The labor journal. [volume] (Everett, Wash.) 1909-1976, 1919-04-04
Article 2

knowledge of social and political
conditions abroad is so full, exact
and unusual that he is the conf
Dental advisor on European affairs
to the highest authorities in this
country. This man said to me two
weeks ago in Paris
Are the people of the United
States ready to drop every other
consideration but Europe starving
and broken? Are they willing to
sacrifice profits, business and COM
fort to save Europe from ruin?
/ said off-hand that l did not
think they were.
"Then," he said, European CIV
ilization is doomed. You will see
in the next six months the begin
ming of a cataclysm such as you
never imagined could be possible.
When many millions of people are
starving and desperate, disappoint-
ed and Disguised, the one thing that
is certain about them is that they
will pull the props out from under
whatever system exists at the time.
In Europe the number that in the
next few months will be starving
is so enormous and so widespread
and the conditions in which they
exist are so terrible that we can ex-
pect the worst.
"There are two things that could
save them and save civilization,
One is food supply, which would re-
lieve their physical suffering, and
the other is the League of Nations,
which would give them a substan-
tial reason to hope that this war
and their sufferings had not been
utterly for nothing.
sit is the combination of their
distress and their disappointment
that makes the situation so pecul-
iarly bad. They cannot see so far
any advantage for anybody out of
the war except the transfer of some
territory and islands from one pow
err to another. OF course, they are
wrong about this, but so they look
at it.
"The United States is the only
nation in the world that can give
them the least help. 1t has food
enough; it can keep them from
starving. 1t has influence enough
to make the League of Nations a
fact, and thereby give the world
hope and courage to go ahead on
the accustomed lines. Everything
rests in the hands of the United
States. What will it do with the
most wonderful opportunity any
nation ever had?"
This man Lointed out the unde-
niable fact that every other civil
ization, Assyrian, Egyptian, Gre
clan, Roman, had gone down in
some CONFUSION and that there was
no reason to think ours was more
sacred. He thought that if it was
worth saving from one kind of enc
my it was worth saving from anoth-
er. Autocracy was the visible foe
that had attacked 1t on one side
and had been defeated, and famine
was the invisible foe that was now
assailing it on the other.
He is a serious minded and reas-
oning man; he would not spy a
danger where none existed. He
had been lately in Central and East
ern Europe and what he said about
conditions there exactly agreed
with all reports from all other sour
ces.
The worlds attention has been
so exclusively fastened upon the
Peace Conference and peace terms.
it has overlooked the new and per-
haps greater storm that is brewing.
For just at the time, when the
period of acute distress is beginning
in these afflicted regions bolshe-
vik agitation is most active.
About this we have in the Unit
ed States two comfortable feelings
that keep us from getting the real
situation straight in our minds.
One is that the failure of Bolshev-
ism to provide an efficient govern
ment in Russia renders the
rest of the world safe from Bolshev-
ism forever after. And the other.
being part of our unfortunate ma
tional endowment of superficial OPP
timism, is that II we are all right
nobody else can be badly off, so
what is the use of bothering?
or course we don't proceed in
practice upon that easy going doc
trine because whenever we are
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