picture of Europe? A country population able to support life on the
fruits of its own agricultural production, but without the accustomed
surplus for the towns, and also (as a result of the lack of imported
materials, and so of variety and amount in the salable manufactures of
the towns) without the usual incentives to market food in exchange for
other wares; an industrial population unable to keep its strength for
lack of food, unable to earn a livelihood for lack of materials, and so
unable to make good by imports from abroad the failure of productivity
at home."

Russia is an emphasized engraving, in which every line of that picture
is bitten in with repeated washes of acid. Several new lines, however,
are added to the drawing, for in Russia the processes at work elsewhere
have gone further than in the rest of Europe, and it is possible to see
dimly, in faint outline, the new stage of decay which is threatened.
The struggle to arrest decay is the real crisis of the revolution, of
Russia, and, not impossibly, of Europe. For each country that develops
to the end in this direction is a country lost to the economic comity of
Europe. And, as one country follows another over the brink, so will
the remaining countries be faced by conditions of increasingly narrow
self-dependence, in fact by the very conditions which in Russia, so far,
have received their clearest, most forcible illustration.

THE SHORTAGE OF MEN

In the preceding chapter I wrote of Russia's many wants, and of the
processes visibly at work, tending to make her condition worse and not
better. But I wrote of things, not of people. I wrote of the shortage of
this and of that, but not of the most serious of all shortages, which,
while itself largely due to those already discussed, daily intensifies
them, and points the way to that further stage of decay which is
threatened in the near future in Russia, and, in the more distant future
in Europe. I did not write of the shortage deterioration of labor.

Shortage of labor is not peculiar to Russia. It is among the postwar
phenomena common to all countries. The war and its accompanying eases
have cost Europe, including Russia, an enormous number of able-bodied
men. Many millions of others have lost the habit of regular work. German
industrialists complain that they cannot get labor, and that when they
get it, it is not productive. I heard complaints on the same subject in
England. But just as the eco