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INTRODUCTORY

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occasional visit to London was a strange experience.England still stands outside Europe. Europe 's voice-less tremors do not reach her. Europe is apart andEngland is not of her flesh and body. But Europe issolid with herself. France, Germany, Italy, Austria ,and Holland, Russia and Roumania and Poland ,throb together, and their structure and civilisationare essentially one. They flourished together, theyhave rocked together in a war, which we, in spiteof our enormous contributions and sacrifices (likethough in a less degree than America), economicallystood outside, and they may fall together. In thislies the destructive significance of the Peace of Paris.If the European Civil War is to end with France andItaly abusing their momentary victorious power todestroy Germany and Austria-Hungary now pros-trate, they invite their own destruction also, beingso deeply and inextricably intertwined with theirvictims by hidden psychic and economic bonds. Atany rate an Englishman who took part in the Con-ference of Paris and was during those months amember of the Supreme Economic Council of theAllied Powers, was bound to become, for him anew experience, a European in his cares and out-look. There, at the nerve centre of the European system, his British preoccupations must largely fallaway and he must be haunted by other and moredreadful spectres. Paris wagj a nightmare, andevery one there was morbid. A sense of impend-

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