EUROPE: 1,063 Weeks

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Occupation cost France more proportionately than she got out of it. It brought Germany to the edge of revolution. It unleashed a whirlwind—big guns could not bombard a falling mark, diplomats could not make treaties around it. By the beginning of 1924, powerful France jittered defiantly as she prepared to back down—her own currency was skidding fast. First stage of post-war policy had ended.

Inside her ring of States, Germany spun like the whirling dervish, tossing off bits of old treaties, remnants of old economies, fragments of old customs, large chunks of old moralities, and threatening at any moment to fly apart. State power, in Charles Beard's phrase, lay in the streets. And it threshed around like a live wire, destroying whoever seized it. Awed and appalled, the new States of Europe looked on: if that was post-War democracy, most of them wanted dictatorship.

Outside Germany stabilization came fast: Czecho-Slovakia prospered; Poland and the Soviet Union made peace; Mussolini, still working with regularly elected deputies, was known primarily as a theatrical figure who, by some process that involved castor-oil applied to his opponents and the suppression of free speech, had made the trains of Italy run on time. But inside Germany the great problem remained: 62,000,000 Germans had to be fed, clothed, housed, organized in some political system and, as the Ruhr occupation had demonstrated, organized economically as well.

Locarno. Grapes were ripe on the white dusty hills around Locarno, the blue waters of Lake Maggiore were warm, when Briand, Stresemann, Sir Austen Chamberlain and representatives from four other countries assembled to make the Locarno Treaties. Those treaties are dead letters now. But the Locarno spirit in 1925 was Europe's biggest hope. And as it radiated out, promising an easement of armaments, a solution of war debts, new dreams of a warless Europe and even of a European Federation of States, it coincided with the world-wide prosperity of 1925-29.

As treaties, the Locarno pacts were not so much. Stresemann, Foreign Minister through ten German ministries, met Aristide Briand, unpunctual, disorderly French Foreign Minister who held portfolios in 26 French Governments. Stresemann drank beer with German journalists, Chamberlain rode around in a glittering red-cushioned Rolls-Royce that had been built for an Indian Maharaja, Briand took the delegates sailing in a small lake steamer, as for eleven days they consulted. They worked out five important agreements. In four of these the clumsy, nervous Stresemann pledged Germany to settle by arbitration disputes with France, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Poland. These were the States allied in the ring around Germany. In a Treaty of Mutual Guarantee, however, Germany, France, Belgium, Italy, Great Britain, guaranteed the inviolability of the Franco-German and Franco-Belgian frontiers. France's fear of Germany, source of her post-War policy, seemed over.