man life. All these wrecked houses, schools, hospitals, factories, city halls, churches, had been put up to serve human needs. They represented the thought, the sentiments, and the labor of many generations who had builded themselves into these structures.

When you go into a patched-up building with the windows stuffed with cloth, the door turning awkwardly on improvised hinges, and into a bare room with two or three bits of broken-down furniture, and find that this is the city hall and that this man sitting here is the mayor, you begin to realize that it is the whole intangible structure of human life that has been destroyed, a thing which it will be harder to rebuild than buildings. An organized community, which, little by little, took shape through centuries, has been blown to bits. This man sitting here has everything to do and nothing to do it with. He is barehanded and empty-handed. He has no resources and no helpers. But the entire community, bereft of everything, looks to him to make the loss good. Scores of thousands of city fathers in Europe are trying to do this superhuman task.

When the invading tides rolled into Belgium, France, Italy, Greece, Rumania, and Russia, not all the civilians fled before them. In fact, the great majority remained. They went into the cellars while the war tornado crashed past. When the noise died down and they cautiously came to the surface, they found themselves in a changed world. Its physical aspect might be little changed, but everything else was absolutely topsy-turvy. They were no longer their own masters; they were under the rule of an enemy army. It is bad enough to be a subject people in peace, it is far worse to be the subject of an enemy army in war. They could no longer be sure of anything. They had to do as they were told. All ordinary business was at a standstill. They were behind the blockade. If they raised food, it would very likely be taken from them. If they labored, it was very

likely to result in benefit to those who were trying to destroy their country. They were in a sense slaves, for they had no freedom and no rights. On suspicion, they were thrown into prison; on little or no evidence, they might be shot. Their cities were called upon to pay large sums as fines or indemnities. They had to see their factories torn down and the materials shipped away. Anything they had which the enemy wanted he took-especially food and clothing. As the blockade became more and more effective, they suffered even more than the enemy civilians, for many of their supplies were taken and shipped to the enemy countries to eke out their failing stocks. Life was no joy-ride in the occupied territory. No wonder its tuberculosis and child death-rates shot up to one and a half or twice what they were before. It is not easy to realize that this kind of life was the lot of six million people in Belgium, three millions in France, a million in Italy, nearly five millions in Serbia, two hundred thousand in Greece, five millions in Rumania, and twenty-two millions in Russia. In all, some forty-two millions of people lived this life of exasperation, subjection, and deprivation.

From among these many millions there were selected by the enemy, as he grew short of man-power, some hundreds of thousands, no one knows how many, for a worse fate-deportation into enemy country. They were to be real slaves, or worse. From Belgium, from France, and, above all, from Greece and Serbia, these deportations sentenced men and women to wearying, brutal labor, exposure, and generally to hardships like those of army prisons. When there was also involved, as in the Near East, a desire to change the dominant national sentiment of some locality, even the children were deported, to share all the hardships of a life pointing directly toward extermination. When the war was over, the survivors walked home. We met them everywhere in SerbiaGreeks, Albanians, and Serbs-footsore,

ragged, famished, vermin- and diseaseinfected.

The hardships of ten million refugees in their exile, their years of unwelcome sojourn, and their decades of makeshift living during reconstruction in the war zone, and of forty-two millions in occupied areas, and of hundreds of thousands deported into slavery are facts which emphasize only a beginning of the realization of the newer ideals of human life introduced by war. It has always been considered that the death of a husband and father is one of the most serious of tragedies. The highest type of religion has been declared to be the visiting widows and fatherless in their affliction. Now, however, instead of being a rare exception, this was to become almost the rule in wide areas of the world. In France, for instance, we must reckon that about 1,750,000 men have been lost. This includes the deaths from wounds, 1,400,000, those among the "missing," among prisoners, and army deaths from disease. It is quite impossible to arrive at the slightest conception of what a loss of one and three-quarter million men means to a country the size of France, except by living there. Simply from the point of view of the emotional strain of sorrow and mourning, its volume is beyond our powers of understanding. A comparison may help.

Shortly after my return from Europe I happened to meet a neighbor living a few doors away. We chatted a moment. I remarked, casually and thoughtlessly, "I suppose your boys are back from France." "Yes," he said, and his face quivered as he turned away, "all who are coming back. We lost one." I reproached myself for not having remembered that this might be the case. knew another neighbor whose son was killed in the war, and had a third friend in the same town, a city of one hundred thousand, whose son was killed in France. My first impression was that this was a large number, since only fifty thousand Americans gave up their lives in France. May God forgive the "only."

