competition on the Pacific, and to giving threatened China a breathing
time to bring itself up to modern conditions; they looked frankly toward
the establishment of a world peace. But so far as Europe goes, where as
M. Briand’s speech reminded us, the nations are locked together in a
state of extreme danger, the conference has as yet done nothing. It is
quite possible to believe that it will do very little. It is doubtful if
the peace of Europe can ever be dealt with effectually in Washington.
The troubles of the European Continent are an old, intricate story, and
I believe the attitude ascribed here to the American Centre and West,
the attitude of “let Europe solve her own international problems and not
bother us with them,” is a thoroughly sound and wise one. America has
neither the time and attention to spare nor the particular
understandings needed to grasp the tangled difficulties of Europe. Such
initiatives as those of President Wilson about Danzig and Fiume settle
nothing and leave rankling sores. It is up to Europe to clear up and
simplify itself before it comes into the world arena with America.
It is just within the range of possibility, therefore, that some sort of
European conference may arise out of the Washington gathering. Such a
conference is becoming necessary. The divergence in spirit and aim of
France and Britain that Washington has brought out is not a divergence
to be smoothed over. Better it should flare now than smoulder later. I
have done my own small best to exacerbate it, because I believe that a
brisk quarrel and some plain speaking may clear the air for a better
understanding. Europe needs ventilation. When France, Britain, Italy and
Germany meet together to discuss their common interests, cut through
their impossible entanglements and get rid of their mutual suspicions
and precautions with the frankness of this Washington gathering, with as
open and free a discussion and as ample a public participation, European
affairs will be on the mend.
But there is another issue which America cannot keep out of as she can
keep out of the Franco-German-British situation, and upon this second
issue the world looks to her for some sort of leadership. So far the
Washington Conference has excluded any consideration of the economic and
financial disorder of the world. But that consideration cannot be
indefinitely delayed; it is becoming pressingly necessary. All the while
we are debating here about Japanese autocracy and ambitions, and what we
really mean by the “open door,” and whether we shall have 40,000 or
90,000 tons of submarines, and so on, the economic dissolution of the
world goes on.
The immediate effect of partial disarmament, indeed, both in Britain and
Japan, may be even to increase the economic difficulties of these
countries by throwing considerable masses of skilled labor out of work.
I propose in my next paper to discuss this process of economic and
social dissolution which is now going on throughout the world, beneath
the surface of our formal international relations. It is the larger
reality of the present world situation which the brighter, more dramatic
incidents of the earlier sessions at Washington have for a time thrust
out of our attention.
XIV
THE REAL THREAT TO CIVILIZATION
Washington, Nov. 25.
In the opening paper of this series I said that Western civilization was
undergoing a very rapid process of disorganization, a process that was
already nearly complete in Russia and that was spreading out to the
whole world. It is a huge secular process demanding unprecedented
collective action among the nations if it is to be arrested and I
welcome the Washington Conference as the most hopeful beginning of such
concerted action.
Now that the Washington Conference has defined its scope and limitations
and got down to a definite scheme of work it will be well to return to
this ampler question of the decline in the world’s affairs.
Now there are great numbers of people, more particularly in America, who
still refuse to recognize this intermittent and variable process, which
resumes and goes on again and rests steady for a time and then hurries,
which is taking all that we know as civilization in Europe toward a
final destruction. The mere statement that this is going on they call
“pessimism,” and with a sort of genial hostility they oppose any attempt
to consider the possibility of any action to turn back the evil process.
I suppose they would call the note of a fire alarm or the toot of a
motor horn “pessimism”—until the thing hit them good and hard. It would
have the same effect of a disagreeable warning and interruption to the
even tenor of their ways. They argue that this alleged decadence is not
going on, or, what is from a soundly practical point of view the same
thing, that it is never going to reach them or anything that they really
care for.
The starvation of Russia down to an empty shell, the break up of China,
the retrogression of Southeastern Europe to barbarism, the sinking of
Constantinople to the level of a drunken brothel, the steadily
approaching collapse of Germany, is nothing to these “optimists.”
America is all right, anyhow, and am I my brother’s keeper? It is just a
phase of misfortune “over there” and the people must get out of it as
they can.
Wait for the swing of the pendulum, the turn of the tide. Things will
come right again—over the heaps of dead. There have been such slumps
before in those countries away over there, notoriously less favored by
God, as they are, than America.
