Europe: An Impressionist View
AN American whom familiarity with the Europe of to-day has not dulled to the contrast with its pre-war condition, quickly detects its unhealthy atmosphere. For a moment he may be persuaded by the superficial normality of things that life flows on the same as formerly. He observes little change in the people who throng the streets and crowd the shops, cafés, and theatres. But once the visitor escapes from the thoughtless prepossessions of a tourist, he needs no guide to tell him that he is in a hospital where nations are the patients. Their symptoms vary from the chills of industrial stagnation and unemployment to the fever of inflationstimulated trade. Unhealed wounds, following the operations of bungling surgeons, drain their vitality. Nightmare visions of Bolshevism and revolution disturb their repose. The morbid antipathies and irritations of illness jar their nerves.
He finds his former European acquaintances abnormally preoccupied with the present. Their thoughts shun the unhappy memories of the recent past. Courage fails them to scan the future. Looking up and looking forward seem forgotten attitudes.
A striking difference between his own countrymen and the men about him impresses itself on his attention. Europeans have lost a faith which Americans still retain — faith in the existing constitution of society and government. His casual conversations with people of the country usually end with a note of hopelessness or a forecast of trouble. If his engagements take him into the right circles he will become familiar with the unconvincing and platitudinous optimism of government officials and other professional hearteners. But even behind their mask of cheerfulness furrows of care are visible.
Are the nations of Europe, then, incurables or convalescents? We Americans naturally rate them on the highway to recovery. We are a youthful people and cherish the illusion of youth that the fountains of health are inexhaustible.
Possibly we are right. Youth as well as age has its peculiar wisdom. Its vision pierces farther, though it may be less cunning in interpreting what it sees. The complacent American abroad may be the truest prophet, little as he looks the part. Wherever we find him domiciled in Europe, he is preparing confidently for a better time to come.
The same is true, though perhaps in a more thoughtful way, of the British. One meets them everywhere, appraising business prospects, and wonders whether Europe may not eventually pay in tolls to their foresightedness all of England’s outlay in the war.
So a person who seeks to study seriously the present situation beyond the Atlantic is brought to a pause between local pessimism and imported opt imism. Gradually, however, certain facts outline themselves distinctly in his mind.
He recognizes that the old Europe has passed away forever. At first glance some may cheat themselves with the fancy that it will return, like the vegetation that even now covers the war-seared fields of France. Indeed physical restoration may come apace. It is precisely because he sees reconstruction only under its material aspects that the average American abroad is an optimist. But the spiritual, intellectual, and social Europe of a decade ago, lor which so many homesick souls are longing, is already as irrecoverable, and in many respects as remote, as the Europe of the Middle Ages.
We have all heard how the bourgeoisie of Russia was exterminated. Since nature abhors a social as much as a physical vacuum, a new bourgeoisie has rushed in there to fill the place of the old. Less attention has been given to the fact that the same thing is happening, though less dramatically, throughout the war-swept nations. There are silent as well as noisy revolutions; old orders can be strangled as well as blown to pieces. Over large areas of the most highly civilized part of the globe, the middle classes our generation has known are being smothered — quietly, and behind the curtains — under an economic incubus that is no less crushing because it is intangible. Not only familiar faces, but familiar types of faces are disappearing from salons and drawing-rooms, from banquet-halls and fashionable lounges, submerged by countenances of class alien, if not blood alien, type.
Were this a mere change of caste upon the stage of European life, the results might be obliterated in a single generation, and the children of the usurping dynasty be indistinguishable from their fathers’ predecessors. But the transformation goes deeper. Both the ascending currents are surcharged with a spirit of unfaith which denies and nullifies the cohesive forces of society. Though the pendulum of public sentiment is swinging just now from the left to the right — from radicalism toward conservatism — its pivot has shifted leftward.
To put it more concretely, thousands of the war-impoverished members of the former middle and upper classes, previously stout defenders of the social status quo, have lost faith in the old order because it failed to protect thenproperty and privileges, and above all because, while permitting them to be cast down, it has exalted others whom they consider less fit to the places which they occupied. In victorious and defeated countries alike, it has been the most conscientious and public-spirited men who have been chosen by an ironical and iconoclastic fate to suffer most. They were the ones who, during the stress of war, subscribed ‘until it hurt’ to public loans and private charities. They may have credits in Heaven for the latter, but their government bonds, measured by the present purchasing power of principal and interest, have shrunk to a microscopic asset. Is it strange, then, that many of these men are inclined to look upon the old society, with its broken promises and belied professions, as a pious swindler? Even in England, where post-war psychology seems by comparison almost as normal as in the United States, an ex-officer, wearing five service ribbons on his breast, said to me, with more seriousness than humor in his voice: ‘Out of every pound I receive, I pay six shillings to the government for winning the war, and I doubt whether it was worth it.’ One night on a Central European sleeping-car, I was awakened by hearing the former Austrian army officer w ho shared my compartment talking in his sleep. The burden of his restless muttering was: Fünf Jahre Krieg — und warum? (Five years of war — and why?) He was returning from a visit to family connections in Italy, — one of the frequent international marriages across the Alps, — and during our conversation the following day commented upon the sameness of mood which prevailed there and in his own country. He saw little worth preserving in the Europe of to-day, and thought God ought to sink the human race under the sea and create a new Adam.
