EUROPE IN CONVALESCENCE.
THE title of Mr. Alfred E. Zimmern's vigorous and highly controversial essay, Europe in Convalescence (Mills and Boon, 5s. net), shows that he does not share the gloomy opinions put • forward by Mr. Keynes and otlr political pessimists. The
nations are recovering slowly, he thinks, though the Govern- ments are still in a bad way. Mr. Zimmern pours the vials of his wrath not only upon the Prime Minister but upon the British people, and by the very intemperance of his language weakens his plea for a better understanding with France as the basis of a European revival. We are told that Mr. Lloyd George at the Armistice might have introduced the millennium or something like it :- " He erred, not, like the English people, out of ignorance, but deliberately, out of cowardice and lack of faith. At the pinnacle of his career, when the moral leadership of Europe lay within his grasp, he yielded to the Tempter and made what will live in human annals as one of the Greatest Refusals in history. He sinned against the light, and the sin of one weak mortal, entrusted with power for which he had not the moral stature, caused suffering to millions and kept a continent in chaos. For all his bravado, he has been a haunted man ever since."
Such unhistorical rhetoric and the assertion that the British people " sinned, as they did sin grievously in the Election of 1918," are not calculated to help the cause which the author has at heart. We are a modest people, accustomed to abuse from our own citizens, yet even the humble Englishman will feel inclined to resent such lectures from one who seems to pride
himself on being a cosmopolitan. Mr. Zimmern contends that we " played a dishonourable part " in 1919 by, demanding that the reparation terms should include our war pensions. He admits that General Smuts and President Wilson agreed to this interpretation of the Armistice terms, so that there cannot
have been anything " dishonourable " in it. The Allies ought, no doubt, to have adopted a more precise formula, which could not possibly be interpreted in different ways, but Mr. Zimmern's reading of the formula -is no more " honourable " than the meaning officially adopted and accepted by Germany. The only questions at issue are whether Germany can pay the sums fixed for reparation and whether it would not be as well to reduce or postpone the payments due to us. Mr. Zimmern is in error when he tries to make this a question of morals and talks about Great Britain " insisting on her own unjust claims at the expense of the just claims of her former Ally," France.
Let us face it as a matter of business in dealing with an unwilling or evasive or perhaps helpless debtor, and the problem may soon be resolved. Mr. Zimmern's methods of argument only inflame the controversy that has lasted -too long.
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