The words are Trotsky's. They were his verdict on the humiliating Peace which Russia was compelled to accept at the hands of Germany. You may see them scrawled on the wall of the old Jesuit College at Brest-Litovsk where the Peace was signed: “Neither Peace Nor War. Trotsky.” If they were true of the Peace of Brest-Litovsk, they are equally true of the Peace which has befallen Central Europe as the crowning achievement of the war which was to end all wars. It is not stating matters too strongly to say that up to date Peace had caused at least as much misery as the four years' fury of embattled armies. But there is this difference: the heavier portion of the present misery is being borne by women and children.

As one who was a combatant, I think I know what urged the fighting-man to his sacrifice. He considered his own welfare as of paltry consequence if, by foregoing it, he could help to create a social order which would be more righteous. He gladly took his chance of wounds and annihilation, believing that his pain was the purchase-price of a future and enduring happiness. A tour through contemporary Central Europe would leave him sadly disillusionized. The victory, which his idealism made possible, has been turned to a cruel use—a use which he never intended and for which he would certainly never have agonised. Killing men in fight is comparatively decent and an essential accompaniment of the technique of war; butchering their families with slow starvation by the Peace that comes after is revolting and savage.

And whose is the fault? Part of it belongs to the enemy nations themselves who perpetrated the crime of war and, when they found that they were losing, fought themselves to such a point of exhaustion that they were left with no power of recuperation. Part of it belongs to the internal race-hatreds which were only kept in check by the economic interdependence of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire. Part of it belongs to a Peace of Idealism imposed upon peoples historically unprepared for it and imposed at a time when they found themselves on the brink of insolvency. The only chance that such a Peace had of achieving the pacification that was intended, was by the Allies taking control of Central Europe and constituting themselves sole arbiters of administration until the newly created nations were sufficiently balanced to function for themselves. But in the final analysis the fault was yours and mine—we who are the plain people of the Allied Nations.

It is more fashionable to lay the blame on a group of elderly statesmen who met in Paris to arrange the pacification. They were the leaders who had piloted their nations to triumph—men of unstained integrity who, having survived incredible anxieties, had the right to be more war-jaded than any of their countrymen. They met at a time when the nerves of both conquerors and defeated had reached the breaking-point. They had no sooner assembled than the clamour arose, “Make haste. Make haste.” Overnight they were compelled to attempt solutions for race-problems which had eluded astuter minds than theirs for centuries. They were forced to decide the fates of nations whose language they could not speak, whose lands they had not visited, whose geography was unfamiliar to them and whose very histories they were not given time to study. They were not permitted to consecrate to peace a hundredth part of the industry that victory had required. As a consequence, in order to abbreviate debates, they cleared the room of critics and carved up the map of Europe behind closed doors. They were good men, animated by a desire to help humanity. Civilisation was crumbling while they delayed. The loud boom of threatened ruin thundered through their council-chamber like the cracking of Arctic ice.

It was not their reparation clauses that did the damage. The reparation clauses were just. The least you can ask of a boy who flings a stone is that he shall replace the pane which he smashed. The damage was done by clauses conceived in the finest spirit of altruism, but with no practical knowledge of what was possible. You may pitch your ideals so high that you render them useless. The weakness of the Peace Treaty lay in the fact that its framers had to rely on books and hearsay for information which, to be accurate, ought to have been obtained by first-hand investigation. And they were not business men. They were journalists, professors and oratorical inspirers; whereas their task from first to last was a reorganizing of the world's big business. When the doors were flung wide on their deliberations, they presented humanity with exactly what we might have expected—a paper peace. It was a noble performance for the time it had taken. It read beautifully, but in practice large portions of it have proved wholly unworkable and have produced an economic stagnation which is neither peace nor war. It is fair to state, however, that whether because of or in spite of it, Europe has shown a marked improvement in the last two years.

Recriminations are cowardly. The mistakes of the Peace Treaty were the direct result of our culpable indifference. We displayed little interest in what our pacifiers were doing. World-happenings no longer concerned us. Few of us troubled to read the terms when they were published. We had become provincial and were concentrating all our energies on our personal futures. Things being as they were, it is probable that no group of men, differently selected, could have done better. In the spring of 1919 we were not ripe for peace. Most decidedly we were not ripe for altruism. We were spendthrift philanthropists in dread of our creditors. We were too panic-stricken to be considerate, too needy to be magnanimous, too unfortunate to have pity on the unhappiness of the peoples who had caused our embarrassment. If the elderly statesmen made too much haste in Paris, it was we who urged them to hurry. The paper peace was the common people's doing quite as much as it was theirs. By the same token the starvation of five million children in Central Europe is our doing. And the righting of the disaster which our indifference made possible, should be ours.

