d the payment of much higher sums
from countries like Germany, which has lost almost all her best
resources: mercantile fleet, colonies and foreign organization, etc.

4. The danger exists that with the aggravation of the situation in the
vanquished countries and the weakening of the economic structure of
Europe, the vanquished countries will drag the victors down with
them to ruin, while the Anglo-Saxon peoples, standing apart from
Continental Europe, will detach themselves more and more from its
policy.

5. The situation which has come about is a reason for everyone to be
anxious, and threatens both the downfall of the vanquished and the
almost inevitable ruin of the victors, unless a way is found of
reconstructing the moral unity of Europe and the solidarity of
economic life.

VI

EUROPE'S POST-WAR RECONSTRUCTION AND PEACE POLICY

No right-thinking person has nowadays any doubt as to the profound
injustice of the Treaty of Versailles and of all the treaties which
derive from it. But this fact is of small importance, inasmuch as it
is not justice or injustice which regulates the relations between
nations, but their interests and sentiments. In the past we have seen
Christian peoples, transplanted in America, maintain the necessity of
slavery, and we have seen, and continue to see every day, methods of
reasoning which, when used by the defeated enemy were declared to be
fallacious and wrong, become in turn, when varied only in form, the
ideas and the customary life of the conquerors in the War--ideas which
then assume the quality of liberal expressions of democracy.

If appeals to the noblest human sentiments are not made in vain (and
no effort of goodness or generosity is ever sterile), the conviction
which is gradually forming itself, even in the least receptive minds,
that the treaties of peace are inapplicable, as harmful to the
conquerors as to the conquered, gains in force. For the treaties are
at one and the same time a menace for the conquerors and a paralysis
of all activity on the part of the conquered, since once the economic
unity of Continental Europe is broken the resultant depression becomes
inevitable.

If many errors have been committed, many errors were inevitable. What
we must try to do now is to limit the consequences of these mistakes
in a changed spirit. To reconstruct where we see only ruins is the
most evident necessity. We must also try to diffuse among the nations
which have