Europe without trustworthy money is as paralyzed as a brain without wholesome blood. She cannot act, she cannot move. Employment becomes impossible and production dies away. The towns move steadily toward the starvation that has overtaken Petersburg and the peasants and cultivators cease to grow anything except to satisfy their own needs. To go to market with produce, except to barter, is a mockery. The schools are not working, the hospitals, the public services; the teachers and doctors and officials cannot live upon their pay, they starve or go away. This state of affairs has been brought about by the reckless manufacture of paper money by nearly every European Government; we can measure their recklessness roughly by comparing their pre-war and post-war exchanges. It is only now that we are beginning to realize the enormity of the disaster which this demoralization of money is bringing upon the world. We have weakened the link of cash payments, which has hitherto held civilization together, to the breaking point. As the link breaks, the machine stops. The modern city will become a formless mob of unemployed men and the countryside will become a wilderness of food-hoarding peasants—and since the urban masses will have no food and no means of commanding it, we may expect the most violent perturbations before they are persuaded to accept their fate in a philosophical spirit. Revolutionary social outbreaks are not the results of plots; they are symptoms of social disease. They are not causes but effects. This is what I mean when I write of a breakdown of civilization. I mean the death of town life, which cannot go on without money and the cessation of organized communications. I mean a breakdown of the organizations for keeping the peace. I mean an end to organized education. I mean the smashing of this social order in which we live, through the smashing of money, which has already occurred to a large extent in Russia, which is going on in many parts of Eastern Europe, which seems likely to occur within a few months in Germany, which may spread into Italy and France, and so to Britain, and even to the American continent, and which can only be arrested by the most vigorous collection action to restore validity to money. Of which vigorous collective action there is in Washington at the present moment no sign. XV THE POSSIBLE BREAKDOWN OF CIVILIZATION Washington, November 26.