‘Suddenly all this elaborate structure of economic life was swept away. Vienna, instead of being the vital centre of fifty millions of people, finds itself a derelict city with a province of six millions. It is cut off from its coal supplies, from its food supplies, from its factories, from everything that means existence. It is enveloped by tariff walls.’
The writer goes on to explain that the evils are not limited to Austria. In this unhappy Balkanised Society that the peace has created at the heart of Europe, every State is at issue with its neighbours: the Czechs with the Poles, the Hungarians with the Czechs, the Rumanians with the Hungarians, and all with Austria. The whole Empire is parcelled out into quarrelling factions, with their rival tariffs, their passports and their animosities. All free intercourse has stopped, all free interchange of commodities has ceased. Each starves the other and is starved by the other. ‘I met a banker travelling from Buda-Pest to Berlin by Vienna and Bavaria. I asked him why he went so far out of his way to get to his goal, and he replied that it was easier to do that than to get through the barbed-wire entanglements of Czecho-Slovakia. There is great hunger in Bohemia, and it is due largely to the same all-embracing cause. Formerly the Czech peasants used to go to Hungary to gather the harvest and returned with corn as part payment. Now intercourse has stopped, the Hungarian cornfields are without the necessary labour, and the Czech peasant starves at home, or is fed by the American Relief Fund. “One year of peace,” said Herr Renner, the Chancellor, to me, “has wrought more ruin than five years of war.”’
Mr Gardiner’s final verdict[6] does not in essence differ from that of Mr Hoover:—
‘It is the levity of mind which has plunged this great city into ruin that is inexplicable. The political dismemberment of Austria might be forgiven. That was repeatedly declared by the Allies not to be an object of the War; but the policy of the French, backed by the industrious propaganda of a mischievous newspaper group in this country, triumphed and the promise was dishonoured. Austria-Hungary was broken into political fragments. That might be defended as a political necessity. But the economic dismemberment was as gratuitous as it was deadly. It could have been provided against if ordinary foresight had been employed. Austria-Hungary was an economic unit, a single texture of the commercial, industrial, and financial interests.’[7]
We have talked readily enough in the past of this or that being a ‘menace to civilisation.’ The phrase has been applied indifferently to a host of things from Prussian Militarism to the tango. No particular meaning was attached to the phrase, and we did not believe that the material security of our civilisation—the delivery of the letters and the milk in the morning, and the regular running of the ‘Tubes’—would ever be endangered in our times.
But this is what has happened in a few months. We have seen one of the greatest and most brilliant capitals of Europe, a city completely untouched by the physical devastation of war, endowed beyond most with the equipment of modern technical learning and industry, with some of the greatest factories, medical schools and hospitals of our times, unable to save its children from death by simple starvation—unable, with all that equipment, to provide them each with a little milk and a few ounces of flour every day.
5
The Limits of Political Control
It is sometimes suggested that as political factors (particularly the drawing of frontiers) entered to some extent at least into the present distribution of population, political forces can re-distribute that population. But re-distribution would mean in fact killing.
So to re-direct the vast currents of European industry as to involve a great re-distribution of the population would demand a period of time so great that during the necessary stoppage of the economic process most of the population concerned would be dead—even if we could imagine sufficient stability to permit of these vast changes taking place according to the naïve and what we now know to be fantastic, programme of our Treaties. And since the political forces—as we shall see—are extremely unstable, the new distribution would presumably again one day undergo a similarly murderous modification.