Germany), says: "What then is our 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.