It may be well therefore to go over this matter a little more fully and
to give my grounds for supposing that there is a rot, a coming undone,
going on in our system, that will not necessarily recover—that the
movement isn’t the swing of a pendulum, nor this ebb an ebb that will
turn again. And further, that this rotting process is bound to affect
not merely Europe and Asia, but ultimately America.
Now let us recapitulate in the most general terms what has happened and
is happening at the present time to impoverish and disorganize the
world. First, there has been a very great destruction of life through
the war, especially in Europe. Mostly this has been the killing of young
men who would otherwise have been the flower of the working mass of
these countries at the present time. This in itself is a great loss of
energy, but it is a recoverable loss. A new generation is already
growing up to replace these millions of dead and to efface the economic
loss of this tragic and sorrowful destruction.
Nor is the extraordinary waste of property, of energy and raw material
spent in mere destruction, an irreplaceable loss. Given toil, given
courage, devastated areas can be restored, fresh energies found to
replenish the countless millions and millions of foot pounds of work
wasted upon explosives. Many beautiful things, buildings, works of art
and the like have gone, never to be gotten again, but their place may
conceivably be taken by new efforts of creative, artistic energy, given
toil, given confidence and hope.
Far more serious, from the point of view of the future, than the
destruction of either things or lives, are certain subtler destructions,
because they strike at that toil, that courage and hope and confidence
which are essential to any sort of recuperation.
And foremost is the fact of debt, everywhere, but particularly in the
European countries. All the billions worth of material that was smashed
up and blown to pieces on the front had to be bought from its owners and
to secure it every belligerent Government had to incur debts. Lives cost
little, but material much. The European combatants are overwhelmed with
debts, every European worker and toiler, every European business man, is
a debtor; every European enterprise goes on under a crushing burden of
taxation because of these debts. An attempt has been made to shift this
unendurable burden from the victors to the vanquished, but the
vanquished already had as much as they could carry.
Now when first mankind began to experiment with money and credit the lot
of the debtor was an intolerable one. He might become the slave of his
creditor, he might be subjected to imprisonment and frightful
punishments. But it was early discovered that it was not to the general
advantage, it was not even to the advantage of the creditor, to drive
the debtor to despair. Processes of bankruptcy were devised to clear him
up, get what was possible from him and then release him to a fresh start
and hope.
But we have not yet extended the same leniency to national bankruptcy
because national insolvencies have been rare. And so we have whole
nations in Europe so loaded with debts and punitive charges that every
worker, every business man, will be under his share in this burden from
the cradle to the grave. He will be a debt serf to the domestic or
foreign creditor and all his enterprises will be weighed and discouraged
by this obligation. Debt is one immense and universal discouragement now
throughout all Europe.
But even that might not prevent the recovery of Europe. There is yet
another and profounder evil in operation to prevent people “getting to
work” to reconstruct their shattered economic life. That is the
increasing failure of money to do its work. Europe cannot get to work,
cannot get things going again, because over a large part of the world
the medium of exchange has become untrustworthy and unusable. That is
the immediate thing that is destroying civilization in the Old World.
We have to remember that our whole economic order is based on money. We
do not know any way of working a big business, a manufactory, a large
farm, a mine, except by money payments. Payment in kind, barter and the
like are ancient and clumsy expedients; you cannot imagine a great city
like New York getting along with its industrial and business life on any
such clumsy basis. Every modern city, London, Paris, Berlin, is built on
a money basis and will collapse into utter ruin, as Petersburg has
already collapsed, if money fails. But over large and increasing areas
of Europe money is now of such fluctuating value, its purchasing power
is so uncertain, that men will neither work for it, nor attempt to save
it, nor make any monetary bargains ahead.
Such a thing has never occurred to anything like the same extent in all
history, and it is killing business enterprise altogether and throwing
whole masses of working people out of employment.
Europe without trustworthy money is as paralyzed as a brain without
wholesome blood. She cannot act, she cannot move. Employment becomes
impossible and production dies away. The towns move steadily toward the
starvation that has overtaken Petersburg and the peasants and
cultivators cease to grow anything except to satisfy their own needs. To
go to market with produce, except to barter, is a mockery. The schools
are not working, the hospitals, the public services; the teachers and
doctors and officials cannot live upon their pay, they starve or go
away.
This state of affairs has been brought about by the reckless manufacture
of paper money by nearly every European Government; we can measure their
recklessness roughly by comparing their pre-war and post-war exchanges.
