1: Introductory
Preface || 2: Europe Before the War >>
THE power to become habituated to his surroundings is a marked characteristic of
mankind. Very few of us realize with conviction the intensely unusual, unstable,
complicated, unreliable, temporary nature of the economic organization by which Western
Europe has lived for the last half century. We assume some of the most peculiar and
temporary of our late advantages as natural, permanent, and to be depended on, and we lay
our plans accordingly. On this sandy and false foundation we scheme for social improvement
and dress our political platforms, pursue our animosities and particular ambitions, and
feel ourselves with enough margin in hand to foster, not assuage, civil conflict in the
European family. Moved by insane delusion and reckless self-regard, the German people
overturned the foundations on which we all lived and built. But the spokesmen of the
French and British peoples have run the risk of completing the ruin, which Germany began,
by a Peace which, if it is carried into effect, must irnpair yet further, when it might
have restored, the delicate, complicated organization, already shaken and broken by war,
through which alone the Eurepean peoples can employ themselves and live.
In England the outward aspect of life does not yet teach us to feel or realize in the
least that an age is over. We are busy picking up the threads of our life where we dropped
them, with this difference only, that many of us seem a good deal richer than we were
before. Where we spent millions before the war, we have now learnt that we can spend
hundreds of millions and apparently not suffer for it. Evidently we did not exploit to the
utmost the possibilities of our economic life. We look, therefore, not only to a return to
the comforts of 1914, but to an immense broadening and intensification of them. All
classes alike thus build their plans, the rich to spend more and save less, the poor to
spend more and work less.
But perhaps it is only in England (and America) that it is possible to be so
unconscions. In continental Europe the earth heaves and no one but is aware of the
rumblings. There it is not just a matter of extravagance or "labor troubles";
but of life and death, of starvation and existence, and of the fearful convulsions of a
dying civilization.
For one who spent in Paris the greater part of the six months which succeeded the
Armistice an occasional visit to London was a strange experience. England still stands
outside Europe. Europe's voiceless tremors do not reach her. Europe is apart and England
is not of her flesh and body. But Europe is solid with herself. France, Germany, Italy,
Austria and Holland, Russia and Roumania and Poland, throb together, and their structure
and civilization are essentially one. They flourished together, they have rocked together
in a war, which we, in spite of our enormous contributions and sacrifices (like though in
a less degree than America), economically stood outside, and they may fall together. In
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 Imminent 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.
Preface || 2: Europe Before the War >>