What do the peoples whom our Peace has tortured, have to say about it? Their criticism is summed up in one word—hypocrisy. They say that we employed the language of the Beatitudes, while we cast lots for their raiment. They say—though certainly they exaggerate—that they would not have minded so much if we had been boldly ruthless; what they can't forgive is our high-flown talk of democracy and justice at the very moment when we were condemning them to generations of servitude. They accuse us of having paid our debts out of their pockets in a manner which had nothing to do with reparations. A case in point was the reward that was allotted to Roumania for having come in on the side of the Allies. The Russian Front was crumbling. For the Allies it was the blackest hour. Something had to be done to create a diversion; if the diversion had not been created, we might have been in the condition that Central Europe is in today. Roumania offered to join us if, in the event of victory, we would concede to her certain territories. As Admiral Horthy, the Governor of what is left of Hungary, said to me, “Your very lives were at stake. You would have promised Roumania the whole of Hungary at that moment if she had asked for it. I, for one, would not have blamed you. What I blame is not that you kept your promise after you had won the war, but that you stole from us in the name of idealism, disguising your theft with a lot of talk about self-determination. You paid your debt by handing over Transylvania, which was Hungary's granary and absolutely essential to our economic regeneration. We are a trunk of a nation now, shorn of our arms and legs. We cannot rise from the ground or stir. You have spared us our head, so we lie on our back and think, and die by inches.”

What is it that the Peace has really done to Europe? It has created a dozen Alsace-Lorraines by taking away territory from one people and bestowing it on another. It has manufactured new nations, with new paper currencies, negligible reserves, experimental constitutions and no previous experience to guide them in the restraints of self-government. It has multiplied frontiers and spun a spider-web of tariff-walls. It has fenced in the local hatreds which it was intended to abolish, so that they grow savage like dogs perpetually chained. It has established free-ports for the use of mixed populations who are too distrustful to use them. It has entrusted to plebiscites the deciding of their own fates, with the result that they have become hot-beds for the hostile propaganda of rival claimants. It has so lopped and changed the political landscape that railroads now converge on cities which have ceased to serve their purpose. Vienna, the great pre-war middle-man city of Central Europe, is a case in point. Today it stands isolated and unself-supporting in the scrubby patch of tillage which is the new Austria. Its currency is so unredeemable and varying in value that even Austrians prefer to make their contracts in terms of a foreign currency which is stable. Their neighbours refuse to accept it and hoard their goods within their own borders. Their goods have a tangible value, which the paper money of Austria has not. But the railroads still converge on Vienna. The case is similar throughout partitioned Europe. Money is a commodity in which to speculate; it is no longer a medium of barter. When you cross the border from Czecho-Slovakia into Poland, you have to pay your train-fare in French francs. Polish marks are refused, although you are already on Polish soil. When nations show this distrust of their own issue, they can scarcely expect other nations to accept it. At all the frontiers you are searched by officials of the country from which you are departing, to make sure that you are not carrying away too much of their worthless currency. If you are, it is confiscated. The amount that you are allowed to carry is utterly inadequate. It is impossible to travel unless you are a person of sufficient standing to purchase a letter of credit. As a consequence of these restrictions, trade has ceased to circulate and raw materials, which would mean life if trade-confidence were restored, lie hoarded in idle accumulations.

Which brings one to the question of transportation, which lies at the heart of the mischief. So great is the bitterness occasioned by the transfer of territories, with the multiplying of frontiers and hostile tariff-walls, that every nation is at enmity with its neighbours and determined at all costs not to co-operate. One irritating way in which they show their venom is by refusing to return freight-cars which come across their frontiers. Very naturally no freight-cars come across. Goods which are being exported, are unloaded at the border and then re-loaded into cars of the country through which they are to travel. The belief in honesty has perished; the carving up of Europe is largely to blame for it.

