CHAOS IN EUROPE.

Taranaki Daily News, 6 March 1919, Page 5

CHAOS IN EUROPE.

APPALLING SPECTACLE. BREAKDOWN OF CIVILISATION. In a message to the New York Times, Dr. Harold Williams wrote from Geneva in December: History is turning strange somersaults- Italian prisoners in Galioia are lighting with the Poles agalnsc the Ukrainians; German troops in Southern Kussia are selling or giving arms to the Ukrainians; are fighting ■iiil plundering mw leaguing themselves with tho Ukrainians and Bolsheviks, and now opposing them. Further north, some of the German trpops are thoroughly Bolshevist, whilo others are try. ing to retire, only to find themselves attacked in the rear by Lenin's Red Army. ' Europe is strewn with guns, machineguns, bombs, and ammunition, all the leavings of a great war, and everyone and no one is master of theso instruments of destruction. Frontiers and lines of denjarkaiion are swaying. A» omenta are made today and broken to-morrow, and save for a few cases, there is not a Government from the Rhine eastward that is not desperately beating the air to-day, «uid is liable to be swept away to-morrow. In the war the democratic maritime Powers are victorious, and the great blocks of despotism in the European hinterland have been broken up into their component atoms without any visible binding will or controlling purpoa*. I have no hesitation in saying that the spectacle of European min is simply appalling. Nineteenth century civilisation has broken down. I do not mean merely that dilapidated trains crawl dismally; that postal and telegraphic communication is hardly better than in Napoleonio times; that famine and pestilence are creeping over Europe; but that there is a collapse of human, moral energy, d' revival of the primitive, barbaric instinctSj and the fierce endeavour to hare one's little private will by force. The general sense of the purpose-of life is lost in the chaos of petty warring impulses. People eagerly repeat the shibboleths of democracy and equalitv, hoping that this will dispel the terrible dread that lurks in their hearts. Little men, often well-meaning and sincere, devise shallow plans for coping with the menacing forces of destruction.

In Germany the soldiers mako chaotic politics while the upper class looks on unrepentant, arrogant, resentful, and helpless; and amateur governments of a day spend their little strength in torrents of speeches -while they have no power to stay the inevitable course of events. _ Through all this seething chaos run evil currents of intrigue after intrigue, monarchical, Bolshevist, financial. imperialistic, particularist, clerical, atheist. Russian prisoners in hundreds of thousands are on their great trek homewards, starving, in rags, dying like flies on the way, and the revolutionary German Government has provided them with copies of periodicals in Russian, Social- ' istie, and full of invective against England and praise of the German Soviets Up through the European chaos U surely creeping tho menace of Bolshevism, not Socialism, hut that Bolshevism which is the revengeful shadow of reck-k-ss modern materialism. I don't wish to anpear to be preaching, but, only the imagery of the Apoca- ' lypse can do justice to the present state of Europe. It Ls not a political, but a spiritual crisis. The victory of the ' Maritime Powers is an immense moral responsibility, because on the victors lies the task of saving and reconstructing all ' that is worth saving in civilisation. I hope that I may he forgiven for telegraphmg „ tlii, way; hut no one ' «ho has closely watched the present ruin ot 'Jiurope can ] le]p fpcK tJ)a<; fX laid'" ° f PeaCe ar ° P ° Wer " . That is why the League of Nations is supremely important. If the League- ' of Nations is a Utopia then our spiritual strenrth ,s exhausted and civilisation WiSc?"" 1 * W<?lter ° f barl) «™<'