at it. What will happen to it when peace comes no man can tell. Nor what
will happen to the mark. The rouble has gone into the Abyss. Our giddy
money specialists clutch their handfuls of paper and watch it flying
down the steep. Much as we may hate the Germans, some of us will have to
sit down with some of the enemy to arrange a common scheme for the
preservation of credit in money. And I presume that it is not proposed
to end this war in a wild scramble of buyers for such food as remains in
the world. There is a shortage now, a greater shortage ahead of the
world, and there will be shortages of supply at the source and transport
in food and all raw materials for some years to come. The Peace Congress
will have to sit and organize a share-out and distribution and
reorganization of these shattered supplies. It will have to Rhondda the
nations. Probably, too, we shall have to deal collectively with a
pestilence before we are out of the mess. Then there are such little
jobs as the reconstruction of Belgium and Serbia. There are considerable
rectifications of boundaries to be made. There are fresh states to be
created, in Poland and Armenia for example. About all these smaller
states, new and old, that the peace must call into being, there must be
a system of guarantees of the most difficult and complicated sort.

I do not see the Press Congress getting through such matters as these in
a session of weeks or months. The idea the Germans betrayed at Brest,
that things were going to be done in the Versailles fashion by great
moustached heroes frowning and drawing lines with a large black
soldierly thumbnail across maps, is--old-fashioned. They have made their
eastern treaties, it is true, in this mode, but they are still looking
for some really responsible government to keep them now that they are
made. From first to last clearly the main peace negotiations are going
to follow unprecedented courses. This preliminary discussion of war aims
by means of great public speeches, that has been getting more and more