p. — ^ECONOMICS. 1 ] 9 



Eighteeuth-century England was too well organised economically 

 to be in much risk of actual famine, but for Ireland and large parts of 

 tlie Continent famine was a normal risk. War and its effects had only 

 accentuated, not created, that risk. Imports might reduce it, but could 

 not avert it, because Western Europe tends to have approximately the 

 same harvest conditions throughout, and it was impossible to draw 

 really large supplementary supplies from anywhere else. So unim- 

 portant were overseas supplies that the Continent suffered very much 

 more from the harvest failure of 1816, in time of peace, than from the 

 eight yeai's' English blockade in time of war. If overseas supplies 

 could be got they were hard to distribute, owing to defective transport 

 facilities. Thanks to the work of the nineteenth century, the most 

 terrific of all wars was required to bring Western Europe face to face 

 with what had been both a war-time and a peace-time risk a century 

 earlier. 



But the old Europe, if it had the defects, had also the elasticity of 

 a rather primitive economic organism. Given a couple of good harvests, 

 and a laud of peasants soon recovers from war. Serbia had a good 

 harvest last year (1919), and was at once in a state of comparative 

 comfort, in spite of her years of suffering. A second good harvest 

 this year, for which fortunately the prospects are favourable, would 

 ahnost restore her. So it was with France and, to a less extent, 

 Germany in 1816-18. In France acute distress in 1816-17 had been 

 confined to the towns and to those country districts where the harvest 

 failure was woi-st. The hai^vest of '17 put an end to it. One gets the 

 impression that in Germany distress among the peasants themselves 

 had been more widespread. Worse communications and the absence of 

 a strong central Government seem to have been the chief causes of 

 this, though perhaps the harvest failure was more complete. In 

 I'Vance, as we have seen, the central Government took such action 

 as was possible in the interests of the whole country. A parallel 

 might be drawn between the German situation in 1815-17 and that 

 of the States which have arisen from the break-up of the old Austi'o- 

 Hungarian Empire since 1918. Freed from French domination, and 

 then fi'om the urgent necessity of co-operating against a common 

 enemy, the German States relapsed into their ancient jealousies and 

 conflicting economic policies, just as the new States, which were 

 once subject to the Hapsburgs, have been forbidding exports of food 

 and fuel and disputing with one another. 



An excellent harvest in 1817 averted the risk of famine in Germany 

 also; but anything that could be called prosperity was long delayed, 

 whereas France was indisputably prosperous, judged by the standards 

 of the day, and far more contented than England, by 1818-20. Germany 

 Had been so exhausted by the wars and incessant territorial changes 

 of the Napoleonic age, and was politically so divided, that her economic 

 life remained stagnant and her poverty great until at least 1830. It 

 was all that the various Governments could do to find money for the 

 most essential of all economic measures — ^the repair and construction 

 of roads — whereas France had her splendid main roads in order again 

 and liad resumed work on her canals before 1820. But France had 



