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.

CHAPTER II

EUROPE BEFORE THE WAR

Before 1870 different parts of the small continent of Europe had specialized in their own products; but, taken as a whole, it was substantially self-subsistent.  And its population was adjusted to this state of affairs.

After 1870 there was developed on a large scale an unprecedented situation, and the economic condition of Europe became during the next fifty years unstable and peculiar.  The pressure of population on food, which had already been balanced by the accessibility of supplies from America, became for the first time in recorded history definitely reversed.  As numbers increased, food was actually easier to secure.  Larger proportional returns from an increasing scale of production became true of agriculture as well as industry.  With the growth of the European population there were more emigrants on the one hand to till the soil of the new countries, and, on the other, more workmen were available in Europe to prepare the industrial products and capital goods which were to maintain the emigrant populations in their new homes, and to build the railways and ships which were to make accessible to Europe food and raw products from distant sources.  Up to about 1900 a unit of labor applied to industry yielded year by year a purchasing power over an increasing quantity of food.  It is possible that about the year 1900 this process began to be reversed, and a diminishing yield of Nature to man’s effort was beginning to reassert itself.  But the tendency of cereals to rise in real cost was balanced by other improvements; and—­one of many novelties—­the resources of tropical Africa then for the first time came into large employ, and a great traffic in oil-seeds began to bring to the table of Europe in a new and cheaper form one of the essential foodstuffs of mankind.  In this economic Eldorado, in this economic Utopia, as the earlier economists would have deemed it, most of us were brought up.