FOOTNOTE:
[110] In the year of boom to June 1920, on a total trade of $13,350 millions, the excess of exports over imports was $2870 millions. In the year, partly one of depression, to June 1921, on a total trade of $10,150 millions, the excess of exports was $2860 millions.
CHAPTER VII
The Revision of the Treaty and the Settlement of Europe
The deeper and the fouler the bogs into which Mr. Lloyd George leads us, the more credit is his for getting us out. He leads us in to satisfy our desires; he leads us out to save our souls. He hands us down the primrose path and puts out the bonfire just in time. Who, ever before, enjoyed the best of heaven and hell as we do?
In England, opinion has nearly completed its swing, and the Prime Minister is making ready to win a General Election on Forbidding Germany to Pay, Employment for Every one, and a Happier Europe for All. Why not, indeed? But this Faustus of ours shakes too quickly his kaleidoscope of halos and hell–fire, for me to depict the hues as they melt into one another. I shall do better to construct an independent solution, which is possible in the sense that nothing but a change in the popular will is necessary to achieve it, hoping to influence this will a little, but leaving it to those, whose business it is, to gage the moment at which it will be safe to embroider such patterns on a political banner.
If I look back two years and read again what I wrote then, I see that perils which were ahead are now passed safely. The patience of the common people of Europe and the stability of its institutions have survived the worst shocks they will receive. Two years ago the Treaty, which outraged Justice, Mercy, and Wisdom, represented the momentary will of the victorious countries. Would the victims be patient? Or would they be driven by despair and privation to shake Societyʼs foundations? We have the answer now. They have been patient. Nothing very much has happened, except pain and injury to individuals. The communities of Europe are settling down to a new equilibrium. We are almost ready to turn our minds from the avoidance of calamity to the renewal of health.
There have been other influences besides that patience of the common people which often before has helped Europe through worse evils. The actions of those in power have been wiser than their words. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that no parts of the Peace Treaties have been carried out, except those relating to frontiers and to disarmament. Many of the misfortunes which I predicted as attendant on the execution of the Reparation Chapter have not occurred, because no serious attempt has been made to execute it. And, whilst no one can predict with what particular sauce the makers of the Treaty will eat their words, there can no longer be any question of the actual enforcement of this Chapter. And there has been a third factor, not quite in accordance with expectations, paradoxical at first sight, but natural, nevertheless, and concordant with past experience,—the fact that it is in times of growing profits and not in times of growing distress that the working classes stir themselves and threaten their masters. When times are bad and poverty presses on them they sink back again into a weary acquiescence. Great Britain and all Europe have learned this in 1921. Was not the French Revolution rather due perhaps to the growing wealth of eighteenth–century France—for at that time France was the richest country in the world—than to the pressure of taxation or the exactions of the old régime? It is the profiteer, not privation, that makes man shake his chains.
In spite, therefore, of trade depression and disordered exchanges, Europe, under the surface, is much stabler and much healthier than two years ago. The disturbance of minds is less. The organization, destroyed by war, has been partly restored; transport, except in Eastern Europe, is largely repaired; there has been a good harvest, everywhere but in Russia, and raw materials are abundant. Great Britain and the United States and their markets overseas have suffered a cyclical fluctuation of trade prosperity of a greater amplitude than ever before; but there are indications that the worst point is passed.