Not a single important promise of the war was fulfilled, save only the promise of victory. Hundreds of millions, aroused to the heights of an exalted idealism, came back to earth only to find themselves betrayed. With less promise and more fulfillment; with at least an appearance of statesmanship; with some respect for the simple moralities of truth-telling, fair-dealing, and common honor, there might have been some chance for the capitalist system to retain the confidence of the peoples of war-torn Europe, even in the face of the Russian Revolution; but each of these things was lacking, and as one worker put it: "I don't know what Bolshevism is, but it couldn't be any worse than what we have now, so I'm for it!" Such a loss of public confidence would have proved a serious blow to any social system, even were it capable of immediately reëstablishing normal conditions of living among the people. In this case, the same events that destroyed public confidence in the capitalist system, destroyed the system itself. The old political forms of Europe--the czars, emperors and kaisers, who stood as the visible symbols of established order and civilization, were overthrown during the war. The economic forces--the banks and business men--had used these forms for the promotion of their business enterprises. Capitalism depended on czars and kaisers as a blacksmith depends on his hammer. They were among the tools with which business forged the chains of its power. They were the political side of the capitalist system. While the people accepted them and believed in them, the business interests were able to use these political tools at will. The tools were destroyed in the fierce pressure of war and revolution, and with them went one of the chief assets of the European capitalists. There was a third breakdown--far more important than the break in the political machinery of the capitalist system--and that was the annihilation of the old economic life. Economic life is, in its elements, very simple. Raw materials--iron ore, copper, cotton, petroleum, coal and wheat--are converted, by some process of labor, into things that feed, clothe and house people. There are four stages in this process--raw materials; manufacturing; transportation; marketing. If there is a failure in one of the four, all of the rest go wrong, as is very clearly illustrated whenever there is a great miners' or railroad workers' strike, or when there is a failure of a particular crop. During the war, all four of these economic stages went wrong. Between the years 1914 and 1918 the people of Europe busied themselves with a war that put their economic machine out of the running.