chapter I

shall have more to say about the Versailles Conference. For the moment, let me quote the observations of the well-known British publicist J. L. Garvin, who adequately summarizes the situation when he says: "As matters stand, no great war ever was followed by a more disquieting and limited peace. Everywhere the democratic atmosphere is charged with agitation. There is still war or anarchy, or both, between the Baltic and the Pacific across a sixth part of the whole earth. Without a restored Russia no outlook can be confident. Either a Bolshevist or reactionary or even a patriotic junction between Germany and Russia might disrupt civilization as violently as before or to even worse effect."[111]

Political uncertainty is a poor basis on which to rebuild Europe's shattered economic life. And this economic reconstruction would, under the most favorable circumstances, be very difficult. We have already seen how, owing to the industrial revolution, Europe became the world's chief workshop, exporting manufactured products in return for foodstuffs to feed its workers and raw materials to feed its machines, these imports being drawn from the four quarters of the globe. In other words, Europe had ceased to be self-sufficing, the very life of its industries and its urban populations being dependent upon foreign importations from the most distant regions. Europe's prosperity before the war was due to the development of a marvellous system of world-trade; intricate, nicely adjusted, functioning with great efficiency, and running at high speed.

Then down upon this delicately organized mechanism crashed the trip-hammer of the Great War, literally smashing it to pieces. To reconstruct so intricate a fabric takes time. Meanwhile, how are the huge urban masses to live, unfitted and unable as they are to draw their sustenance from their native soil? If their sufferings become too great there is a real danger that all Europe may collapse into hopeless chaos. Mr. Frank A. Vanderlip did not overstate the danger when he wrote: "I believe it is possible that there may be let loose in Europe forces that will be more terribly destructive than have been the forces of the Great War."[112]

The best description of Europe's economic situation is undoubtedly that of Mr. Herbert Hoover, who, from his experience as inter-Allied food controller, is peculiarly qualified to pass authoritative judgment. Says Mr. Hoover:

"The economic difficulties of Europe as a whole at the signature of peace may be almost summarized in the phrase 'demoralized productivity.' The production of necessaries for this 450,000,000 population (including Russia) has never been at so low an ebb as at this day.

"A summary of the unemployment bureaus in Europe will show that 15,000,000 families are receiving unemployment allowances in one form or another, and are, in the main, being paid by constant inflation of currency. A rough estimate would indicate that the population of Europe is at least 100,000,000 greater than can be supported without imports, and must live by the production and distribution of exports; and their situation is aggravated not only by lack of raw materials, and imports, but also by low production of European raw materials. Due to the same low production, Europe is to-day importing vast quantities of certain commodities which she formerly produced for herself and can again produce. Generally, in production, she is not only far below even the level of the time of the signing of the armistice, but far below the maintenance of life and health without an unparalleled rate of import....

"From all these causes, accumulated to different intensity in different localities, there is the essential fact that, unless productivity can be rapidly increased, there can be nothing but political, moral, and economic chaos, finally interpreting itself in loss of life on a scale hitherto undreamed of."[113]

Such are the material and vital losses inflicted by the Great War. They are prodigious, and they will not easily be repaired. Europe starts its reconstruction under heavy handicaps, not the least of these being the drain upon its superior stocks, which has deprived it of much of the creative energy that it so desperately needs. Those 16,000,000 or more dead or incapacitated soldiers represented the flower of Europe's young manhood--the very men who are especially needed to-day. It is young men who normally alone possess both maximum driving power and maximum plasticity of mind. All the European belligerents are dangerously impoverished in their stock of youth. The resultant handicap both to Europe's working ability and Europe's brain-activity is only too plain.

Moreover, material and even vital losses do not tell the whole story. The moral and spiritual losses, though not easily measured, are perhaps even more appalling. In fact, the darkest cloud on the horizon is possibly the danger that reconstruction will be primarily material at the expense of moral and spiritual values, thus leading to a warped development even more pronounced than that of the nineteenth century and leading inevitably to yet more disastrous consequences.

