Abstract
This chapter must be one of pessimism. The Treaty includes no provisions for the economic rehabilitation of Europe,—nothing to make the defeated Central Empires into good neighbours, nothing to stabilise the new States of Europe, nothing to reclaim Russia; nor does it promote in any way a compact of economic solidarity amongst the Allies themselves; no arrangement was reached at Paris for restoring the disordered finances of France and Italy, or to adjust the systems of the Old World and the New.
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Notes
- 1.
Professor Starling’s Report on Food Conditions in Germany [Cmd. 280.].
- 2.
Including the Darlehenskassenscheine somewhat more.
- 3.
Similarly in Austria prices ought to be between twenty and thirty times their former level.
- 4.
One of the most striking and symptomatic difficulties which faced the Allied authorities in their administration of the occupied areas of Germany during the Armistice arose out of the fact that even when they brought food into the country the inhabitants could not afford to pay its cost price.
- 5.
Theoretically an unduly low level of home prices should stimulate exports and so cure itself. But in Germany, and still more in Poland and Austria, there is little or nothing to export. There must be imports before there can be exports.
- 6.
Allowing for the diminished value of gold, the exchange value of the franc should be less than 40 per cent of its previous value, instead of the actual figure of about 60 per cent, if the fall were proportional to the increase in the volume of the currency.
- 7.
How very far from equilibrium France’s international exchange now is can be seen from the following table:
Monthly average
Imports
Exports
Excess of imports
£1000
£1000
£1000
1913
28,071
22,934
5137
1914
21,341
16,229
5112
1918
66,383
13,811
52,572
January–March 1919
77,428
13,334
64,094
April–June 1919
84,282
16,779
67,503
July 1919
93,513
24,735
68,778
These figures have been converted at approximately par rates, but this is roughly compensated by the fact that the trade of 1918 and 1919 has been valued at 1917 official rates. French imports cannot possibly continue at anything approaching these figures, and the semblance of prosperity based on such a state of affairs is spurious.
- 8.
The figures for Italy are as follows:
Monthly average
Imports
Exports
Excess of imports
£1000
£1000
£1000
1913
12,152
8372
3780
1914
9744
7368
2376
1918
47,005
8278
38,727
January–March 1919
45,848
7617
38,231
April–June 1919
66,207
13,850
52,357
July–August 1919
44,707
16,903
27,804
- 9.
In the last two returns of the Bank of France available as I write (October 2 and 9, 1919) the increases in the note issue on the week amounted to £18,750,000 and £18,825,000 respectively.
- 10.
On October 3, 1919, M. Bilinski made his financial statement to the Polish Diet. He estimated his expenditure for the next nine months at rather more than double his expenditure for the past nine months, and while during the first period his revenue had amounted to one-fifth of his expenditure, for the coming months he was budgeting for receipts equal to one-eighth of his outgoings. The Times correspondent at Warsaw reported that “in general M. Bilinski’s tone was optimistic and appeared to satisfy his audience”!
- 11.
The terms of the Peace Treaty imposed on the Austrian Republic bear no relation to the real facts of that State’s desperate situation. The Arbeiter Zeitung of Vienna on June 4, 1919, commented on them as follows: “Never has the substance of a treaty of peace so grossly betrayed the intentions which were said to have guided its construction as is the case with this Treaty … in which every provision is permeated with ruthlessness and pitilessness, in which no breath of human sympathy can be detected, which flies in the face of everything which binds man to man, which is a crime against humanity itself, against a suffering and tortured people.” I am acquainted in detail with the Austrian Treaty and I was present when some of its terms were being drafted, but I do not find it easy to rebut the justice of this outburst.
- 12.
For months past the reports of the health conditions in the Central Empires have been of such a character that the imagination is dulled, and one almost seems guilty of sentimentality in quoting them. But their general veracity is not disputed, and I quote the three following, that the reader may not be unmindful of them: “In the last years of the war, in Austria alone at least 35,000 people died of tuberculosis, in Vienna alone 12,000. To-day we have to reckon with a number of at least 350,000 to 400,000 people who require treatment for tuberculosis.… As the result of malnutrition a bloodless generation is growing up with undeveloped muscles, undeveloped joints, and undeveloped brain” (Neue Freie Presse, May 31, 1919). The Commission of Doctors appointed by the Medical Faculties of Holland, Sweden, and Norway to examine the conditions in Germany reported as follows in the Swedish Press in April 1919: “Tuberculosis, especially in children, is increasing in an appalling way, and, generally speaking, is malignant. In the same way rickets is more serious and more widely prevalent. It is impossible to do anything for these diseases; there is no milk for the tuberculous, and no cod-liver oil for those suffering from rickets…. Tuberculosis is assuming almost unprecedented aspects, such as have hitherto only been known in exceptional cases. The whole body is attacked simultaneously, and the illness in this form is practically incurable…. Tuberculosis is nearly always fatal now among adults. It is the cause of 90 per cent of the hospital cases. Nothing can be done against it owing to lack of food-stuffs…. It appears in the most terrible forms, such as glandular tuberculosis, which turns into purulent dissolution.” The following is by a writer in the Vossische Zeitung, June 5, 1919, who accompanied the Hoover Mission to the Erzgebirge: “I visited large country districts where 90 per cent of all the children were rickety and where children of three years are only beginning to walk. … Accompany me to a school in the Erzgebirge. You think it is a kindergarten for the little ones. No, these are children of seven and eight years. Tiny faces, with large dull eyes, overshadowed by huge puffed, rickety foreheads, their small arms just skin and bone, and above the crooked legs with their dislocated joints the swollen, pointed stomachs of the hunger œdema…. ‘You see this child here,’ the physician in charge explained; ‘it consumed an incredible amount of bread, and yet did not get any stronger. I found out that it hid all the bread it received underneath its straw mattress. The fear of hunger was so deeply rooted in the child that it collected stores instead of eating the food: a misguided animal instinct made the dread of hunger worse than the actual pangs.’” Yet there are many persons apparently in whose opinion justice requires that such beings should pay tribute until they are forty or fifty years of age in relief of the British taxpayer.
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Keynes, J.M. (2019). Europe After the Treaty. In: Cox, M. (eds) The Economic Consequences of the Peace. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04759-7_7
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