If it has lasted as long as it has, it is because it was, at least from the part of one section of the Entente, not the road to peace, but because it was a method of crushing down Germany.
If a people had conditions for developing rapidly it was Czeko-Slovakia. But also with the intention of hurting Germany and the German peoples, a Czeko-Slovak State was created which has also its own tremendous crisis of nationality. A Czeko-Slovakia with a population of eight to nine million people represented a compact ethnical unity. Instead, they have added five and a half million people of different nationalities, amongst whom about 4,000,000 Germans, with cities which are the most German in the world, as Pilsen, Karlsbad, Reichenberg, etc. What is even more serious is that the 4,000,000 Germans are attached to Germany, and, having a superior culture and civilization, will never resign themselves to being placed under the Czeks.
Czeko-Slovakia had mineral riches, industrial concerns and solid agriculture, and a culture spread among the people—all the conditions for rising rapidly. All these advantages risk being annulled by the grave and useless insult to the Germans and Magyars.
Not only is the situation of Europe in every way uncertain, but there is a tendency in the groups of the victors on the Continent of Europe to increase the military budgets. The relationships of trade are being restored only slowly; commerce is spoken of as an aim. In Italy the dangers and perils of reopening trade with Germany have been seriously discussed; customs duties are raised every day; the industrial groups find easy propaganda for protection. Any limitation of competition is a duty, whether it be the enemy of yesterday or the enemy of to-day, and so the greatest evils of protection are camouflaged under patriotism.
None of the countries which have come out of the War on the Continent have a financial position which helps toward a solid situation. All the financial documents of the various countries, which I have collected and studied with great care, contain enormous masses of expenses which are the consequences of the War; those of the conquering countries also contain enormous aggregations of expenses which are or can become the cause of new wars.
The conquered countries have not actually any finance. Germany has an increase of expenses which the fall of the mark renders more serious. In 1920 she spent not less than ninety-two milliards, ruining her circulation. How much has she spent in 1921?
Austria and Hungary have budgets which are simply hypotheses. The last Austrian budget, for 1921, assigned a sum of seventy-one milliards of crowns for expenses, and this for a poor country with 7,000,000 inhabitants.
A detailed examination of the financial situation of Czeko-Slovakia, of Rumania, and of the Serbo-Croat States gives results which are at the least alarming. Even Greece, which until yesterday had a solid structure, gallops now in a madness of expenditure which exceeds all her resources, and if she does not find a means to make peace with Turkey she will find her credit exhausted. The most ruinous of all is the situation of Poland, whose finance is certainly not better regulated than that of the Bolsheviks of Moscow, to judge from the course of the Polish mark and the Russian rouble if anyone gets the idea of buying them on an international market.
The situation of the exchange since the War has not sensibly bettered even for the great countries, and it is extraordinarily worse for the other countries.
In June, 1921, France had a circulation of about thirty-eight milliard of francs, Belgium six milliard of francs, Italy of about eighteen milliards; Great Britain, between State notes and Bank of England notes, had hardly £434,000,000 sterling. Actually, among the continental countries surviving the War, Italy is the country which has made the greatest efforts not to augment the circulation but to increase the duties; also because she had no illusions of rebuilding her finance and her national economy on an enemy indemnity.