The danger of purely material reconstruction is of course the peril which lurks behind every great war, and which in the past has wrought such tragic havoc. At the beginning of the late war we heard much talk of its morally "regenerative" effects, but as the grim holocaust went on year after year, far-sighted moralists warned against a fatal drain of Europe's idealistic forces which might break the thin crust of European civilization so painfully wrought since the Dark Ages.

That these warning voices were not without reason is proved by the chaos of spiritual, moral, and even intellectual values which exists in Europe to-day, giving play to such monstrous insanities as Bolshevism. The danger is that this chaos may be prolonged and deepened by the complex of two concurrent factors: spiritual drain during the war, and spiritual neglect in the immediate future due to overconcentration upon material reconstruction.

Many of the world's best minds are seriously concerned at the outlook. For example, Doctor Gore, the Bishop of Oxford, writes: "There is the usual depression and lowering of moral aims which always follows times of war. For the real terror of the time of war is not during the war; then war has certain very ennobling powers. It is after-war periods which are the curse of the world, and it looks as if the same were going to prove true of this war. I own that I never felt anxiety such as I do now. I think the aspect of things has never been so dark as at this moment. I think the temper of the nations has degraded since the declaration of the armistice to a degree that is almost terrifying."[114]

The intellectual impoverishment wrought by the war is well summarized by Professor C. G. Shaw. "We did more before the war than we shall do after it," he writes. "War will have so exhausted man's powers of action and thought that he will have little wit or will left for the promotion of anything over and above necessary repair."[115]

Europe's general impoverishment in all respects was vividly portrayed by a leading article of the London _Saturday Review_ entitled "The True Destructiveness of War." Pointing to the devastated areas of northern France as merely symptomatic of the devastation wrought in spiritual as well as material fields, it said:

"Reflection only adds to the effect upon us of these miles of wasted country and ruined towns. All this represents not a thousandth part of the desolation which the war has brought upon our civilization. These devastated areas scarring the face of Europe are but a symbol of the desolation which will shadow the life of the world for at least a generation. The coming years will be bleak, in respect of all the generous and gracious things which are the products of leisure and of minds not wholly taken up by the necessity to live by bread alone. For a generation the world will have to concentrate upon material problems.

"The tragedy of the Great War--a tragedy which enhances the desolation of Rheims--is that it should have killed almost everything which the best of our soldiers died to preserve, and that it should have raised more problems than it has solved.

"We would sacrifice a dozen cathedrals to preserve what the war has destroyed in England.... We would readily surrender our ten best cathedrals to be battered by the artillery of Hindenburg as a ransom. Surely it would be better to lose Westminster Abbey than never again to have anybody worthy to be buried there."[116]

Europe is, indeed, passing through the most critical spiritual phase of the war's aftermath--what I may term the zero hour of the spirit. When the trenches used to fill with infantry waiting in the first cold flicker of the dawn for the signal to go "over the top," they called it the "zero hour." Well, Europe now faces the zero hour of peace. It is neither a pleasant nor a stimulating moment. The "tumult and the shouting" have died. The captains, kings--and presidents--have departed. War's hectic urge wanes, losses are counted, the heroic pose is dropped. Such is the moment when the peoples are bidden to go "over the top" once more, this time toward peace objectives no less difficult than those of the battle-field. Weakened, tired Europe knows this, feels this--and dreads the plunge into the unknown. Hence the _malaise_ of the zero hour.

The extraordinary turmoil of the European soul is strikingly set forth by the French thinker Paul Valery.

