Note 7 — Chapter I · OUR DAILY BREAD

Sir William Goode, British Director of Relief, has said, (Times Dec. 6th., 1919):—

‘I have myself recently returned from Vienna. I feel as if I had spent ten days in the cell of a condemned murderer who has given up all hope of reprieve. I stayed at the best hotel, but I saw no milk and no eggs the whole time I was there. In the bitter, cold hall of the hotel, once the gayest rendezvous in Europe, the visitors huddled together in the gloom of one light where there used to be forty. They were more like shadows of the Embankment than representatives of the rich. Vienna’s world-famous Opera House is packed every afternoon. Why? Women and men go there in order to keep themselves warm, and because they have no work to do.’

He went on:—

‘First aid was to hasten peace. Political difficulties combined with decreased production, demoralisation of railway traffic, to say nothing of actual shortages of coal, food, and finance, had practically paralysed industrial and commercial activity. The bold liberation or creation of areas, without simultaneous steps to reorganise economic life, had so far proved to be a dangerous experiment. Professor Masaryk, the able President of Czecho-Slovakia, put the case in a nutshell when he said: “It is a question of the export of merchandise or of population.”’