What is it that the Peace has really done to Europe? It has created a dozen Alsace-Lorraines by taking away territory from one people and bestowing it on another. It has manufactured new nations, with new paper currencies, negligible reserves, experimental constitutions and no previous experience to guide them in the restraints of self-government. It has multiplied frontiers and spun a spider-web of tariff-walls. It has fenced in the local hatreds which it was intended to abolish, so that they grow savage like dogs perpetually chained. It has established free-ports for the use of mixed populations who are too distrustful to use them. It has entrusted to plebiscites the deciding of their own fates, with the result that they have become hot-beds for the hostile propaganda of rival claimants. It has so lopped and changed the political landscape that railroads now converge on cities which have ceased to serve their purpose. Vienna, the great pre-war middle-man city of Central Europe, is a case in point. Today it stands isolated and unself-supporting in the scrubby patch of tillage which is the new Austria. Its currency is so unredeemable and varying in value that even Austrians prefer to make their contracts in terms of a foreign currency which is stable. Their neighbours refuse to accept it and hoard their goods within their own borders. Their goods have a tangible value, which the paper money of Austria has not. But the railroads still converge on Vienna. The case is similar throughout partitioned Europe. Money is a commodity in which to speculate; it is no longer a medium of barter. When you cross the border from Czecho-Slovakia into Poland, you have to pay your train-fare in French francs. Polish marks are refused, although you are already on Polish soil. When nations show this distrust of their own issue, they can scarcely expect other nations to accept it. At all the frontiers you are searched by officials of the country from which you are departing, to make sure that you are not carrying away too much of their worthless currency. If you are, it is confiscated. The amount that you are allowed to carry is utterly inadequate. It is impossible to travel unless you are a person of sufficient standing to purchase a letter of credit. As a consequence of these restrictions, trade has ceased to circulate and raw materials, which would mean life if trade-confidence were restored, lie hoarded in idle accumulations.