It is only right to say that, after the first suspicions had been overcome, the Soviet Government and its officials played fair and did all they could to facilitate this work. The food did reach the starving children and their parents. The railways and engines were repaired. Trucks were built. A new hope dawned in Russia, which learnt something from American methods of efficiency. The Reign of Terror had worn itself out, the actual practice of Communism was abandoned, the rights of private property and private trading were, to some extent, restored, a great shadow passed from the spirit of the people, and in many ways life became endurable after the years of agony. The utter failure of the Communist experiment was acknowledged by Lenin within Russia itself, though its propaganda and revolutionary doctrines were still used to stir up trouble in the outside world. Slowly the life of the Russian people staggered up from misery, and although there is still great distress in many districts and a new threat of famine, the ninety million peasants, controlled by a small body of Communists whose economic philosophy has no appeal for them, are getting a bare life out of the soil, with now and then a surplus of grain for export in return for manufactured goods. Even Russia is on the road to recovery. Other countries revived, at least to the extent of providing their own means of subsistence, in peasant states like those of the new Baltic nations. Even international trade recovered some of its old activity in countries, like Czecho-Slovakia, newly carved out of the old Austrian Empire and successors to its sources of industrial energy. But it was impossible to hope for any general and complete recovery of trade conditions in Europe so long as there was no stability in the value of monetary exchange and no political peace. The printing presses in many countries were issuing paper money which had no reality behind it, and the time came when it proved worthless either for internal commerce or for foreign business. Russian roubles had long ceased to have any purchasing power. A million roubles brought from Moscow would not buy a glass of schnapps in Riga. THE RELIEF OF AUSTRIA