Meanwhile the war-enriched, who in spite of the common talk about their numbers are much fewer t han the warimpoverished, are too newly arrived at their present station to have a distinct class spirit. Indeed one doubts whether, in the Europe we have in prospect for the next generation, they ever will form more than a proletarianoid bourgeoisie. They still envy the ease and share the opinions of the man without a collar. Having fished so successfully in troubled waters they find them a not unpleasant element. For the most part their fortunes are still far from being of the solid sort that court the shadow of a policeman. Many are ‘Get-Rich-Quick Wallingfords ’ who play the millionaire with their last banknote. As a body they are the reverse of a stabilizing element in society.
Perhaps this all makes in the long run for democracy. The true proletariat may recruit new and better teachers and leaders among the men of intellectual training, native refinement, and cult ured heredity who are descending involuntarily to its ranks. It is too early yet to judge of this. What we see to-day, especially in Central Europe, is a multitude of those who were literally the best people sinking silently, often with a sort of Quixotic heroism, beneath the flood, to be lost in the depths of genteel pauperism or to die. It is easy to say: Let them go to work. But even the trained manual worker, fitted by a lifetime of experience to survive in such a crisis, finds it hard to keep his head above water now. In truth many do die. An extreme but suggestive example illustrating this was related to me by an American occupying a responsible official post in one of the late belligerent countries. He received a call one morning from a gentleman of international distinction both in the field of scholarship and of public service. During their interview his eye involuntarily caught the fact that his visitor’s worn but respectable black frock coat, unconsciously thrown open a moment to take a paper from the inside pocket, lacked a lining. The latter had been cut out for more imperative uses. Noting this fleeting but understanding glance, the caller quickly buttoned his coat and abruptly took his leave. Three or four days later he was dead —a vict im of privat ion and wounded pride.
While the old Europe of the middle and upper classes has thus passed away, a new and hardier— though just now somewhat chastened — proletariat has appeared upon the stage. Not only have the working classes won polit ical rights and industrial privileges which they did not possess before, but they have grasped — and this is true of Great Britain as well as the Continent — the idea of proletarian government, even though it be under the forms of democracy rather than a dictatorship, as something possible and tangible — a goal just over the horizon. At the same time, however, faith in millennial socialism seems to have vanished, whisked away during the whirlwind of t he war and its aftermath. These have been years of disillusionment as well as attainment for thinking workingmen. State control of production and distribution, and especially of conditions of employment, is not so popular since the experience with government regulation during the war. Labor leaders talk much less of socializing and of nationalizing industry than formerly. These are topics upon which they are evasive and evidently without clear-cut policies.
In fact, political measures — in the larger sense — are taking priority over economic measures in the minds of t he thinking proletariat. Its members are intent just now upon solidifying their international organization. They look forward to a united world proletariat, instead of to leagues of nations and t he like, as the surest guaranty of permanent peace. This is good political strategy for t he leaders, since the workingmen of Europe are interested to-day above all other things in preventing another war.
International organization, then, is not sought as an end in itself. It is regarded merely as a next step — the logical and imperative next step — toward attaining other ends. The first of these is the prevention of war, and the next in order of importance is establishing a world-wide closed shop.
A far more baffling question is the sentiment of the working people toward violent revolution. Were it permissible to judge from chance conversations with manual workers — longshoremen, taxi-drivers, building mechanics, railway yardmen, and the like — it would seem that these classes of labor generally favor direct action. A British railway porter’s ‘Wait till we break loose,’was typical of this spirit. But those responsible labor leaders whom I had an opportunity to meet in several European capitals and at the Geneva Labor Conference, were clearly averse to tactics of force. In Vienna and Berlin, perhaps because the Socialists of Austria and Germany have had a taste of political responsibility, even workers of the rank and file professed to be conservative. However, their acts were not in harmony with their professions.
