Peaceless Europe | Page 9

economic conditions of the world. It
has not only been the greatest war in history, but in its consequences it
threatens to prove the worst war which has ravaged Europe in modern
times.
After nearly every nineteenth-century war there has been a marked
revival of human activity. But this unprecedented clash of peoples has
reduced the energy of all; it has darkened the minds of men, and spread
the spirit of violence.
Europe will be able to make up for her losses in lives and wealth. Time
heals even the most painful wounds. But one thing she has lost which,
if she does not succeed in recovering it, must necessarily lead to her
decline and fall: the spirit of solidarity.
After the victory of the Entente the microbes of hate have developed
and flourished in special cultures, consisting of national egotism,
imperialism, and a mania for conquest and expansion.
The peace treaties imposed on the vanquished are nothing but arms of
oppression. What more could Germany herself have done had she won
the War? Perhaps her terms would have been more lenient, certainly

not harder, as she would have understood that conditions such as we
have imposed on the losers are simply inapplicable.
Three years have elapsed since the end of the War, two since the
conclusion of peace, nevertheless Europe has still more men under
arms than in pre-war times. The sentiment of nationality, twisted and
transformed into nationalism, aims at the subjugation and depression of
other peoples. No civilized co-existence is possible where each nation
proposes to harm instead of helping its neighbour.
The spread of hatred among peoples has everywhere rendered more
difficult the internal relations between social classes and the economic
life of each country. Fearing a repetition of armed conflicts, and owing
to that spirit of unrest and intolerance engendered everywhere by the
War, workers are becoming every day more exacting. They, too, claim
their share of the spoils; they, too, clamour for enemy indemnities. The
same manifestations of hate, the same violence of language, spread
from people to people and from class to class.
This tremendous War, which the peoples of Europe have fought and
suffered, has not only bled the losers almost to death, but it has deeply
perturbed the very life and existence of the victors. It has not produced
a single manifestation of art or a single moral affirmation. For the last
seven years the universities of Europe appear to be stricken with
paralysis: not one outstanding personality has been revealed.
In almost every country the War has brought a sense of internal
dissolution: everywhere this disquieting phenomenon is more or less
noticeable. With the exception, perhaps, of Great Britain, whose
privileged insular situation, enormous mercantile navy and flourishing
trade in coal have enabled her to resume her pre-war economic
existence almost entirely, no country has emerged scatheless from the
War. The rates of exchange soar daily to fantastic heights, and
insuperable barriers to the commerce of European nations are being
created. People work less than they did in pre-war times, but
everywhere a tendency is noticeable to consume more. Austria,
Germany, Italy, France are not different phenomena, but different
manifestations and phases of the same phenomenon.

Before the War Europe, in spite of her great sub-divisions, represented
a living economic whole. To-day there are not only victors and
vanquished, but currents of hate, ferments of violence, a hungering
after conquests, an unscrupulous cornering of raw materials carried out
brutally and almost ostentatiously in the name of the rights of victory: a
situation which renders production, let alone its development and
increase, utterly impossible.
The treaty system as applied after the War has divided Europe into two
distinct parts: the losers, held under the military and economic control
of the victors, are expected to produce not only enough for their own
needs, but to provide a super-production in order to indemnify the
winners for all the losses and damages sustained on account of the War.
The victors, bound together in what is supposed to be a permanent
alliance for the protection of their common interests, are supposed to
exercise a military action of oppression and control over the losers until
the full payment of the indemnity. Another part of Europe is in a state
of revolutionary ferment, and the Entente Powers have, by their attitude,
rather tended to aggravate than to improve the situation.
Europe can only recover her peace of mind by remembering that the
War is over and done with. Unfortunately, the treaty system not only
prevents us from remembering that the War is finished, but determines
a state of permanent war.
Clemenceau bluntly declared to the French Chamber that treaties were
a means of continuing the War. He was perfectly right, for war is being
waged more bitterly than ever