And what is the solution? The nations who have been most despoiled say, “War.” They have neither peace nor war at present; war would give them the chance to snatch back some of the territory that has been filched from them. The disaster of a neighbour might prove to be their opportunity. If they missed their chance, they could not be worse off. They are starving by inches. I never believed that it was possible for so many people to be so hungry and still to go on living. After a certain point of agony has been reached, when the majority of the population possesses nothing, Bolshevism with all its brutal crudities will be welcome. Bolshevism practises at least one principle of social justice: in crises of destitution it sweeps aside property rights and insists that the citizens who have shall share. Day by day, as the tide of hunger rises, sane thinking is being overwhelmed. The goal towards which Central Europe is driving is undoubtedly Bolshevism.

But there is another solution, besides war and Bolshevism, which has not yet been tested—peace. Not the “near” peace and the paper peace of Paris; but the practical peace, tempered with magnanimity, which was the peace we were promised when we fought, and the only peace that any decent man intended.

As a preface to such a peace it is necessary to prevent people from starving. The American Relief Administration is trying to keep pace with the strides of famine. The British Save the Children Fund, is concentrating on Austria. The American and British Society of Friends are operating in Germany. Many of the neutral countries are doing something. We are all doing something and none of us are doing enough. For the moment all of us are trying to save children because, whoever else was guilty, they at least were innocent of offence. The effort is finely conceived and states-manly; children whose lives you have rescued will always be your friends. It is one way of wiping out animosities. Whatever happens to the League of Nations you are making sure of a League of Grateful Children. But there is something cruel in leaving their parents to die of hunger. None of us who has a surplus, whatever his nationality, should be able to rest easy in his bed, till the nations who starve have been nourished.

The first essential of peace is that Central Europe should be supplied with food-stuffs. The second is that she should be allowed credits, so that her currencies may be restored to an actual value, the third is that her flow of transportation should be assured. The fourth is that she should be compelled to break down her internal tariff-walls which we, through our short-sightedness, enabled her to set up.

The answer to this is that no government will be prepared to allow credits to a Central Europe which acts spitefully among its component members and so adds daily to its own tribulations. But as regards the spitefulness, if we condemn it too much, we become like Pontius Pilate washing his hands. The spitefulness existed racially before the war and helped to bring the war about; but we, the Allies, are responsible for its most recent and intense development. Our Peace partitioned economic entities, which had proved workable, and substituted in their place a series of political experiments. These experiments, when imposed upon social and financial conditions which were already shaky, instead of restoring equilibrium, precipitated insolvency. It was as though in trying to rescue a boat-load of shipwrecked mariners, we had collided and, instead of accomplishing the good we had intended, had flung them all into the water. Their instinct for self-preservation comes uppermost. They drown one another as they struggle for a hold on the upturned boat. It was our clumsiness that upset them, so we are scarcely in a position to condemn. If we had wanted to impose our peace experiments, there was only one safe way in which to do it. We should have taken control of partitioned Europe and made ourselves responsible for its new countries, till they were sufficiently stabilised to function for themselves.

Their dire necessity has again given us this opportunity. They must be fed and set to work; if not, the anarchy and distress which are now confined within their borders, will spread like a disease throughout the world. There is no time to lose. It is no longer a case of philanthropy; it is a case of safeguarding our own social health. In return for food-stuffs and credits we must make our conditions; the conditions are that we must be allowed to take control of the entire internal economy of our creditors. There should be no food-stuffs or credits for any country which will not permit the Allies' Director to administer their railroads. The Allies' Director should be in every case an American, since America alone is above suspicion in Europe and has no political axe to grind. The Director in each country would be absolute in the matter of distribution and transport, and would see to it that out-going freight-cars were not unloaded at his frontier and that freight-cars which had entered his territory were returned.

Central Europe at the moment is insane with hunger. She is capable of any folly. She is scarcely to be held accountable for her actions. If she is not fed, revolution will spring up in every direction and no one can say where it will end. Every month we delay brings the menace nearer. The Atlantic Ocean will prove to be no barrier.

She wants the peace which we promised and have withheld. If we withhold it much longer, she will be forced to accept the other alternative. There are only two roads which she can travel; the road of peace or of war. The road of war means Bolshevism. Our settlement at Paris has decided nothing. She has neither peace nor war at present.

THE END