INTERNATIONAL CONCILIATION Published monthly by the American Association for International Conciliation. I. Present Day Conditions in Europe III. Report of the American Military Mission AMERICAN ASSOCIATION FOR INTERNATIONAL CONCILIATION EDITORIAL OFFICE: 407 WEST 117TH STREET, NEW YORK CITY I PRESENT DAY CONDITIONS IN EUROPE Address by HENRY P. DAVISON Chairman, Board of Governors, League of Red Cross Societies Before the General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, Des Moines, Iowa, May 17, 1920 As Chairman of the Convention of Red Cross Societies, composed of representatives of twenty-seven nations, that met recently in Geneva, I am custodian of authoritative reports recording appalling conditions among millions of people living in Eastern Europe. Whatever our attitude towards the League of Nations or our apprehensions regarding foreign entanglements, I feel it is essential that the people of the United States realize that one of the most terrible tragedies in the history of the human race is being enacted within the broad belt of territory lying between the Baltic and the Black and Adriatic Seas. This area includes the new Baltic States-Poland, CzechoSlovakia, Ukraine, Austria, Hungary, Roumania, Montenegro, Albania and Serbia. The reports which come to us make it clear that in these warravaged lands civilization has broken down. Disease, bereavement and suffering are present in practically every household, while food and clothing are insufficient to make life tolerable. Men, women and children are dying by thousands and over vast once-civilized areas there are to be found neither medical appliances nor medical skill sufficient to cope with the devastating plagues. According to reports of the American Red Cross and the Commissioner of the League of Red Cross Societies made in a signed statement to the American Government, wholesale starvation is threatened in Poland this summer unless she can procure food supplies in large quantities. A telegram to the League of Red Cross Societies, March 20, stated that there are now approximately 250,000 cases of typhus in Poland and in the area occupied by Polish troops. This is already one of the worst typhus epidemics in the world's history. In Galicia, whole towns are crippled and business suspended. In some districts there is but one doctor to each 150,000 people. During the year 1919 about 2,400,000 refugees and prisoners entered Poland. In the Ukraine, we were told, typhus and influenza has affected most of the population. In villages of two to three thousand half the people were ill at the same time and there was almost no medical care. In many cases a territory forty miles in diameter had but one physician. Some doctors who had twenty to thirty thousand patients could get no medical supplies whatever and had nothing better to give the sick than oral instructions. Pauperism is intensified every day. A report from Vienna dated February 12 said: "There are rations for three weeks. People are apathetic, fatalistic, tired. One hundred thousand school children in Vienna are reported as underfed and diseased because of food shortage and lack of fuel. At least twenty-five thousand hospital beds have become useless owing to lack of medical supplies. Death stalks through the streets of Vienna and takes unhindered toll. The general death rate has risen forty-six per cent. since 1913 and the mortality for tuberculosis two hundred and fifty per cent." Budapest, according to our information, is one vast city of misery and suffering. The number of deaths is double that of births. Of 160,000 children in the schools, 100,000 are dependent on public charity. There are 150,000 workers idle. In Roumania tuberculosis is spreading in an alarming and unprecedented manner. All energies are devoted to keeping the typhus epidemic at bay, and a military cordon along the Dniester River prevents the entrance of 20,000 Russian refugees on the other side whose infection is feared. Typhus and smallpox have invaded the four countries composing Czecho-Slovakia, and there is lack of medicines, soap and physicians. The shelves of their pharmacies and their hospitals are bare. In Serbia typhus has broken out again and there are but two hundred physicians to minister to the needs of that entire country. In Montenegro, where food is running short, there are but five physicians for an estimated population of 450,000. In a letter to the Red Cross Convention appealing for aid, Arthur Balfour, Chairman of the Council of the League of Nations, speaks of "the catastrophe as one of unexampled magnitude. The calamity following hard on war seems almost worse than the war itself." These are but a few of the top notes of the tragedy. There is nothing here about Russia, whose population is rationed, or of Germany, whose problems are acute, or of Armenia where the distress and destruction are beyond description. Hunger and disease and despair are the lot of these fellow humans of ours. Powerless to help themselves, they are slowly perishing before our eyes. Returning to the United States a few weeks ago with all these horrors ringing in my ears, I found myself once more in a land whose granaries were overflowing, where health and plenty abounded, and where life and activity and eager enterprise were in the full flood. And though I well know of a hundred disturbing problems I heard of no hunger cries. No American children were dying in their mothers' arms for lack of milk or bread. I asked myself—What if this plague and famine were here in the great territory between the Atlantic Seaboard and the Mississippi Valley which roughly parallels the extent of these ravaged countries, and that sixty-five million of our own people condemned to idleness by lack of raw material and whose fields had been devastated by invasion and rapine, were racked by starvation and pestilence, and if we had lifted up our voices and invoked the attention of our brothers in happier Europe to our own deep miseries and our cries had fallen on deaf ears, would we not in our despair exclaim against their heartlessness! And even if this calamity had befallen us because of the wrongdoing of our rulers, even if we were beset by partisan wrangles and torn by conflicting policies, would we not feel that the very magnitude of our disasters outweighed our faults and constituted a claim on the Christian humanity they had in common with ourselves? In my relations with the representatives of these stricken people of Europe I heard no bitter words about America. I attempted through various relations to plumb their feelings. Invariably the replies ran something like this: "Well, we don't |