PERISHING VIENNA

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LIV, Issue LIV, 16 October 1920, Page 10

PERISHING VIENNA

Mr A. G. Gardiner has - been to Vienna, and draws a terrible picture of that perishing city to wliich peace lias brought, tragedy worse than war. lie writes in the Daily News; “To-day this great city lies like a decapitated head that has been struck from the body and left bleeding on the plain. Its members have been hacked away and strewn to the four winds. To conceive its situation orie must, imagine London suddenly out off from all the sources of its life, no access to the sea, frontiers of hostile Powers ’all round it, every coal field •;

Yorkshire or South Wales or Scotland in foreign hands, no citizen able to travel to Birmingham or Manchester without a passport, the mills it had financed in Lancashire taken from it, no coal to burn, no food to-eat, and. with its sluU.ng doun in v.

to a farthing, no money to buy raw’ materials for its labour, industry at a standstill, hundreds of thousands living (.or dying) on charity, nothing prospering except the vile exploiters of misery, the traffickers in food, the traffickers in vice. • “Vienna was the financial and administrative centre rf 00.000,000 people, It financed textile factories, paper manufacturing. machine works, beet growing, and scores of other in-, dustries in German Bohemia, It owned coal mines at Teschen. It drew its food from Hungary. From every quarter of the empire there came to Vienna the half-manufactured I*roducts of the provinces for the finishing processes, tailoring, dyeing, glass working, in which a vast population found employment. “Suddenly all thielaborate structure of economie life was swept a why. Vienna, instead of being the vital centre of oOJIOO,OOO people, finds itselfa derelict city with a province of 0,000,000. It is cut off from its coal supplies, from its food supplies, from its factories, from everything that means existence. It is enveloped by tariff walls. 4 ; “Tito evils are not limited to. Austria. In this unhappy Balkanised world that the peace’ has created at the heart of Europe every State "is at issue with its neighbours*—the Czechs, with' the Boles, the Hungarians with the Czechs, the Roumanians withf-tlf© Hungarians, find, all with Austria. The whole emnire-is parcelled out"into quarrelling, factions, with tneir rival tariffs, their passports, and their'animosities. All free intercourse -has stopped, all free interchange of cqirtraodities has ceased. Each sfcadveis ■ the other, and is starved by the other. “[ met a hanker travelling from Budapest to .Berlin by Vienna find Bavaria. 1 asked -him 'why be went so far out of his wav to got to Kin goal, and he replied that it was easier to do that than to got* through thp barbed-wire entanglements of Czechoslovakia. There is great hunger'in Bohemia, and it is due largely to the same all-embracing cause. Formerly the Czech peasants used to go to Hungary to gather the harvest, and. returned with corn as part payment. Now intercourse ha© stopped, the Hungarian corn fields are without tho necessary labour, and, the Czech pea Pf, ant starves at homo, or is fed by;the American Relief Fund. “Bnß while ‘all the members suffer,’ it 'is Vienna, the heart of.’ the economic system, which has been destroyed. which alone is perishing visibly. The other States are mainly, agricultural: hub here is a great citv which is blockaded just as effectually ias if it were invested ; by onemv armies. It has been starving and 'dying for five years. It is starving I and dying now more than in the bitterest times of the war.”