Y ou may feel inclined to dispute the assertion. You may even consider yourself insulted by the suggestion that it might have happened to you. “It could never have happened to me,” you may argue. But it could. You had no control over the selection of your parents or the date and place of your birth. The advantages which saved you from having it happen to you were the merest accidents; they did not arise from your own inherent merit. It was your good luck to be born in America. No protest of your

T oday I visited one of the strategic points where the battle against hunger is being fought. It was a former barracks, now a soup-kitchen of the American Relief Administration, situated in the poorest district of Vienna, where meals are daily prepared for 8000 children. There are 340,000 undernourished children in Vienna—a total of 96 per cent, out of the entire child-population. But these, whom I visited, were all hand-picked and medically certified as being sufficiently near to extinction to

T oday being Sunday, a day of rest and gladness when even prisoners do not work, I visited the central gaol of Vienna. Permission is not often granted; in order to obtain it, it was necessary to gain the consent of the President of the Austrian Republic. My object in going was to see for myself to what extent starvation is making criminals out of children and so adding one more grim touch, by destroying characters as well as bodies, to the monstrous sum of Europe's child tragedy. Before the war

T here is an institution in Vienna known as the Dorotheum. It is the Government pawnshop and ===has for its sign a falling hammer against a sinking sun. More than two hundred years ago it was founded by the good Emperor Joseph to protect his people against the rapacity of private brokers. Formerly the rule was that if articles were not reclaimed within the space of ten months, they would be passed under the hammer. Today the respite for redemption has been cut down to three months; the Governmen

O nce is enough,” says Budapest. “We shall never go Bolshevist again.” When one listens to the stories of what happened while Hungary was under the heel of Bela Kuhn, his only wonder is that once was not too much. The first man to give me an inside picture was the correspondent of the Manchester Guardian; his mother had been thrown out of a fourth storey window by the pillaging rabble who visited her home. The second was Hungary's greatest iron-master, who crouched with his wife and daughter in

T oday I had an interview, lasting for an hour, with Admiral Horthy, who is Governor of Hungary. It was he who snatched his country from the throes of Bolshevism and established in the midst of disaster a representative government. He is a patriot and man of the world in the finest sense. He was wounded in the Great War and has lived through to peace days without animosities. My object in seeing him was to obtain a personal statement from him of how he proposed to reconstruct the fallen destinie

T his year Santa Claus made a mistake about Vienna; he forgot to come or else he had grown tired of paying visits to a people who are so unhappy. In Vienna they speak of 1920 as the sixth year of the war—they mean the war against hunger. They can afford no more Christmases till the Peace with Hunger has been settled. Some of us who had seen the toys taken from the children being auctioned for bread at the Dorotheum, suspected that this would be the case—Santa Claus would be too busy in England a

A ccounts of the starving children are likely to create the impression that the countries in which they starve are callous. The case is quite the opposite. Hungary, for instance, used to lead the world in its legislation for child-conservation. If the parent failed, the State automatically became the parent. If an unprotected woman were about to become a mother, the State undertook a man's responsibilities, both for the woman and the life unborn. The way in which the law operated was peculiarly

T hey wouldn't need to starve if they would get to work.” The retort and the criticism which it implies are as shallow as they are selfish. Central Europe wants to work. It is begging for the chance to work; but it cannot work efficiently while it is under-nourished. Here in Prague there is an American business man who has probed deeper into the Czecho-Slovak economic situation than all the politicians. He has found a way to feed the nation and to make a profit for himself. He bases his calculat

P rague is one of the more important of the jumping off points for Bolshevist propaganda in Europe; it is at the same time a rendezvous for exiled Russians of moderate views, who are conspiring to overthrow the Red regime the moment the hour seems propitious. These exiled Russians all belong to the Intelligencia—the cultured middle-class. They are university students, professors, doctors, engineers—the people of brains and small means who do the sane thinking for whatever nation. They are a clas