I

When one is dealing with totals of millions, fifty thousand seems but few. Under any other circumstances the loss of fifty thousand American men would have seemed an unprecedented calamity; and so it would have been. I happened to pick up the Annual of the graduatingclass of the high-school and found that of the class of 1919 no less than seventeen had died in the service. I began to sense the extent to which the shadow of war-sorrow had come to our little city. A day or two later I read in the evening paper, in the proceedings of a memorial meeting, a list of the boys from Yonkers who had died in France. It filled nearly a column. I was astounded at its length. I made a little calculation then for the first time, as to what would be, so to speak, Yonkers' quota of a total of fifty thousand deaths, and realized that it would be forty-five. It was appalling to think that in these few square miles. of territory, and in every other group of a hundred thousand population from Florida to Washington and from southern California to Maine, there were on an average forty-five households which, however they might rejoice at the successful outcome of the war, were feeling that the price to them had been terribly, terribly high. The loss of fifty thousand men has brought a shade of gloom to every community in America.

Then I tried to think for a moment how we should feel if we had lost our men in the same proportion as France. If America were mourning, not fifty thousand, but four and three-quarter millions, Yonkers would have lost, not a quota of forty-five, but a quota of forty-three hundred. The average loss in every city, community, and town would be ninety-five times as large. The shade of gloom, so to speak, would be ninety-five times as thick, the cloud ninety-five times as black; the question whether it had been worth while ninetyfive times as frequent; the missing places in the ranks of industry, education, agriculture, and the professions, and all along the line, ninety-five times

as numerous. France lost about onefifth of all her men between eighteen and fifty. If there were no additional work to do, four men would have to do what was previously done by five, and from these four-fifths there is still to be deducted an army of cripples and the armies keeping the watch on the Rhine, on the Danube, and in Asia. And France not only has the work which she had to do before, but she has also a problem of reconstruction so big that nothing like an adequate survey has been made of it; so big that it has been estimated that if all the men who were formerly in the building trades were still alive and if plenty of building materials were made available for them, and if we expected them to do no building except in the devastated area, they would be occupied somewhere from fifteen to thirty years in rebuilding that which has been destroyed.

France is literally soaked, inundated, permeated through and through, by sorrow. Serbia is even more so. England, Russia, Italy, Belgium, Greece, Rumania, and all the enemy countries, only a little less so. Our army authorities estimate the battle deaths alone at 7,582,000. Adding deaths among the missing, among prisoners, and excess of deaths from disease in the armies, it is clear that some nine million men laid down their lives on account of the war. Each of these came from a home. The number of widows, fatherless children, of parents and of brothers and sisters in mourning, must be counted in scores of millions.

But we are only well started with this war on homes. Ten million refugees, twenty-seven millions under enemy army rule, hundreds of thousands deported, and nine million dead soldiers to be mourned by God knows how many millions of widows and orphans-all this is only a fair start. Millions of homes have been deprived of that for which homes primarily exist. Every home is built around a cradle. War has gone very far toward emptying the cradles of

VOL. CXL.-No. 835.-10

The full facts are even worse. In the nine invaded departments there were 141,203 births in 1913 and the falling off was much greater than elsewhere. A million and a half of refugees had fled to the interior and their births are included in the above figures from August, 1914, on. The remaining population was behind the lines and births were few. In Lille, the largest city of the occupied area, the population in 1918 was one-half that of 1913, but the births were only oneeighth as many. The deficit continued through 1918 and, to a large degree, 1919. The total estimated war deficit of births in France is about a million and a half. Italy, a country unlike France in that its birth-rate was high, also shows a war deficit in births of about the same number. Uninvaded Britain shows nearly a million; Belgium, 350,000; Serbia, whose men were in exile for four years, 760,000; and so on. A rough estimate of the Allied countries' shortage in babies due to the war is six or seven millions, and, if we include the Central Empires, we have an estimate for Europe of some ten millions.

The consequences of this wholesale race suicide project themselves far into the future. We can easily foresee many curious but serious results of this hiatus in the orderly sequence of age groups in the great European family. The schools, the military classes, if they still exist eighteen or twenty years from now, the number of marriages, the number of adolescents available for employmentall will show violent fluctuations as the

age groups, born in the years 1915-1920 come upon the scene. In the background a more serious question arises. We know how France's population remained relatively stationary from 1860 onward, while Germany's nearly doubled. Suppose for the next fifty years instead of France we should have to say Europe, and instead of Germany Asia or Asia and Africa. The white race is certainly very much less strong, relatively, than it was in 1914. There is much reason to fear that this European birth deficit is due not simply to the absence of the men by reason of mobilization, but also in part to the subnormal conditions of living, such as reduced food-supply, overcrowding in makeshift quarters, and the like. These conditions will continue for some years and to the extent that the fall in births is due to them it, too, will continue, and the white man will thus become increasingly unequal to his world-burden, so far as numbers go. This aspect of post-war results will bear a great deal of thought.

