The Wrangell sentinel., 1920-03-11
Shall Chaos or Reconstruction in Europe Follow the Great
 World War?
NEW, GREAT FORCES AT WORK
Demand for New Order of Things Is Universal and Reactionaries Merely Swell the Rising Tide of
 Discontent
Article w.
By FRANK coMERFoRD.


 The most obvious thing in Europe Is the changed attitude of the people, and yet there are many, particularly in the conservative. employing class. who refuse to see. There are none so blind as these. While they close their eyes and minds to the obvious. the change goes on. It Is not idle rhetor- ic to say that new great forces are at work. Of course you cannot see the forces any more than you can see the grass growing. but you can see the effects. You can measure the charac- ter of the forces.
 Everywhere I found people talking about new Order. Men separated by hundreds of miles are thinking and talking the same ideas. It startled me to hear the same ideas up in the Balkans that l had heard in France and England. I did not meet any one who was able to give me clear, con- plete meaning of the phrase, but it Is on the lips of everyone. It has meaning. and time will produce plan. The people are forward looking-they are thinking, waiting for something to happen They have faith that it will happen and that it will bring great good to the human race. Every one seems confident that some great con- pensation must and will come out of the siege of suffering through which they have passed. If they were not so earnest, so sane, so determined about it I should have interpreted their enthusiasm as fantasy.
 A meaningless minority of reaction aries scorn and scoff at all talk of a new Order. These are the backward looking men of big business, the stand- patters in politics. They are out of touch with the times; they think the real world is the little circle in which they live. They are the barnacles on big business. They smugly set down all talk of change as bolshevism. Fortunately the real leaders of busi- ness are breaking away from this point of view. Progressive, human and open minded. they see and know that unrest is a problem and that it must be solved. They are paying heed to the complaints of the workers. They admit that there is justice back of the complaints. Instead of arguing coer- cion. they are talking concession. They know a change has come, they want to meet 1t.
 New Order Must Come.
 A new Order will come. The one question that is bothering the minds of men who are awake to the change is, will it come through revolution or through evolution. The greatest friend of revolution is the stubborn employ CT who refuses to see the change, ac- cepts things as they are. and insists upon the use of force as the only cure for unrest.
 Money is a gross thing when con- pared with human life. To mention Europes financial losses in the same breath with her dead and wounded, seems sordid, but it is an everyday world and in it money has it's logical place. Since the war some people are thinking that money has had too im- portant a place in the world. It has been charged with pushing man out of his place. but bills must be paid and Europe needs money. The war cost billions and billions of dollars. Mill lions of men had to be clad and shod, billions and billions of cartridges and shells. rifles. cannons, airplanes. ships. were made. Europe owes the money. How will she pay it; where will she get it? It is a question that even the wisest and most optimistic of men in Europe hesitate to answer. Some wonder. is there an answer?
 Europe has borrowed until her in- terest charge today is almost as large as her whole cost of governmental ad- ministration was few years ago. l heard Lloyd George say that England faced yearly interest charge of three hundred million pounds. Another off cial told me that this interest charge that England must pay each year is nearly one hundred million pounds year larger than the cost of admins tration was at the time of the BOer war. Only the other day her interest was due on some loans from the United States and she was forced to default. and our government charged the in- .erest to the principal and passed the day of payment on. In the meantime the pound is going down in value. When I was on the Continent it had reached S4.14. Today it is under S3.S7 and steadily going down.
 France is in even a worse plight The banks are loaded with government paper. She has made no provision by taxation to pay her debt. was told on every hand that any effort to impose a tax would bring on revolu- tion. It is said that her debt has reached the startling figure of S640 for every man. woman and child in the country. When l left CherbOurg bod