outside what is now German-Austria, the industrial ruin of this latter state, if she cannot obtain coal from Germany, will be complete.  The case of Germany’s neutral neighbors, who were formerly supplied in part from Great Britain but in large part from Germany, will be hardly less serious.  They will go to great lengths in the direction of making their own supplies to Germany of materials which are essential to her, conditional on these being paid for in coal.  Indeed they are already doing so.[49] With the breakdown of money economy the practice of international barter is becoming prevalent.  Nowadays money in Central and South-Eastern Europe is seldom a true measure of value in exchange, and will not necessarily buy anything, with the consequence that one country, possessing a commodity essential to the needs of another, sells it not for cash but only against a reciprocal engagement on the part of the latter country to furnish in return some article not less necessary to the former.  This is an extraordinary complication as compared with the former almost perfect simplicity of international trade.  But in the no less extraordinary conditions of to-day’s industry it is not without advantages as a means of stimulating production.  The butter-shifts of the Ruhr[50] show how far modern Europe has retrograded in the direction of barter, and afford a picturesque illustration of the low economic organization to which the breakdown of currency and free exchange between individuals and nations is quickly leading us.  But they may produce the coal where other devices would fail.[51]

Yet if Germany can find coal for the neighboring neutrals, France and Italy may loudly claim that in this case she can and must keep her treaty obligations.  In this there will be a great show of justice, and it will be difficult to weigh against such claims the possible facts that, while German miners will work for butter, there is no available means of compelling them to get coal, the sale of which will bring in nothing, and that if Germany has no coal to send to her neighbors she may fail to secure imports essential to her economic existence.

If the distribution of the European coal supplies is to be a scramble in which France is satisfied first, Italy next, and every one else takes their chance, the industrial future of Europe is black and the prospects of revolution very good.  It is a case where particular interests and particular claims, however well founded in sentiment or in justice, must yield to sovereign expediency.  If there is any approximate truth in Mr. Hoover’s calculation that the coal output of Europe has fallen by one-third, a situation confronts us where distribution must be effected with even-handed impartiality in accordance with need, and no incentive can be neglected towards increased production and economical methods of transport.  The establishment by the Supreme Council of the Allies in August, 1919, of a European Coal Commission, consisting of delegates from Great Britain, France, Italy, Belgium, Poland, and Czecho-Slovakia was a wise measure which, properly employed and extended, may prove of great assistance.  But I reserve constructive proposals for Chapter VII.  Here I am only concerned with tracing the consequences, per impossibile, of carrying out the Treaty au pied de lettre.[52]