"We civilizations," he writes, "now know that we are mortal. We had heard tell of whole worlds vanished, of empires gone to the bottom with all their engines; sunk to the inexplorable bottom of the centuries with their gods and their laws, their academies, their science, pure and applied; their grammars, their dictionaries, their classics, their romantics and their symbolists, their critics and their critics' critics. We knew well that all the apparent earth is made of ashes, and that ashes have a meaning. We perceived, through the mists of history, phantoms and huge ships laden with riches and spiritual things. We could not count them. But these wrecks, after all, were no concern of ours.

"Elam, Nineveh, Babylon were vague and lovely names, and the total ruin of these worlds meant as little to us as their very existence. But France, England, Russia--these would also be lovely names. Lusitania also is a lovely name. And now we see that the abyss of history is large enough for every one. We feel that a civilization is as fragile as a life. Circumstances which would send the works of Baudelaire and Keats to rejoin the works of Menander are no longer in the least inconceivable; they are in all the newspapers....

"Thus the spiritual Persepolis is ravaged equally with the material Susa. All is not lost, but everything has felt itself perish.

"An extraordinary tremor has run through the spinal marrow of Europe. It has felt, in all its thinking substance, that it recognized itself no longer, that it no longer resembled itself, that it was about to lose consciousness--a consciousness acquired by centuries of tolerable disasters, by thousands of men of the first rank, by geographical, racial, historical chances innumerable....

"The military crisis is perhaps at an end; the economic crisis is visibly at its zenith; but the intellectual crisis--it is with difficulty that we can seize its true centre, its exact phase. The facts, however, are clear and pitiless: there are thousands of young writers and young artists who are dead. There is the lost illusion of a European culture, and the demonstration of the impotence of knowledge to save anything whatever; there is science, mortally wounded in its moral ambitions, and, as it were, dishonored by its applications; there is idealism, victor with difficulty, grievously mutilated, responsible for its dreams; realism, deceived, beaten, with crimes and misdeeds heaped upon it; covetousness and renunciation equally put out; religions confused among the armies, cross against cross, crescent against crescent; there are the sceptics themselves, disconcerted by events so sudden, so violent, and so moving, which play with our thoughts as a cat with a mouse--the sceptics lose their doubts, rediscover them, lose them again, and can no longer make use of the movements of their minds.

"The rolling of the ship has been so heavy that at the last the best-hung lamps have been upset.

"From an immense terrace of Elsinore which extends from Basle to Cologne, and touches the sands of Nieuport, the marshes of the Somme, the chalk of Champagne, and the granite of Alsace, the Hamlet of Europe now looks upon millions of ghosts."[117]

Such is Europe's deplorable condition as she staggers forth from the hideous ordeal of the Great War; her fluid capital dissipated, her fixed capital impaired, her industrial fabric rent and tattered, her finances threatened with bankruptcy, the flower of her manhood dead on the battle-field, her populations devitalized and discouraged, her children stunted by malnutrition. A sombre picture.

And Europe is the white homeland, the heart of the white world. It is Europe that has suffered practically all the losses of Armageddon, which may be considered the white civil war. The colored world remains virtually unscathed.

Here is the truth of the matter: The white world to-day stands at the crossroads of life and death. It stands where the Greek world stood at the close of the Peloponnesian War. A fever has racked the white frame and undermined its constitution. The unsound therapeutics of its diplomatic practitioners retard convalescence and endanger real recovery. Worst of all, the instinct of race-solidarity has partially atrophied.

Grave as is the situation, it is not yet irreparable, any more than Greece's condition was hopeless after AEgospotami. It was not the Peloponnesian War which sealed Hellas's doom, but the cycle of political anarchy and moral chaos of which the Peloponnesian War was merely the opening phase. Our world is too vigorous for even the Great War, of itself, to prove a mortal wound.

The white world thus still has its choice. But it must be a positive choice. Decisions--firm decisions--must be made. Constructive measures--drastic measures--must be taken. Above all: time presses, and drift is fatal. The tide ebbs. The swimmer must put forth strong strokes to reach the shore. Else--swift oblivion in the dark ocean.

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