EUROPE: 1,063 Weeks

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Outworn in the post-War world were measures of national revenge backed by military strength. Revulsion at the Treaty of Versailles was revulsion at its territorial and reparations clauses, not only at its idealistic plans for war's prevention, which these contradicted. By 1921, despite U. S. rejection of the League of Nations, the U. S. had taken the lead in proposing naval limitation, and at the Washington Conference, when Charles Evans Hughes proposed that the U. S., Great Britain and Japan scrap 1,876,000 tons of their battleships, Balfour with poker-faced aplomb called it: ". . . the basis of the greatest reform in the matter of armament and preparation for war that has ever been conceived or carried out by the courage and patriotism of statesmen," and the work of scaling down war vessels began. In 1922, when Germany requested a three-year moratorium on reparations, Great Britain was favorable to the idea, Poincare refused. Outside the ring that France had built around Germany, hostility to the defeated ebbed fast. It ebbed faster when, in 1922, German recognition of the Soviet Union brought fears of a Russian-German alliance. And when Poincare, on January 1, 1923, sent French troops to seize 80% of Germany's coal, iron and steel sources, in "the mad and ruinous Ruhr episode," Great Britain's criticism swelled, Great Britain's sympathies shifted. Lloyd George, who four years before had been re-elected on a platform of punishment for Germany, later called it ". . . the dismal and tragic episode of the Ruhr occupation," and said that it caused "untold misery to many millions of Central Europe, had put back the clock of post-War reconstruction throughout the world, intensified unemployment problems and industrial depression, and had signally failed in its main object of extracting reparations from Germany."

For 600 of the maddest days in history French troops patrolled the Ruhr:

> 147,000 German citizens were driven from the district in eleven months.

> Burgomasters of every major city in the land of 4,000,000 people were expelled or imprisoned.

> Funds and records of manufacturing companies were seized and their offices taken over; at least 100 people lost their lives; newspapers were suppressed; 19,000 officials in the area of the French-sponsored "Autonomous Government of the Palatinate" were deported.

> In Munich, Ludendorff and Hitler attempted to set up a dictatorship. German workers in the Ruhr downed their tools, supported by the German Government, which printed more paper currency to pay them.

> Germany's economy was swept away in an avalanche which threatened to break the ring around her, sweep over Europe. In December, shortly before the French occupied the Ruhr, a U. S. dollar would buy 7,000 marks. In a month it would buy 50,000. By June it would buy 100,000. Prices were quoted by the hour; workmen paid by the day; savings wiped out; housewives rushed to spend money before nightfall, knowing morning would make it worth less. In August one U. S. dollar would buy 5,000,000 marks. By the middle of November the U. S. dollar was quoted at 2,500,000,000,000 in Berlin, and 4,000,000,000,000 at Cologne 300 miles away.