JAZZ DANCE TO ANARCHY.

Taranaki Herald, Volume LXVII, Issue 16468, 21 June 1919, Page 9

JAZZ DANCE TO ANARCHY.

STARVING NATIONS OP EUROPE. A CRUMBLING CIVILISATION. (“The Sycbiey Sun’s Special Representative.) PARIS, March 12. Reports from Peace Conference agents in Central Europe and Russia make extraordinary loading, more thrilling and saddening than the great tragedies. Europe is disrupted, chaotic. Intense physical sufferings have been immediately and markedly followed by decline of spiritual forces. Paiths are shattered, minds, grope wearily amidst uncertainties. You are dismayed that these bodily horrors are possible in western civilisation. You are aghast that they bring rapid, ugly social and moral decay. All are realising to-day how thin and brittle is the partition between complex organised civilisation and consuming anarchy. These wise men of Europe gathered in Pans think all evil springs from lack of food. It is a materialistic doctrine. It strikes at the roots of selfrespect. Rut the conference is pledged to it. Its reports are scut to the Pood Bureau. Great soldiers may scan these tales of social uprisings. Rut action does not lie with them; the general’s day is past. Financiers study them; hut what can money do? Pastors and teachers may theorise, but the conference docs not deal in prayers. No, off with all those reports to the Food Controller, the great Fond Man of Europe, who deals in wheat and meat si)ip,, and recreates a rail system or canal traffic there, m order to save the body and stabilise the mind with material substance. _ Ho is the outstanding man to-day, this Food Controller, for Europe has passed from absorption on war to absorption on transportation and distribution of grain.

DISTEMPER LX GERMANY. Affording to British rind American agents, including a distinguished generiiJ, Germany is on the very or starvation. The well-to-do classes have managed to hold out by combining in little "groups to buy supplies at exorbitant prices. lint the people have for some mouths been getting less than the body requires. One report speaks of thousands of men in an industrial centre being eager but unable to work. All reports tell of terrible distress amongst children and high mortality amongst infants. General Plumer, who is not the agent referred to, has telegraphed that thousands of Germans are dying from starvation, and infectious diseases are running through the population. Masses ot people are in rags. Germany is unhinged. The revolutionary sailors holding the Bcichstag building against Government troops this week in Berlin agreed to surrender in return for soup. They pulled down their flag, handed over their rides, drank their soup, and melted into the crowds, comforted. The famous Guards Division has become frankly mercenary, and lights this street clear or captures that building from Spartacists for set payments in cash and food. Berlin riots along. The jazz dance lias become a craze, operas and theatres are filled with people in evening dress, whilst bullets whistle outside. The jewellers ransom their shops for so many thousand marks; at Mannheim the whole city suddenly goes Bolshevik ; at Dusseldorf a dapper little major-general with 1500 men drives tousands of insurgents away, and then stands a ‘siege. Some people rush along a Berlin street with handbills declaring that if the great General Ludondorff could ho brought hack Ids wonderful brain would settle Germany's difficulties, and therefore all good Berliners will seek his ‘return. Immediately other handbills appear exhorting the public to chase the groat General Ludondorff with a rope or send a file of soldiers after him. Reports of flaring depravity of Beilin come from too many quarters to ho ignored, 'liieso proud people lie and rob to get food, and their lowering morale is shown in flagrant profligacy.

POLITICAL DISEASES. “Bread and the games, those two things which at their empire’s end the Roman populace demanded as a cure for all their ills, are the chief demands also of the once Imperial Berlin. Tho masses arc apathetic, turning this way and that at tho persuasion of the stronger mind. Had Ludendorff’s throw • brought them victory, how they would have strutted about and shouted for the Emperor! But those who a year ago worshipped the Kaiser now rush frenzied towards the extremes of communistic rule.

Government troops, officers’ corps, and the General Staff win their bloody victories over the ill-trained and unkempt mobs of proletarian enthusiasts who have taken to liquid fire, bombs, and asphyxiating gases to destroy society. But they cannot quieten tho surging discontent of tho people. Spartacus movements comp and go, but the distemper grows steadily. An intense radical insurgency is abroad, and great changes will occur in Germany, as in Russia, before stability comes again. Through all Europe it is true that this is the testing time of political ideas, and tho moment of history most pregnant with political change. The failure of the old system looks now complete. Starvation and disorder have followed upon unparalleled human slaughter and destruction. What will supervene? Certainly not tho old form of society in its entirety.

