VI

EUROPE AFTER THE TREATY

233

law yet further from equilibrium rather than towardsit, they favour a continuance of the present conditionsinstead of a recovery from them. An inefficient,unemployed, disorganised Europe faces us, torn byinternal strife and international hate, fighting, starv-ing, pillaging, and lying. What warrant is there fora picture of less sombre colours ?

I have paid little heed in this book to Russia ,Hungary , or Austria. 1 There the miseries of lifeand the disintegration of society are too notoriousto require analysis; and these countries are alreadyexperiencing the actuality of what for the rest ofEurope is still in the realm of prediction. Yet theycomprehend a vast territory and a great popula-tion, and are an extant example of how much mancan suffer and how far society can decay. Aboveall, they are the signal to us of how in the finalcatastrophe the malady of the body passes over intomalady of the mind. Economic privation proceedsby easy stages, and so long as men suffer it patientlythe outside world cares little. Physical efficiency

1 The terms of the Peace Treaty imposed on the Austrian Republic bearno relation to the real facts of that State's desperate situation. The ArbciterZeitung of Vienna on June 4, 1919, commented on them as follows:"Never has the substance of a treaty of peace so grossly betrayed theintentions which were said to have guided its construction as is the casewith this Treaty . . . in which every provision is permeated with ruthless-ness and pitilessness, in "which no breath of human sympathy can be de-tected, which flies in the face of everything which binds man to man,which is a crime against humanity itself, against a suffering and torturedpeople." I am acquainted in detail with the Austrian Treaty and I waspresent when some of its terms were being drafted, but I do not find it easyto rebut the justice of this outburst.