g.

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 w