Glance through Central Europe. Austria takes pride in its steadiness: “We are not like those Prussian organisers, whose organisation collapses under less strain than we suffer.” But Austria’s physical agony is worse than that of Germany. The Conference’s reports describe the Viennese dying in the streets, women fainting as they walk, children crying all day. Two thin meals a day in Vienna is the utmost the Government can manage. Black, ill-smelling bread, and watery soup. Better food conditions rule in Hungary, but here insurgency is strong, and tho tide of rebellion and fighting rolls up and down. Karolyi is urgently breaking 'up estates. “It is not. enough,” say the Hungarians, “we also shall have a proletarian dictature.” Just to the north the Poles are living through a political tempest, though 1 am informed hy General Carton do Wiart, head of the British section of the Polish Commission, that Pederewsld, with his great charm of manner, and deep sincerity, has a wonderful hold over his people. At Lemberg do Wiart dined well. He had money. Rut outside ho saw thousands of emaciated folk who were getting hut one

poor meal of soup a day, whose children a cre dying, and whose clothes wore so thin that the winter's blasts brought ravaging illnesses. Paris is flooded with delegations convinced that their country’s fate is worse than anything seen since heathendom. Roumanians are dying from starvation in hundreds every day. The Germans left them only ten locomotives, and these move with difficulty. The country was stripped hare. The Bolshevism there takes the form of peasants seizing the estates. Turkey has long ceased to show any hopeful sign of the Paris Conference. The population dwindles, but nothing can he done, for shipping is needed hero. The story of Prague is perhaps the most lamentable. The Czechs are a capable, industrious, high-spirited race. They have neither food nor clothes in Plague, and Lady Muriel Paget, who has undertaken the distribution of relief, writes to the Food Commission that people are to bo seen practically naked as well as starving.

WHAT OF BRITAINHcrc in the western countries, where food is scarce and high in price, but enough to keep bodies from tarnishing, one sees the other side of the peculiar post-war disease. In Franco and Britain there are tremendous movements for higher pay and shorter working hours. Dissatisfaction with the Constitution is not apparent. No Bolshevism can bo discerned. The British masses seem still to have trust and affection for their established forms of Government. Attacks on the -Royal household, or on Parliament, are confined to orators on a par with those of the Domain. But throughout Franco and Britain great restlessness prevails. The people are clamorous against tho old 1911 order of things. They are paying a stupendous price for mere necessities. Tho cost of living is at least SO per cent higher than before the war—to many people tho figure is 160 per cent. And they know, as the coal commission and other inquiries show, that profiteering has been rampant, and that immense fortunes were made because the, Governments would not interfere with the economic system Jest it weaken tho vital task of war-winning. At tho same time, there is the general cult of the Jazz Dance, widespread and merry-making, tho irruption every night in London of East End hoys anil girls to tho pleasure haunts and streets of the "West End. There is profligate expenditure, a lower plane of ambition, gaudy dress and voluptuous search of giddy whirls and ragtime music.

Is it not all from the same cause? The European peoples are worn, tired, “fed up.” They are irritable one day, they seek extremes of pleasure the next. What is Bolshevism but one form of hopelessness and tiredness, leading to passionate anger expressed in smashing? I do not discount tho doctrines behind reform, but these doctrines; have got their chance through the mental and physical condition of the people. There are, of course, many millions of people who do not understand what is going on, but proceed stolidly along their old straight paths. They are for saving tho world from further violence, and they do their duty day by day in the hope that the clouds will blow over.

Any picture of Europe to-day would bo false if it did not pay high tribute to tiio great-hearted men and women who have suffered, whose backs and hearts arc breaking, but who stick it out and cany on. They will probably be the saviours of civilisation.

All tho rest should be only a phase. Tile Peace Conference wise men knit their brows over difficulties, and fear that anything may happen. In all countries great reform movements sire proceeding, and attempts are made to meet tho new order of things with a changed order of society and government.

It is largely a question of compromise. Will those who have power and money make the necessary surrender? They are moving that way. Britain is almost pledged to a great policy of nationalistion. Lloyd George wishes it to come at once with a rush. Employers everywhere seem to me actuated by a new spirit, to have found something of comradeship in the men who were their boys’ pals as fighters. They offer profitsharing, co-partnership, increased wages. Nowhere is there ft sign of what is commonly called “capital” making a fight to the death—an unwise alternative.

Europe should bo fed during, this spring. None knows what will happen in Russia, except that no foreign intervention can stifle the new radical spirit. Perhaps Lenin will proclaim himself Csar, perhaps Bolshevism will evolve into a western form of society, perhaps the Terror will gradually give way to self-government—though SO per cent, of the old Russian Empire could neither write nor read 1

But one fact stands out. The anxious days will not bo over in Central and Western Europe until all people are fed, employed, economically saved. Then it will ho seen into what form Europe is going to settle down.