s no problem of abstract politics or ethics with
which I here confront your minds, but one of concrete and immediate
urgency. Distinctively economic in its substance, it brings right into
the daylight the hitherto obscure issue of the duty of nations as
members of an actual or potential society of nations. As a result of
the destruction of war a large part of Europe lies today in economic
ruin. By that I do not only, or chiefly, refer to the material havoc
wrought by the direct operations of war in France, Belgium, Poland,
Servia, and elsewhere. I mean the imminent starvation which this winter
awaits large populations of those and other countries, both our allies
and our late enemies, and the misery and anarchy arising from their
utter inability to resume the ordinary processes of productive
industry. It is not only food and clothing but raw materials, tools,
machinery, transport, and fuel that are lacking over a large part of
the European continent. If they are left to their own unaided
resources, millions of these people, especially in Russia, Poland,
Austria, and sections of the late Turkish Empire, will perish. They
cannot feed themselves. The land remains, but large tracts of it have
been untilled; large numbers of the peasantry have fallen in the war,
or are wandering as disbanded soldiers, far from home; the women and
the aged and the children, underfed and broken in health and spirit,
are utterly unequal to the task of growing the food for their
livelihood. The factories and workshops are idle or are ill-equipped,
for materials, tools, and fuel are everywhere lacking; unemployment
holds large industrial populations in destitution and despair. Even
where plant and materials are present, the physical strength of the
workers is so let down that efficient productivity is impossible. Even
in countries that are not war-broken, the blockade, and the long
stoppage of normal commerce, have caused great scarcity of many
important foods and materials, and famine prices bring grievous
suffering to the poorer classes. Britain alone among the belligerent
countries is not in immediate distress, but only because she has had
larger outside resources and larger borrowing powers on which to draw.
Even the few neutral nations which are said to have profited by war are
severely crippled by the lack of some essentials of their economic
life.

All in different degrees are economic victims of the havoc and the
waste of war. It is not