The Economic Consequences of the Peace | Page 2

this lies the destructive significance of the Peace of Paris. If
the European Civil War is to end with France and Italy abusing their
momentary victorious power to destroy Germany and Austria-Hungary
now prostrate, they invite their own destruction also, being so deeply
and inextricably intertwined with their victims by hidden psychic and
economic bonds. At any rate an Englishman who took part in the

Conference of Paris and was during those months a member of the
Supreme Economic Council of the Allied Powers, was bound to
become, for him a new experience, a European in his cares and outlook.
There, at the nerve center of the European system, his British
preoccupations must largely fall away and he must be haunted by other
and more dreadful specters. Paris was a nightmare, and every one there
was morbid. A sense of impending catastrophe overhung the frivolous
scene; the futility and smallness of man before the great events
confronting him; the mingled significance and unreality of the
decisions; levity, blindness, insolence, confused cries from without,--all
the elements of ancient tragedy were there. Seated indeed amid the
theatrical trappings of the French Saloons of State, one could wonder if
the extraordinary visages of Wilson and of Clemenceau, with their
fixed hue and unchanging characterization, were really faces at all and
not the tragi-comic masks of some strange drama or puppet-show.
The proceedings of Paris all had this air of extraordinary importance
and unimportance at the same time. The decisions seemed charged with
consequences to the future of human society; yet the air whispered that
the word was not flesh, that it was futile, insignificant, of no effect,
dissociated from events; and one felt most strongly the impression,
described by Tolstoy in War and Peace or by Hardy in The Dynasts, of
events marching on to their fated conclusion uninfluenced and
unaffected by the cerebrations of Statesmen in Council:
Spirit of the Years Observe that all wide sight and self-command
Deserts these throngs now driven to demonry By the Immanent
Unrecking. Nought remains But vindictiveness here amid the strong,
And there amid the weak an impotent rage.
Spirit of the Pities Why prompts the Will so senseless-shaped a doing?
Spirit of the Years I have told thee that It works unwittingly, As one
possessed not judging.
In Paris, where those connected with the Supreme Economic Council,
received almost hourly the reports of the misery, disorder, and decaying
organization of all Central and Eastern Europe, allied and enemy alike,

and learnt from the lips of the financial representatives of Germany and
Austria unanswerable evidence, of the terrible exhaustion of their
countries, an occasional visit to the hot, dry room in the President's
house, where the Four fulfilled their destinies in empty and arid
intrigue, only added to the sense of nightmare. Yet there in Paris the
problems of Europe were terrible and clamant, and an occasional return
to the vast unconcern of London a little disconcerting. For in London
these questions were very far away, and our own lesser problems alone
troubling. London believed that Paris was making a great confusion of
its business, but remained uninterested. In this spirit the British people
received the Treaty without reading it. But it is under the influence of
Paris, not London, that this book has been written by one who, though
an Englishman, feels himself a European also, and, because of too vivid
recent experience, cannot disinterest himself from the further unfolding
of the great historic drama of these days which will destroy great
institutions, but may also create a new world.

CHAPTER II
EUROPE BEFORE THE WAR
Before 1870 different parts of the small continent of Europe had
specialized in their own products; but, taken as a whole, it was
substantially self-subsistent. And its population was adjusted to this
state of affairs.
After 1870 there was developed on a large scale an unprecedented
situation, and the economic condition of Europe became during the
next fifty years unstable and peculiar. The pressure of population on
food, which had already been balanced by the accessibility of supplies
from America, became for the first time in recorded history definitely
reversed. As numbers increased, food was actually easier to secure.
Larger proportional returns from an increasing scale of production
became true of agriculture as well as industry. With the growth of the
European population there were more emigrants on the one hand to till
the soil of the new countries, and, on the other, more workmen were

available in Europe to prepare the industrial products and capital goods
which were to maintain the emigrant populations in their new homes,
and to build the railways and ships which were to make accessible to
Europe food and raw products from distant sources. Up to about 1900 a
unit of labor applied to industry yielded