At that time the new Baltic States were unable to support themselves on any decent standard of life. Their children also were underfed. No trade came into the port of Riga, which once had been busy with the world’s merchandise. In Poland there was the spiritual warmth of national independence, but not much else. Misery was widespread. Food for the army was taken from the people. Commerce was stagnant, industry at a standstill. Germany was not buying from Poland. Poland could not buy from Germany or Russia. Underneath its new military ardour there was desperate need in the homes of the workers. THE AGONY OF AUSTRIA In Austria there was utter hopelessness, and the health of the people was breaking down. The Reparations Commission, under Sir William Goode, established to exact indemnities, saw the folly of such action and became a Relief Mission to save the life of those people, the most charming and brilliant and civilised in Central Europe, before they sank under the doom pronounced upon them by a Treaty of Peace which had left them with the capital city of a great Empire from which the Empire had been lopped. I went into the Austrian hospitals, homes, babies’ crèches, and children’s clinics, and saw little Austrian children so weak from under-nourishment that they could not sit up in bed and crippled with rickets. Children of three and four had no solid bone in their bodies, but only gristle. Where their arms were crossed at night there were deep sunken hollows. Sixty-eight per cent. of the Austrian children were in a state of semi-starvation in the year that followed war. THE GERMAN PEOPLE In Germany it was not so bad—but bad. For the last year of the war the people had been reduced to the bare limits of food supply. After the war, when the blockade was maintained until the signature of peace, the children went without milk and fats and there was general shortness of provisions, not amounting to actual starvation, but weakening the working men and women. Factory workmen told me that they never ate meat, and existed on bread and potatoes. It was enough for life, they said, but not enough for physical strength. They felt tired. Women fainted in the tramcars. There was stinting and scraping in every home, except those of the “profiteers,” who by some genius of finance were making a good thing out of the fall of the mark.