In a previous paper I have set out the plain facts of the condition of Central and Eastern Europe. It is a break-up of the modern civilization system, due to the smashing up of money, without which organized town life, factory production, education and systematic communications are unworkable. If it goes on unchecked to its natural conclusion, Central and Eastern Europe will follow Russia to a condition in which the towns will be dying or dead, empty and ruinous, the railroads passing out of use, and in which few people will be left alive except uneducated and degenerating peasants and farmers, growing their own food and keeping a rough order among themselves in their own fashion. We are faced, indeed with a return to barbarism over all these areas. They are going back to the conditions of rural Asia Minor or the Balkans.

How far is this degeneration going to spread?

Let us recognize at once that it need spread no further. It is not an inevitable process. It could be arrested, it could be turned back and a rapid restoration of our shattered civilization could be set going right away if the leading powers of the world, sinking their political ambitions for a time, could meet frankly to work out a bankruptcy arrangement that would release the impoverished nations from debt and give them again a valid money, a stable money with a trustworthy exchange value, that could be accepted with confidence and saved without deterioration. Upon that things could be set going again quite hopefully. Education has not so degenerated as yet, habits of work and trading and intercourse are still strong enough to make such a recovery possible.

Except perhaps in Russia. Russia, for all we know, may have sunken very deep.

But if there is no vigorous world effort made soon the trading class, the foreman class, the technically educated class, the professional class, the teachers, and so forth, will have been broken up and dispersed. These classes are comparatively easy to destroy, extremely hard to reconstruct. Modern civilization will really have been destroyed, if not for good, for a long period, over great areas if these classes go.

And the process is at present still spreading rapidly. If it gets Germany—and it seems to be getting Germany—then Italy may follow. Italy is linked very closely to Germany economically and financially. The death of Germany will chill the economic blood of Italy. Italy is passionately anxious to disarm on land and sea. But Italy cannot disarm while France maintains a great army and makes great naval preparations. France’s refusal to disarm prevents Italy from disarming. The lira sways and sinks; its value fluctuates not perhaps so widely as do marks and kronen but much too widely for healthy industrial life and social security. And Italy is troubled by its restless nationalists, a whooping flag-waving crew of posturing adventurers without foresight or any genuine love of country. If nothing is done, I think I would give Germany about six months and North Italy two years before a revolutionary collapse occurs.

And France?

This new rhetorical France which remains heavily armed while no man threatens, which builds new ships to fight non-existent German armies and guards itself against the threats of long dead German Generals—one of M. Briand’s hair-raising quotations is to be found in the Encyclopaedia Britannica and must be nearly twenty years stale—the renascent France which jostles against Italy and England and believes that it can humbug America for good and all while it does these things, will it pull through amid the general disaster of Europe? Will it achieve its manifest ambition and remain dominant in Europe, the dominance of the last survivor, the cock upon the dunghill of a general decay? I doubt it.

Watch the franc upon the exchange as the true meaning of the French search for “security” dawns upon the world. Watch the subscription to the next French loan to pay for more submarines and more Senegalese. It may prove to be too difficult a feat, after all, for France to wreck the rest of Europe, to destroy her commerce by destroying her customers, and yet to save herself. When France begins to break, she may break very quickly. Under the surface of this exuberant French patriotism runs a deep tide of Communism, raw and red and insanely logical.

We talk of the saner, graver France, the substantial France, that is masked by the rhetoric of M. Briand and the flag-waving French nationalists, of a France generous enough to help a fallen foe and great enough to think of the welfare of mankind. I wish we could hear more of that saner France. And soon. I can see nothing but a warlike orator, empty and mischievous, leading France and all Europe to destruction. I do not see that it is possible for a France of armaments and adventures to dance along the edge of the abyss without falling in.

When we pass out of the Continental to the Atlantic system and consider the case of Britain we find a country with a stabler exchange and a tradition of social give and take stronger and deeper than that of any other country in Europe. But she is not a self-maintaining country. Her millions live very largely on overseas trade. She is helplessly dependent upon the prosperity of other countries, and particularly of Europe; the ebb of prosperity abroad means ebb for her at home. No other country feels so acutely the economic prostration of Germany; no other country suffers so greatly from the restless activities of France. She is struggling along now with unprecedented masses of unemployed workers, and the state of affairs abroad offers no hope of any diminution of this burden. The housing of her great population has degenerated greatly since the war began; she cannot continue to feed, clothe nor educate her people as she used to do unless the decay of Continental Europe is arrested.

I do not know what political form of expression a great distress in Britain might take. The tendency toward revolutionary violence is not very evident in the British temperament, but people who are slow to move are often slow to stop. The slow violence of the English might not find expression in revolution and might not expend itself internally. They might get resentful about France—and perhaps Germany might be feeling resentful about France too. But I will confess that I cannot yet imagine what an acutely distressed Britain might or might not do. Yet it is plain to me that the shadow that lies so dark over Petrograd stretches as far as London.

Such, compactly, is the condition of Europe today. I submit to the reader that it is a fair statement of facts in common knowledge. This is not the Europe of the diplomatists and publicists; it is the Europe of reality and the common man. It is a process of decline and fall going on under our eyes, swifter and more extensive than the decline and fall of the Roman Empire in the fourth and fifth centuries. Its immediate cause is the destruction of the monetary system under the burden of war expenditure and war debts. And the only possible hope that it may be arrested lies in a prompt and vigorous world conference to put an end to war expenditures, including even these French war expenditures that M. Briand’s admirers find so justifiable; to extinguish debts and reinstate stable and trustworthy money in the world.

There is no evidence yet that the Washington Conference will take up this task or will even contemplate this task. I find myself in the trough of the waves today and less confident of the outcome, even the limited outcome, of things here. I am increasingly doubtful whether the conference will get as far in the direction of a stabilized Pacific as I hoped a few days ago.