STONE & WEBSTER

JOURNAL

AUGUST, 1920

EDITORIAL COMMENT

Europe Today and Tomorrow

We confess to a certain pride in this issue of the JOURNAL. Knowing that a number of competent observers were about to arrive home from different parts of Europe, we, so to speak, met them at the pier and placed them one and all under bonds promptly to furnish the JOURNAL with such views of the European situation as they were able to gather. As a result, this may properly be termed an International Number.

Their articles are presented in logical sequence. The first is a joint contribution by Mr. Charles A. Stone and Mr. Edwin S. Webster. It is interesting and significant, in the first place, because the impressions left in their minds by what they saw and heard are identical. They traveled together, followed the line of battle-fields in France and Belgium, saw the evidences of devastation, noted the progress in rehabilitation, and conversed with leading authorities in these two countries and in England regarding the real nature of the situation and the outlook for the future. Thus, from them we get a comprehensive view of Western Europe, and yet one not lacking minutiae.

In the second article, Mr. Ralph Adams Cram provides a wealth of details regarding the devastated region. His pen pictures reflect the righteous indignation of a distinguished architect, of a leading authority on medieval architecture. Mr. E. G. Allen, who contributes the third article, visited the battlefields, but his remarks are for the most part confined to Italy, a country regarding which Americans have in the last few years acquired quickened interest. Last but not least, there is Mr. Wadsworth's article on Bolshevism. By reason of his repeated trips to Eastern Europe in behalf of the Rockefeller Foundation and the American Red Cross, Mr. Wadsworth has had excep

tional opportunities to study this sinister phase of European unrest.

These first-hand impressions will perhaps in some measure clear our mental atmosphere regarding Europe. The situation in the old world has so many divergent factors that to most persons it seems impossible to view it in perspective. Our difficulty is that of the man who could not see the forest on account of the trees. It might seem that this country ought to be able to regard European affairs with detachment, owing to its supposed remoteness from the scene of action, and thus to be able to reach a balanced judgment as to how things are going. But this is by no means the case, for our situation is, as a matter of fact, too indissolubly bound up with that of Europe. In the first place, Europe owes us ten billion dollars. Then, too, she is our best customer, and we are too much concerned about her future purchasing power to view her current happenings dispassionately. Furthermore, many of the things that now characterize her situation acutely characterize ours also high cost of living, high wages and lowered efficiency of labor, social unrest, high taxation, debilitated transportation, and dislocated governmental policies. We are all keyed up by our own problems, and every day brings fresh news across the water of a disturbing nature.

Yet it ought to be possible to look at world affairs with some measure of calmness, and according to Mr. Stone and Mr. Webster the most experienced minds in Western Europe appear to be so regarding them.

Certain things are inevitable in this life; intelligence is bound to triumph over ignorance, efficiency over inefficiency, the determination to live over the determination to commit suicide. Unless a people is far gone in moral decadence, it will listen to the dictates of stern necessity and, in the long run, govern its conduct accordingly. There is no race in Europe which today, taken as a whole, has any desire to shatter the prosperity which it has built up in the past. The trouble is, millions of ignorant and thoughtless persons, as well in this country as elsewhere, think they can take the social structure to pieces and reconstruct it along lines immediately productive of better results. Hope lies in the fact, however, that it does not take much suffering to make such persons see new light. And the number of such persons is after all comparatively small.

Take the case of France. Four of the contributors to this

issue of the JOURNAL bring out the fact that the French peasants are working as hard as it is possible to work getting the agriculture of France back to pre-war conditions. One reason for this is that the peasants of that country own most of the land and cultivate it as proprietors. They have too much at stake not to cultivate it with the highest intensity. Even if we should assume that they have no patriotic incentive (which would be very far from the truth), they are automatically impelled by sheer necessity to work their hardest.

Russia affords us another picture. There the peasants have but one desire to possess land. It is significant, however, that they will not cultivate it if they cannot have the product of it. Here is an object lesson in Socialism. It is said time and again that men will work as hard and as efficiently under a policy of state ownership as under the historic policy of individual ownership, but Russia has, in the last two years, given the lie to this assertion. As soon as the Soviet government began to take over the products of agriculture, the peasants stopped raising crops in excess of their own personal and immediate needs. The moment that government takes its hands off, the peasants will unquestionably speed up in excess of their former activity.

It will not take Europe very long to eat up all its accumulated capital; that is, all that can be eaten - you cannot put railroads and factories and mines and public buildings into your stomach. When the capital that can actually be consumed in keeping life in the human body is lowered to a certain point, the resulting physical hardship will make every one forget everything except increasing the supply as fast as possible. That is as certain as that two times two makes four. An empty stomach is one of the best means of knocking sense into a thoughtless head.

The French peasants know this at first hand. The so-called industrial workers, whose contact with the land has been lost, and who do not think habitually in terms of seed time and harvest, have to learn it by indirect means. They do not keep track of the visible supply of food, and clothing, and fuel, and building materials; and when the prices of necessaries go up and up, they attribute the fact more to profiteering than to growing scarcity. Obsessed by the idea of profiteering, they slacken their own work and thus make harder the task of those who are doing their best to keep the world from starving and freezing.