When we pass out of the Continental to the Atlantic system and consider the case of Britain we find a country with a stabler exchange and a tradition of social give and take stronger and deeper than that of any other country in Europe. But she is not a self-maintaining country. Her millions live very largely on overseas trade. She is helplessly dependent upon the prosperity of other countries, and particularly of Europe; the ebb of prosperity abroad means ebb for her at home. No other country feels so acutely the economic prostration of Germany; no other country suffers so greatly from the restless activities of France. She is struggling along now with unprecedented masses of unemployed workers, and the state of affairs abroad offers no hope of any diminution of this burden. The housing of her great population has degenerated greatly since the war began; she cannot continue to feed, clothe nor educate her people as she used to do unless the decay of Continental Europe is arrested. I do not know what political form of expression a great distress in Britain might take. The tendency toward revolutionary violence is not very evident in the British temperament, but people who are slow to move are often slow to stop. The slow violence of the English might not find expression in revolution and might not expend itself internally. They might get resentful about France—and perhaps Germany might be feeling resentful about France too. But I will confess that I cannot yet imagine what an acutely distressed Britain might or might not do. Yet it is plain to me that the shadow that lies so dark over Petrograd stretches as far as London. Such, compactly, is the condition of Europe today. I submit to the reader that it is a fair statement of facts in common knowledge. This is not the Europe of the diplomatists and publicists; it is the Europe of reality and the common man. It is a process of decline and fall going on under our eyes, swifter and more extensive than the decline and fall of the Roman Empire in the fourth and fifth centuries. Its immediate cause is the destruction of the monetary system under the burden of war expenditure and war debts. And the only possible hope that it may be arrested lies in a prompt and vigorous world conference to put an end to war expenditures, including even these French war expenditures that M. Briand’s admirers find so justifiable; to extinguish debts and reinstate stable and trustworthy money in the world. There is no evidence yet that the Washington Conference will take up this task or will even contemplate this task. I find myself in the trough of the waves today and less confident of the outcome, even the limited outcome, of things here. I am increasingly doubtful whether the conference will get as far in the direction of a stabilized Pacific as I hoped a few days ago. XVI WHAT OF AMERICA?