The generous way in which the United States came to the rescue of starving peoples in the early days of the war was not deserted by her when the armistice and the peace that followed revealed the frightful distress in Poland, Hungary, and Austria. While the doom of these people was being pronounced by statesmen not naturally cruel, but nevertheless sentencing great populations to starvation, and while the blockade was still in force, American representatives of a higher law than that of vengeance went into these ruined countries and organized relief on a great scale for suffering childhood and despairing womanhood. I saw the work of the American Relief Committee in Vienna and remember it as one of the noblest achievements I have seen. All ancient enmity, all demands for punishment or reparation, went down before the agony of Austria. Vienna, a city of two and a half million souls, once the capital of a great empire, for centuries a rendezvous of gayety and genius, the greatest school of medicine in the world, the birthplace and home of many great musicians, and the dwelling-place of a happy, careless, and luxurious people, was now delivered over to beggary and lingering death. With all its provinces amputated so that it was cut off from its old natural resources of food and raw material, it had no means of livelihood and no hope. Austrian paper money had fallen away to mere trash. The krone tumbled down to the value of a cent, and it needed many kronen to buy any article of life—2,000 for a suit of clothes, 800 for a pair of boots, 25 for the smallest piece of meat in any restaurant. Middle-class people lived almost exclusively on cabbage soup, with now and then potatoes. A young doctor I met had a salary of 60 kronen a week. When I asked him how he lived he said: "I don't. This is not life." The situation goes into a nutshell when I say—as an actual fact—that the combined salaries of the Austrian Cabinet amounted, according to the rate of exchange, to the wages of three old women who look after the lavatories in Lucerne. Many people, once rich, lived on bundles of paper money which they flung away as leaves are scattered from autumn trees. They were the lucky ones, though ruin stared them in the eyes. By smuggling, which became an open and acknowledged system, they could afford to pay the ever-mounting prices of the peasants for at least enough food to keep themselves alive. But the working-classes, who did not work because factories were closed for lack of coal and raw material, just starved, keeping the flame of life aflicker by a thin and miserable diet, until the weakest died. Eighty-three per cent. of the children had rickets in an advanced stage. Children of three and four had never sat up or walked. Thousands of children were just living skeletons, with gaunt cheek-bones and bloodless lips. They padded after one in the street, like little old monkeys, holding out their claws for alms.
The American Relief Committee got to work in the early months of 1919. They brought truck-loads of food to Vienna, established distributing centers and feeding centers in old Viennese palaces, and when I was there in the early autumn they were giving 200,000 children a meal a day. I went round these places with a young American naval officer—Lieutenant Stockton—one of the leading organizers of relief, and I remember him as one of the best types of manhood I have ever met up and down the roads of life. His soul was in his job, but there was nothing sloppy about his sentiment or his system. He was a master of organization and details and had established the machinery of relief, with Austrian ladies doing the drudgery with splendid devotion (as he told me, and as I saw), so that it was in perfect working order. As a picture of childhood receiving rescue from the agony of hunger, I remember nothing so moving nor so tragic as one of those scenes when I saw a thousand children sitting down to the meal that came from America. Here before them in that bowl of soup was life and warmth. In their eyes there was the light of ecstasy, the spiritual gratitude of children for the joy that had come after pain. For a little while they had been reprieved from the hunger-death.
American agents of the Y. M. C. A., nurses, members of American missions and philanthropic societies, penetrated Europe in far and strange places. I met a crowd of them on the "Entente train" from Vienna to Paris, and in various Italian towns. They were all people with shrewd, observant eyes, a quiet sense of humor, and a repugnance to be "fudged off" from actual facts by any humbug of theorists. They studied the economic conditions of the countries through which they traveled, studied poverty by personal visits to slum areas and working-class homes, and did not put on colored spectacles to stare at the life in which they found themselves. The American girls were as frank and courageous as the men in their facing of naked truth, and they had no false prudery or sentimental shrinking from the spectacle of pain and misery. Their greatest drawback was an ignorance of foreign languages, which prevented many of them from getting more than superficial views of national psychology, and I think many of them suffered from the defect of admirable qualities by a humorous contempt of foreign habits and ideas. That did not make them popular with people whom they were not directly helping. Their hearty laughter, their bunching together in groups in which conversation was apt to become noisy, and their cheerful disregard of conventionality in places where Europeans were on their "best behavior" had an irritating effect at times upon foreign observers, who said: "Those Americans have not learned good manners. They are the new barbarians in Europe." English people, traveling as tourists before the war, were accused of the same lack of respect and courtesy, and were unpopular for the same reason.
Toward the end of 1919 and in the beginning of 1920 I came into touch with a number of Americans who came to Europe on business enterprises or to visit the battlefields. In private conversation they did not disguise their sense of distress that there were strained relations between the public opinion of England and America. Several of them asked me if it were true that England was as hostile to America as the newspapers tried to make out. By way of answer I asked them whether America were as hostile to us as the newspapers asked us to believe. They admitted at once that this was a just and illuminating reply, because the intelligent section of American society—people of decent education and good will—was far from being hostile to England, but on the contrary believed firmly that the safety and happiness of the world depended a good deal upon Anglo-American friendship. It was true that the average citizen of the United States, even if he were uninfluenced by Irish-American propaganda, believed that England was treating Ireland stupidly and unjustly—to which I answered that the majority of English people agreed with that view, though realizing the difficulty of satisfying Ireland by any measure short of absolute independence and separation. It was also true, they told me, that there was a general suspicion in the United States that England had made a big grab in the peace terms for imperial aggrandizement, masked under the high-sounding name of "mandate" for the protection of African and Oriental states. My reply to that, not as a political argument, but as simple sincerity, was the necessity of some control of such states, if the power of the Turk were to be abolished from his old strongholds, and a claim for the British tradition as an administrator of native races; but I added another statement which my American friends found it hard to believe, though it is the absolute truth, as nine Englishmen out of ten will affirm. So far from desiring an extension of our empire, the vast and overwhelming majority of British people, not only in England, but in our dominions beyond the seas, are aghast at the new responsibilities which we have undertaken, and would relinquish many of them, especially in Asia, with a sense of profound relief. We have been saddled with new and perilous burdens by the ambition of certain statesmen who have earned the bitter animosity of the great body of the British people entirely out of sympathy with their imperialistic ideals.
I have not encountered a single American in Europe who has not expressed, with what I believe is absolute sincerity, a friendly and affectionate regard for England, whose people and whose ways of life they like, and whose language, literature, and ideals belong to our united civilization. They have not found in England any of that hostility which they were told to expect, apart from a few blackguardly articles in low-class journals. On the contrary, they have found a friendly folk, grateful for their help in the war, full of admiration for American methods, and welcoming them to our little old island.
They have gone back to the United States with the conviction, which I share, with all my soul, that commercial rivalry, political differences, and minor irritations, inevitable between two progressive peoples of strong character, must never be allowed to divide our two nations, who fundamentally belong to the same type of civilization and to the same code of principles. Most of the so-called hostility between us is the mere froth of foul-mouthed men on both sides, and the rest of it is due to the ignorance of the masses. We must get to know each other, as the Americans in Europe have learned to know us and to like us, and as all of us who have crossed the Atlantic the other way about have learned to know and like the American people. For the sake of the future of the world and all the hopes of humanity we must get to the heart of each other and establish a lasting and unbreakable friendship. It is only folly that will prevent us.