pe--the czars, emperors and kaisers, who
stood as the visible symbols of established order and civilization, were
overthrown during the war. The economic forces--the banks and business
men--had used these forms for the promotion of their business
enterprises. Capitalism depended on czars and kaisers as a blacksmith
depends on his hammer. They were among the tools with which business
forged the chains of its power. They were the political side of the
capitalist system. While the people accepted them and believed in them,
the business interests were able to use these political tools at will.
The tools were destroyed in the fierce pressure of war and revolution,
and with them went one of the chief assets of the European capitalists.

There was a third breakdown--far more important than the break in the
political machinery of the capitalist system--and that was the
annihilation of the old economic life.

Economic life is, in its elements, very simple. Raw materials--iron ore,
copper, cotton, petroleum, coal and wheat--are converted, by some
process of labor, into things that feed, clothe and house people. There
are four stages in this process--raw materials; manufacturing;
transportation; marketing. If there is a failure in one of the four, all
of the rest go wrong, as is very clearly illustrated whenever there is a
great miners' or railroad workers' strike, or when there is a failure of
a particular crop. During the war, all four of these economic stages
went wrong.

Between the years 1914 and 1918 the people of Europe busied themselves
with a war that put their economic machine out of the running.

For a hundred years the European nations had been busy building a finely
adjusted economic mechanism; population, finance, commerce--all were
knit into the same system. This system the war demolished, and the years
that have followed the Armistice have not seen it rebuilt in any
essential particular, save in Great Britain and in some of the neutral
countries.

Not only were the European nations unable to give commodities in
exchange for the things they needed but the machinery of finance, by
means of which these transactions were formerly facilitated, was
crippled almost beyond repair. Under the old system buying and selling
were carried on by the use of money, and money ceased to be a stable
medium of exchange in Europe. It would be more correct to say that money
was no longer taken seriously in many parts of Europe. Duri