One frosty Sunday last November I trudged for several hours through a w orkingmen’s suburb of Berlin, famous in the days of the Red uprisings as a hotbed of Radicalism. I sought out places where distress, if existent, would be most visible. Nowhere in the streets and courtyards — there were practically no alleys — did I see a ragged, illshod, or apparently underclad child. Neither did the swarms of children playing on the pavements show evidence of undernourishment. Doubtless behind closed doors the hidden tragedies of want which every metropolis hides were being enacted. But, so far as the surface showed, far worse conditions than were visible in Berlin could be found within five minutes’ walk of some of our best avenues in America. To be sure, Communist election posters, picturing bourgeois ogres sucking the blood of emaciated workingmen, and containing exhortations to the proletariat that in our country would have set in wrathful motion all the police machinery of the government, still clung unmutilated to the walls as reminders of the recent municipal campaign. But otherwise things looked like old-time Germany.
Yet the following two days —Monday and Tuesday — the very streets through which I had walked were completely in possession of rioting mobs, which overpowered t he police and sacked numerous provision stores and mercantile establishments. Similar incidents occurred sporadically throughout the city — even occasionally in downtown districts — for several days thereafter. Clearly a dangerous habit of direct action has taken possession of the German working classes, w hatever their professions. Property is no longer sacred. The doctrine, ‘Take what you want, you made it,’ has found many willing converts.
Vienna had a still more ominous experience a few days later, when rioters pillaged well toward two hundred of its best hotels, shops, and cafés. It w as as if the employees of the East River factories in New York and Brooklyn, reënforced by the nondescript rabble which every city harbors, had marched up Fifth Avenue and Broadway from Madison Square to Central Park, breaking plate-glass windows, forcing locked doors, and pillaging every fashionable store, hotel, and restaurant along their way. Here again there is no escaping the impression that such acts are less the automatic reflexes of economic despair than the symptoms of a new psychology of the masses, which will not tolerate the social contrasts — the gulfs between the luxury of the rich and the privation of the poor — which were accepted with only muttered protest before the war. For while the condition of many workmen in all parts of Europe is distressing, we have no reason to believe that it is worse in Berlin and V ienna to-day than it has been on earlier occasions. In Germany, at least, wages have risen faster than the cost of living, because rents and food prices are kept down artificially by the government. Nor is there as much unemployment. in either Austria or Germany as in America and England. To a transient observer, at least, it would seem that social discontent, seething to the bursting point, does not necessarily imply unprecedented suffering among the people whom it drives to action.
Possibly, therefore, they go too far in their materialistic reaction from the ethical enthusiasms of the war, who ascribe Europe’s present unsettlement solely to economic causes. Undoubtedly we can conceive of a degree of material well-being that would make everybody contented, at least until they fell victims to dyspepsia and hypochondria. But it is unwarranted optimism to assume that any amount of economic recovery within prudent forecast will permanently lay the spirit of revolution that still stalks through the mine galleries, the factory aisles, and the tenement courts and corridors of Europe.
To be sure the immediate cause of the V ienna disorders was popular exasperation at the sudden decline of the krone, with its accompanying unsettlement of wages and prices. It would be wrong to minimize the effect of unstable currency, and of the impossible public burdens and the international uncertainties from which it proceeds, in fostering an insurgent spirit among the people. But we may admit all this without feeling assured that Europe’s dangerous mood will respond to economic remedies. So much of the Continent’s physical wealth remains apparently intact, that the impression of post-war poverty is not particularly vivid to the unthinking masses. Houses, fields, factories, mines, and forests remain, to superficial observation, about what they were eight years ago. Indeed during the war industrial plants expanded conspicuously. Except inside a limited devastated area — too small to count in the larger experience of nations — the average man is living in the same physical environment he has always known. The new evils that upset the routine of his life are intangible and elusive. He cannot understand why they should manifest themselves in concrete discomforts and privations. Therefore he ascribes them to the crafty malice of personified capital, the delinquencies of a personified society, or to some other personal devil — usually a foreign power. Such convictions once rooted in his mind are not easily eradicated.
One result of this is that the people of Europe seem to be bound together by common hatreds more than by common loves. The inspiration of class comradeship is hatred of other classes, and national unity is based on antagonism to other nations. Patriotism becomes the sentiment of hating your country’s neighbors. It is peculiarly the indulgence of the middle and upper ranks of society; the working people satisfy their emotional longings with class hatred and are passive or friendly toward the workers of other countries. In fact the most powerful political force in Europe to-day, especially if measured by its prospective development, is the internationalism of the proletariat.
