined within their borders, will spread like a disease throughout the world. There is no time to lose. It is no longer a case of philanthropy; it is a case of safeguarding our own social health. In return for food-stuffs and credits we must make our conditions; the conditions are that we must be allowed to take control of the entire internal economy of our creditors. There should be no food-stuffs or credits for any country which will not permit the Allies' Director to administer their railroads. The Allies' Director should be in every case an American, since America alone is above suspicion in Europe and has no political axe to grind. The Director in each country would be absolute in the matter of distribution and transport, and would see to it that out-going freight-cars were not unloaded at his frontier and that freight-cars which had entered his territory were returned.
Central Europe at the moment is insane with hunger. She is capable of any folly. She is scarcely to be held accountable for her actions. If she is not fed, revolution will spring up in every direction and no one can say where it will end. Every month we delay brings the menace nearer. The Atlantic Ocean will prove to be no barrier.
She wants the peace which we promised and have withheld. If we withhold it much longer, she will be forced to accept the other alternative. There are only two roads which she can travel; the road of peace or of war. The road of war means Bolshevism. Our settlement at Paris has decided nothing. She has neither peace nor war at present.