HKB
An inefficient, unemployed, disorganized Europe faces us, torn by internal strife and international hate, fighting, starving, pillaging, and lying. What warrant is there for a picture of less somber colors?
I have paid little heed in this book to Russia, Hungary, or Austria.[155] There the miseries of life and the disintegration of society are too notorious to require analysis; and these countries are already experiencing the actuality of what for the rest of Europe is still in the realm of prediction. Yet they comprehend a vast territory and a great population, and are an extant example of how much man can suffer and how far society can decay. Above all, they are the signal to us of how in the final catastrophe the malady of the body passes over into malady of the mind. Economic privation proceeds by easy stages, and so long as men suffer it patiently the outside world cares little. Physical efficiency and resistance to disease slowly diminish,[156] but life proceeds somehow, until the limit of human endurance is reached at last and counsels of despair and madness stir the sufferers from the lethargy which precedes the crisis. Then man shakes himself, and the bonds of custom are loosed. The power of ideas is sovereign, and he listens to whatever instruction of hope, illusion, or revenge is carried to him on the air. As I write, the flames of Russian Bolshevism seem, for the moment at least, to have burnt themselves out, and the peoples of Central and Eastern Europe are held in a dreadful torpor. The lately gathered harvest keeps off the worst privations, and Peace has been declared at Paris. But winter approaches. Men will have nothing to look forward to or to nourish hopes on. There will be little fuel to moderate the rigors of the season or to comfort the starved bodies of the town-dwellers.
But who can say how much is endurable, or in what direction men will seek at last to escape from their misfortunes?
FOOTNOTES:
[145] Professor Starling's Report on Food Conditions in Germany. (Cmd. 280.)
[146] Including the Darlehenskassenscheine somewhat more.
[147] Similarly in Austria prices ought to be between twenty and thirty times their former level.
[148] One of the moat striking and symptomatic difficulties which faced the Allied authorities in their administration of the occupied areas of Germany during the Armistice arose out of the fact that even when they brought food into the country the inhabitants could not afford to pay its cost price.
[149] Theoretically an unduly low level of home prices should stimulate exports and so cure itself. But in Germany, and still more in Poland and Austria, there is little or nothing to export. There must be imports before there can be exports.
[150] Allowing for the diminished value of gold, the exchange value of the franc should be less than 40 per cent of its previous value, instead of the actual figure of about 60 per cent, if the fall were proportional to the increase in the volume of the currency.
[151] How very far from equilibrium France's international exchange now is can be seen from the following table:
Excess of Monthly Imports Exports Imports Average $1,000 $1,000 $1,000
1913 140,355 114,670 25,685 1914 106,705 81,145 25,560 1918 331,915 69,055 262,860 Jan.-Mar. 1919 387,140 66,670 320,470 Apr.-June 1919 421,410 83,895 337,515 July 1919 467,565 123,675 343,890
These figures have been converted, at approximately par rates, but this is roughly compensated by the fact that the trade of 1918 and 1919 has been valued at 1917 official rates. French imports cannot possibly continue at anything approaching these figures, and the semblance of prosperity based on such a state of affairs is spurious.
[152] The figures for Italy are as follows:
Excess of Monthly Imports Exports Imports Average $1,000 $1,000 $1,000
1913 60,760 41,860 18,900 1914 48,720 36,840 11,880 1918 235,025 41,390 193,635 Jan.-Mar. 1919 229,240 38,685 191,155 Apr.-June 1919 331,035 69,250 261,785 July-Aug. 1919 223,535 84,515 139,020