P oland is commencing the New Year with her face towards peace and the hope in her heart that she may never have to fight again. For her the war has lasted two years longer than for any other country. During the past six years she has had to fight on five separate fronts. Her devastated area is greater than that of France. She has cities which have been captured and occupied seven separate times since 1914 by the armies of seven separate nations. She is sick of war. She has elected a peasant for

S ome weeks ago a haggard man limped into the headquarters office of the American Relief in Warsaw. He had come to seek assistance for his daughter. She had just escaped from Kharkov, where she had been held a prisoner by the Bolshevists for many months. Her health was broken with hardship; if something were not done for her, she would die. Unfortunately he could not offer money; but whatever was done for her he would consider a debt, which one day he would repay. By profession he was an enginee

W hy does Poland starve? The question needs answering. In our secret hearts we people who have plenty, are inclined to suspect that the nations who suffer are purchasing their hunger with idleness. I do not pretend that the situation at Marki answers all the question, But certainly the reasons for the hunger there apply to very many towns which once were hives of industry. Marki lies six miles to the east of Warsaw in the direct path of a Russian advance. The country through which one approaches

I f you can imagine the House of Lords standing in the bread-line, you will be able to picture the sight that I saw today. I suppose nothing like it has been seen since the French Revolution—no reversal of social fortunes half so tragic and poignantly dramatic. It was an object lesson to anyone who believes that aristocracy is anything more than environment. What I really saw was the Imperial Russian Court in miniature. The lady who introduced me was the wife of the Tsar's High Chamberlain, Mada

T his morning I had an interview with Witos, the Prime Minister of Poland. If anyone suspects Poland of Imperialistic aims, Witos is the answer and the direct negation. He is a Galician peasant, who had his little farm near Cracow. He first began to be heard from as a protesting voice against oppression, when Galicia was under Austrian domination. As oppression multiplied his voice grew, always protesting in defence of the under-dog. It was five years ago, after Russian Poland had been occupied

I t was January the sixth, the eve of the Festival of the Three Kings, which is the day before the Russian Christmas, that we found ourselves automobiling across the devastated stretch of country which lies between Brest-Litovsk and the old Russo-German front-line. Our object in going was to see how the peasants were living in the destroyed areas and what was being done to save their starving children. The mention of devastated areas conjures a picture of the kind of destruction that happened in

D oes Poland want peace? It is a question which has to be answered in the affirmative if either philanthropists or nations are going to interest themselves in restoring Poland to a sound financial footing. In order to obtain an authoritative answer, I approached Prince Sapieha, the Polish Minister of Foreign Affairs. Rather to my amazement he was not at all elusive, but gave me the most convincing Arguments for Poland's peace desires that I have yet heard. “The trouble with Poland,” he said, “is

D antzig's problem is similar to the problems of the whole of Central Europe; it arises out of the arbitrary creation of new frontiers. To sit in Paris with a blue pencil and scrawl lines on a map was a simple task; to have to dwell within those lines, despite their violation of economic laws, and make a livelihood, has proved less easy. It is one thing to declare Dantzig a free-port; it is another to persuade her neighbours to use her. It is possible that in making Dantzig free, the Peace Confe

T he youth of Germany have established an invisible system of trenches in every home, every school, every university. Though they may not know it and would perhaps disown it, they are banded together to withstand that same intolerance of autocracy which hurried lovers of freedom from the ends of the earth that it might be crushed on the Western Front. These new armies which are re-winning the old battle Have given themselves a name; they call themselves the Freie Deutsche Jugend—the Free Youth o

T he words are Trotsky's. They were his verdict on the humiliating Peace which Russia was compelled to accept at the hands of Germany. You may see them scrawled on the wall of the old Jesuit College at Brest-Litovsk where the Peace was signed: “Neither Peace Nor War. Trotsky.” If they were true of the Peace of Brest-Litovsk, they are equally true of the Peace which has befallen Central Europe as the crowning achievement of the war which was to end all wars. It is not stating matters too strongly