Probably the growth of even a militant class internationalism should be rated a recuperative process. It indicates a partial healing of war wounds. But there are other constructive forces at work of more immediate interest. When a brilliant Austrian economist, after a most mournful review of the apparently hopeless situation of his own country and some of its neighbors, inconsistently admitted that conditions were improving langsam aber planmässig, — let us put it, ‘ slowly but logically,’ — the statement was not so paradoxical as it seemed. The feeling is very general that the dead centre in Europe’s recovery has been passed, and that such scanty signs of improvement as appear now are self-consistent indications of progress and not the fallacious symptoms of mere temporary rallies.
In the first place it is the common belief that the present cycle of political overturns and violent class revolutions has nearly run its course. This very belief is in itself a factor of safety. A day or two after the ex-Emperor Charles entered Hungary, last October, and while the sensational press was still printing alarmist reports concerning the broken peace of the Danube Valley, delegates from all the countries directly affected were calmly discussing, around a long table in a seaside hotel at Port o Rose, ways and means for restoring facilities of communication and freedom of commerce throughout the natural economic unit which their joint territories form. Not only were these governments and their people too nerveshaken a year ago to have held a meeting under such conditions, but, had the meeting occurred, its debates would never have ended in the fruitful agreements reached at Porto Rose. Fear, which is the mother of intractability, is subsiding. A spirit of revolution still walks in Europe, as we have said, and a determination eventually to overturn the political settlements of Versailles and Saint-Germain is just as strong as ever; but some instinct bids the discontented wait. They are lulled by the languor of convalescence.
Slowly the mists are rolling back from Russia, disclosing great wreckage and ruin, but also wide fields of opportunity. Russia promises to afford the shock that will liberate Europe from the inhibitions of its present introspective paralysis. We forget our troubles when we are helping others. Russia’s reconstruction may stimulate the reconstruction of her western neighbors. It would not do to draw the parallel too closely, but the former empire of the Tsars may prove a Great East that will serve the same function in restoring Europe’s economic health, that our Great West performed so salutarily for us after our early panic eras.
. An ironical equity inspires the economic laws to which our present world must bend. The war enriched some nations at the cost of others. Switzerland, Scandinavia, Spain, Holland, Japan — to say nothing of our own country — accumulated wealth rapidly during hostilities. Now all these nations are involuntarily disgorging to their needy neighbors. Their citizens are estimated to have made an outright gift of about a billion dollars to Germany alone, this amount representing the difference between t ire sum they paid that country for paper marks, bought on speculation, and the sum they will eventually obtain from their investment. The people of these war-nursed countries also buried fortunes in factories, ships, and other enterprises, which are now unprofitable and lying half employed or entirely idle, because their fellow countrymen will not work for the wages current in the war-impoverished nations. Reckoned in the same money, the wages of a German machinist today are less than one half t he wages of a Japanese machinist, and this discrepancy runs through the whole list of trades. Consequently German goods are flooding even Japan’s nearest and longest established markets. The Elbe at Hamburg is crowded with British, American, and other foreign shipping, waiting for reconditioning and repairs, while dockyards on the Clyde are idle and the British government must tax its citizens to support its unemployed. A ton of pig-iron costs less in Germany to-day than it cost before the war, while it costs a third more than its prewar price in the United States. The Swiss clock industry is at a standstill, and that little country’s idle workers number into the hundred thousands, while I bought a German-made clock in Hamburg—a traveler’s radiolite alarmclock of excellent workmanship, in a silk-lined red morocco case—for the equivalent of ninety cents. Were such conditions as these to continue permanently, American, British, Swiss, Dutch, and Scandinavian mechanics and factory operatives would in time become as scarce as white servants in China.
However, this grotesque situation promises to be as transient as it is abnormal. It indicates that pauperism and affluence do not long endure side by side in the modern community of nations, that there is a common level near which the wages, prices, and standard of living in all of them tend to come to rest. We can watch with equanimity what might otherwise seem disconcerting phenomena when we know that they merely mark stages in a normal process of convalescence.
The main thing is not to interrupt that beneficent process by further political indiscretions. Our international politicians and politico-economists suggest at times a board of engineers summoned by some freak of misunderstanding to treat an organic malady. Part of them are eager to rebuild their patient — Europe — precisely as she was before; others, like the architecturally-minded French, wish to adorn her with a political façade, which must not vary in the slightest detail from a preconceived design which they submit annexed to their prescription, leaving the interior unchanged; while for the interior itself a thousand plans are presented by as many schools of social sanitarians and remodelers. Happily for the world these well-intentioned and busy gentlemen work so at cross purposes that they largely nullify each other’s efforts, thus giving Mother Nature an opportunity to apply her own restoratives.