only could the Bolshevics have triumphed. In such a world only can 
Bolshevism hold its own. When after long efforts, Germany was at last 
subdued and disarmed, the purpose of the war seemed to have been ac- 
complished, and Russia’s disintegration, and her becoming subjugated, 
appeared to be an additional stroke of luck: the world became still smaller 
and still easier to rule and to organise. In these months of delight in what 
had been achieved and in the wide outlook which seemingly revealed 
itself — faith was apparently easy in Europe. At the same time a great 
weariness made itself felt, and there was therefore no great keenness for 
further difficult enterprises. It is from out of this faith in one’s proper 
omnipotence and from actual impotence that, on the spur of the moment, 
this decision concerning Russia had its rise in Europe: leave her to her 
own fate, and make use of the Bolshevics for proper ends. Then, or shortly 
afterwards, one of the world’s rulers an chief leader of the policy of the 
British World Empire, found it possible to throw the mutual relations 
between Europe and Russia, martyrised by the Bolshevics, into the following 
formula: trade is possible even with cannibals; at least it is to this man 
to whom this formula is attributed. At that time everything looked simple. 
But gradually the world becomes complicated again, or rather people begin 
to realise that they had only imagined it had become simple, while in 
reality it always remained complicated, and has become even more so now. 
When have there ever existed so many insecure frontiers, so many unsolved 
questions, so many weak or sore spots, so many contradictions even between 
those who, in tradition and spirit, are most closely allied? Whereas, on the 
contrary, the abyss between the victors and the vanquished is daily being 
bridged over. Germany's power, which to break was the purpose and the 
most important result of the war, is being created anew, and not to a small 
degree do the victors — America, England and even France — contribute 
towards it. Of course, not the military power. But what reasonable man 
in Europe would venture to declare that Germany, who even now has 
considerably recovered, will not be able to fight in some forty or fifty years 
in spite of her present-day defencelessness? And would anyone on the 
contrary venture to assert that Germany would have had the strength and 
the energy for a new war ten or twenty years after the recent sanguinary 
exertions, if this last war and the peace that ensued, had been quite free 
from world-redeeming tendencies, and free from absolute problems and 
solutions? 
What has been said, of course, does not dispose of the whole significance 
and importance of the stormy years which Europe has just experienced; it 
is even clearer that in the above the past is not being estimated nor 
any one judged. The important thing is that we should know — what is, 
and what can be. where we are. and whither we are going. The answer to 
anRQ