Books-New and Old
Surveying the European Ruin
What Happened to Europe. By FRANK A. VANDERLIP; 188 pp. The Macmillan Company.
Across the Blockade. A Record of Travels in Enemy Europe. By HENRY NOEL BRAILSFORD; 174 pp. Harcourt, Brace and Howe.
These two volumes, containing the most important post-bellum considerations of the state of Europe thus far published, are supplementary to each other. Mr. Frank A. Vanderlip is an eminent American financier and, like many individuals, viewing society from the altitudes of high finance, a man of wide vistas and considerable anticipatory acumen. Mr. Brailsford is a linguist, an ethnologist, one of the foremost living authorities on Balkan problems and a prolific contributor on foreign topics to the best-informed part of the British and American press.
Mr. Brailsford's volume records impressions formed during four months spent in blockaded Europe between February and May, 1919, with supplementary comment added after his return to England. It is the clearest and most illuminating work yet published in America about what has happened and what it has been like in Central Europe since the Armistice. Part of some of the chapters originally appeared in the New Republic, the Nation, and the Manchester Guardian. It tells of the political, social and economic revolutions of Europe, shows their true inwardness and explains many factors whose effect on world-wide affairs is profound.
The leading chapter entitled "In Communist Hungary" gives the only just and illuminating account we have thus far come across of a unique episode in the life-history of an important section of Central Europe. "In Hunger-Stricken Austria" is a terrible picture of a moribund commonwealth without any but purely artificial and treaty-made boundaries, political or economic. The concluding words, written in February, 1919, have since been amply justified by the event:
"It is not enough . . . to raise the blockade, for bankrupt Austria cannot obtain raw materials unless the Allies guarantee a loan. Paris, however, is discussing not loans but indemnities. One might as well levy an indemnity on the inmates of a workhouse."
The chapters of most direct interest to Jewish readers are the fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh, all dealing with Poland. In one of their aspects, these chapters form a somberly ironical comment upon the blandly unreal legalism of the Morgenthau report. Not in the Morgenthau report, but in Mr. Brailsford’s illuminating testimony are we confronted with the real Poland in which Jews have to live and to suffer, the Poland of a new Szlachta supported by French bayonets, the Poland of abundance for the few and heartrending misery for ihe many, the clerical and aristocratic Poland which cannot maintain its rule without throwing its Jews before the wolves of popular destitution and of widespread disaffection within the ranks of the national army. Slayings en masse have ceased since Mr. Brailsford took up pen to record his Polish impressions; but the boycotts and legal chicaneries that are in full blast now form the supplementary chapters to Mr. Brailsford’s presentation—and will continue to do-so, until the real Polish people write the final chapter of this partie honteuse of Polish history. A specimen of Mr. Brailsford’s historical argument, gleaned from the sixth chapter, will give a better notion of his penetration and expository power than any extent of critical commendation:
"So far as I could gather, the open preaching of anti-Semitism and the organized persecution of the Jews in Poland are compara-
tively recent phenomena. A Pole will always begin any conversation about the Jews by recalling the traditional tolerance of the Polish State. That is, I fear, a myth: it was on the persecution of both the Protestant and the Orthodox that Prussia and Russia fastened as a pretext for the first Partition. The fact is that modern anti-Semitism in Poland has an obvious economic root. Until the middle of the last century the Jews were the only middle class in Poland, and the only trading class. Poles were either landowners, peasant owners, or laborers. In the last fifty years, Poles have increasingly taken to trade and even to industry, though the names of the larger firms are still preponderantly German or Jewish. Usually, these magnates are baptized Jews. This belated industrial development in Poland, delayed by the heavy hand of Tsardom, brought Jewish and Christian traders and shopkeepers, when it came at length, into sharp competition. As in Austria, so in Poland, this economic competition was obvious material for the political agitator. Mr. Roman Dmowski, the founder of the old National Democratic Party, did what Lueger and the "Christian Socialists" did in Vienna; he roped the small middle-class man, who felt the pressure of Jewish competition, into an essentially Conservative Nationalist Party. Before the war, his was a russophile policy; he was a favorite at the Tsar's Court, and represented in the Duma a tendency that was relatively reactionary even in that backward assembly. In Poland, though his party relied for funds on the big landowners, it won popular support by a violent and entirely reckless campaign against the Jews. To this party belong not merely M. Dmowski, by far the cleverest of Polish politicians, but also M. Paderewski, and most of the present ministry. From specimens of their election literature which I saw, one might suppose that they fought the first election in free Poland mainly on the Jewish issue, combined with the subtle suggestion that most Socialists are Jews, and all Socialists Bolsheviks. Ugly illustrated posters and leaflets, issued officially by this party, depicting the Jew as a serpent or a vampire, appealed to the numerous illiterate electors, and the newspaper press kept the agitation going from day to day by incessant anti-Jewish articles. I procured copies of some of these sinister popular appeals to race-hatred, and in the municipal elections a little later actually saw myself an 'N. D.' car, decorated with all the Allied flags, scattering an anti-Jewish leaflet in the mainstreet of Warsaw. For the present state of mind of brutal fanaticism which breaks out in massacre, this ruling party is directly responsible. Itself at bottom the party of the big landed interests; it has used anti-Jewish prejudice as a demagogic appeal, in order to win the masses from the Socialist and Peasant parties." Compare the outspokenness of this passage with the formalistic and insincere exculpation of the Polish government in Mr. Morgenthau's report, and the importance of Mr. Brailsford's survey of European conditions as an eye-opener becomes manifest.
Mr. Vanderlip's volume arrests the profound attention of American-Jewish readers for general rather than local and national reasons. The book is an effort to cast the economic horoscope of the Europe of Mr. Brailsford's truthful presentation. According to Mr. Vanderlip's avowal, "there was never a more unpremeditated book. We landed in England February 2, 1919, intending to take a hurried glance at financial conditions in London and on the Continent and be back in New York by the first of April. Almost within a few hours, I found that I had known practically nothing of what happened to Europe. The process of learning proved so fascinating,