We have seen in another number that war has given a new lease of life to many plagues and pests that were well on their way toward extinction. How many additional deaths have already been thus caused among civilians, no one can say. We must include typhus and typhoid epidemics, greatly increased tuberculosis and infant death-rates, a great increase in malaria, and other similar factors. We must include influenza as at least contributed to, if not caused by, war. The excess of deaths from such causes as these in Italy and in Serbia may be tentatively estimated at 900,000 and 400,000, respectively. Elsewhere we cannot make even a tentative estimate, except that the totals will run well into the millions.

With war as an enemy of home life, we have still other accounts to settle. Something like fifty or fifty-six million men, most of them we may be sure being fathers or big brothers, were for the time being almost as effectively separated from their families as though they

were never to return. And for many of them it was a separation for four years, broken by only very brief occasional leaves. Europe was a continent of manless homes. Its home life was thoroughly abnormal. Ordinarily the father is the steadying as well as the supporting factor. To the children he is the superman. His miraculous strength keeps the world in order. His companionship, when he has time for it, stands out as a series of marvelous events. He, on the other hand, hears compressed into the word "Daddy" such volumes of affection, such completeness of confidence, that life takes on new meanings which draw out his greatest powers and make long hours of toil seem a negligible part of the day. The games in which big brother joins are best of all. Now there remained only the tame ones in which all the parts could be taken by children. Life was quiet and monotonous. Mother seemed very still and not much interested in anything. There was nobody to do the hard work but the old men, the women, and the older children. No interesting things could be planned. It was a dull, gray, uneventful life for, say, a hundred million children, and an anxious, wearing, emotionally overstrained existence for scores of millions of wives and mothers.

In the middle of Serbia, in late December, 1918, I saw a company of German prisoners in a village. They had use of a fairly comfortable building with a yard. around it inclosed with barbed wire. I talked with them of the war. They did not seem at all interested in the Peace Conference; they did not care where the Kaiser was or what he was doing, or who was in control in Germany, or what America was going to do. They wanted to get home to their wives and children. They did not complain of their food, or shelter, or work. They talked and thought of only one thing-home.

For four long years, scores of millions of homes in Europe, instead of being centers and creators of happiness and affection, of serenity and order, were

abodes of loneliness, anxiety, nervous apprehension, and, in about ten million. cases, of grief beyond expression. Who can foresee the future effects of such an environment for the children of a continent?

We have spoken thus far of those who were directly affected-refugees, residents of occupied regions, those deported, widows and the fatherless, and the families of those mobilized. But this warfare against the home permeated every community in Europe. With the able-bodied men diverted to war for four years, it needed neither blockade nor submarines to make life bare and hard, to make food, clothing, shoes, coal, wood, shelter, medical care, recreation, education, scarce and high in price. The entire world went in sight of hunger and in whole nations its pinch was actually felt. This falling away from the slowly and hardly won condition of having enough food immediately registered itself in the death records everywhere in Europe, and enabled disease to take a new hold upon the human family. Nobody had time to devote to building homes or schools or churches or hospitals, or to making the world a safer and brighter place for children. It was impossible even to carry on such of these things as existed. There are those for whom the simplification of life doing without servants and automobiles and having fewer courses at dinner was desirable, but such are numerically a negligible minority. The great masses of mankind have never gained so much that they can afford to lose; they have never passed beyond the simple life. For them diminution means hardship, and hardship means reduced vitality and efficiency. This sub-standard of living has been enforced over practically the whole of Europe during the later stages of the war, and still continues.

How long it will continue no one may say. It is easier to tear down than to construct. The complex economic life, growth of generations, must be slowly

rebuilt. The world has more work to do than before and fewer men to do it. There is a shortage in all manufactured articles, a shortage in raw materials, a shortage in every form of transportation, a shortage in housing, and there are enormous ruined areas to be rebuilt. The prospect for a speedy regaining of the standards of living of 1914, of such measure of comfort, well-being, education, and enjoyment as the peoples of Europe had attained to, is not good. All those cheerful head-lines, which one will read during the next two years, to the effect that this, that, or the other country has returned to normal conditions, may be disregarded as based on misinformation, lack of information, or blind and wilful optimism. Every nation has incurred for future payment a huge debt which for an indefinite period will claim all income except that required for the most urgent of current needs. The increasing amounts which were being devoted to education, health, and in general to the enrichment and betterment of life can only be had from now on in driblets. In a hundred million homes in Europe there will be hopeless drudgery, constant and fruitless struggle against heavy taxation and high prices. Europe will be in the treadmill for decades, slowly and painfully grinding out the liquidation of war's enormous obligations, incurred for destructive purposes. She starts her post-war career with depleted stocks of men, and must propagate her future generations from the physically less fit. Intangible and difficult of measurement as this race deterioration may be, it may easily prove to have been the most disastrous of all the effects of the war.

Vast political, economic, and social changes caused by the war can be seen only vaguely as in process, but with no clear outcome in sight. The world will be either more democratic or more imperialistic, but as yet it is not clear which. Peoples have seen big things done and are demanding that other big things be done. One can feel the swell of