EUROPE: 1,063 Weeks

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In the evening of October 16, the treaty was signed while church bells rang and a crowd clamored outside the town hall. It was brought to the window, lighted like an ikon. Mussolini took a special train from Rome to Milan, drove a racing car from Milan to Stresa, a speedboat from Stresa to Locarno. Briand, always in bed by nine if possible, was asleep two hours after the signing. But he was stirred: "It is ended," he said later, "that long war between us. Ended those long veils of mourning for the pains that will never be assuaged. Away with the rifles, the machine guns and the cannon! Here come conciliation, arbitration and peace!"

The post-War world now began to seem not only warless, but prospering. The years of German loans, of the building of the Bremen, the Graf Zeppelin, of reconstruction, of speculation, of U. S. financial dominance unaccompanied by an increase of U. S. political responsibility, were also years that saw the production of the world's goods reach new heights. They were the years when Coolidge said of war debts, "They hired the money," when Charles Dawes was Coolidge's vicegerent in Europe, wearing laurels won with the Dawes Plan.

They were the years in which German steel production approached its pre-War level; Germany's merchant marine climbed from 400,000 to 3,700,000 tons. They were the years in which France stabilized her currency, recovering from the post-Ruhr crisis that swept six ministries out of office in 15 months. They were the years when Edward, Prince of Wales, was known as the Empire's greatest salesman. And though England was laboring with an unemployment problem and China was torn by internal revolt, advocates of international cooperation flourished in the capitals of Europe as trade grew, production increased.

On New Year's Day 1929, a spectator from any place but Mars might have seen, beneath the hysteria and hangover of the boom years, a perspective of peace ahead. The ribbons of trenches that crisscrossed Europe had been filled in, the post-War statesmen of revenge were out of office, the Soviet Union had turned from its program of international revolution to its program of internal development under the Five-Year Plan. U. S. tourist spending in Europe jumped over 350% between 1920 and 1928, building went on as rapidly as in any period of history, and if for a moment a steadily rising standard of living seemed an approachable goal for mankind, it was a measure of what continued peace meant, of what might happen in a community of nations that was not haunted by dreams of the last War, or by premonitions of the next.

Collapse. On October 24, 1929, the market crashed in New York, and in that year world unemployment swelled to 30,000,000. By 1931:

> The price of copper slumped from 18¢ to 8¢ a pound; U. S. wheat fell from $1.30 to 53¢ a bushel; cotton from 16¢ to 6¢ per Ib.; beef from $9 to $5 per 100 Ib.