It is only now that we are beginning to realize the enormity of the
disaster which this demoralization of money is bringing upon the world.
We have weakened the link of cash payments, which has hitherto held
civilization together, to the breaking point. As the link breaks, the
machine stops. The modern city will become a formless mob of unemployed
men and the countryside will become a wilderness of food-hoarding
peasants—and since the urban masses will have no food and no means of
commanding it, we may expect the most violent perturbations before they
are persuaded to accept their fate in a philosophical spirit.
Revolutionary social outbreaks are not the results of plots; they are
symptoms of social disease. They are not causes but effects. This is
what I mean when I write of a breakdown of civilization. I mean the
death of town life, which cannot go on without money and the cessation
of organized communications. I mean a breakdown of the organizations for
keeping the peace. I mean an end to organized education.
I mean the smashing of this social order in which we live, through the
smashing of money, which has already occurred to a large extent in
Russia, which is going on in many parts of Eastern Europe, which seems
likely to occur within a few months in Germany, which may spread into
Italy and France, and so to Britain, and even to the American continent,
and which can only be arrested by the most vigorous collection action to
restore validity to money.
Of which vigorous collective action there is in Washington at the
present moment no sign.
XV
THE POSSIBLE BREAKDOWN OF CIVILIZATION
Washington, November 26.
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.
XVI
WHAT OF AMERICA?
Washington, November 28.
In my next article I will report progress of the Washington Conference;
in this I will go on with my account in general terms of what is
happening in the world.
I have written of a progressive rapid dissolution of our civilized
organization as the dominant fact of the present time. It is very hard
indeed to keep it in one’s mind here in this city of plenty and lavish
light that anything of the sort is going on. It is amazing how they
splash light about here; the Capitol shines all night like a full moon,
an endless stream of light pours down the Washington Obelisk, light
blinks and glitters and spins about and spills all over the city.
I find it hard to realize the reality of the collapse here myself, and
yet I have seen the streets of one great European city in full daylight
as dead and empty as a skull. I have sought my destination in the chief
thoroughfare of another European capital at night by means of a pocket
electric torch. I at least ought to keep these memories of desolation
clear before me.
I do not see how Americans who have never seen anything of the wrecked
state of Eastern Europe and the shabbiness and privation of the Centre
can be expected to feel and see the vision I find it so hard to keep
vivid in my thoughts. Here is a country where money is still good; the
$10 notes in my pocket assure me I can go down to the Treasury here and
get gold for them whenever I think fit. (I believe them so thoroughly
that I do not even think fit.) My intimations of the progressive
dissolution over there must read like a gloomy fiction. And it is the
hardest, most important fact in the world.
Everywhere here there is festival. I go to splendid balls, to glittering
receptions; I am whirled off to a most hilarious barbecue, an ox in
chains, roasts and drips over a wood fire—think of that in Russia!
Thanksgiving Day was an inordinate feast. The portions of food they give
you in hotels, clubs and restaurants are enormous, by present European
standards; one seems always to be eating little bits and throwing the
rest away.
Neither New York nor Washington shows a trace yet, that I can see, of
the European shadow. There is much unemployment, but not enough yet to
alarm people. Nothing of it has struck upon my perceptions either here
or in New York. In the midst of this gay prosperity comes a letter from
my wife describing how the police had to censor the bitter inscriptions
upon the wreaths that were laid upon the London cenotaph on Armistice
Day and how the veterans of the Great War who marched in the unemployed
processions in London wore pawn tickets in the place of their medals.
I am forced by these contrasts to the question: “Suppose America patches
up a fairly stable peace with Japan; lets Japan accumulate in Manchuria,
Siberia, and finally China; cuts her naval expenditure to nothing, and
allows the rest of the world, including the old English-speaking home,
to slide and go over into the abyss—apart from the moral loss, will she
suffer very greatly?”
That is a very interesting speculation.
I think she may adjust herself to a self-contained system and, in a
sense, pull through. It may involve some very severe stresses. At
present she grows more food than she can eat or waste; she exports
foodstuffs. The American farmer sells so much of his produce for export,
not a very great percentage, but enough to form an important item in his
affairs. Given a Europe and Asia too impoverished and broken up to
import food stuffs, that trade goes. The American farmer will have to
sell to a shrunken demand; he will have either to shrink himself or
undersell his fellow farmer. This will mean bad times for the American
farmer as Europe sinks; farmers will be unable to buy as freely as
usual; many agriculturists will be going out of business.