What a muddle it all is! France and Germany are both anxious to settle in the Ruhr, but are too proud to admit it. The struggle, therefore, goes on, and will continue to the detriment of both. Belgium is sorry she ever entered the Ruhr, but cannot get out of it. Every time she tries to get away France pulls her back roughly by the tail of her coat, so she has to do sentry-go at Essen whilst her franc is leading a wild life at home. Italy has forgotten that she ever sanctioned the occupation, and her moral indignation is mounting rapidly, although it has not yet risen to a height which is visible across the Alps. Great Britain is growling futile notes of dissatisfaction with everybody—France and Germany alike. The confusion of tongues is deafening and paralysing, and no one is quite happy except the spirit of mischief who is holding his sides with ghoulish laughter. He never had such[Pg 214] a time—not since the Tower of Babel. And this time it may end in a second deluge.  
The horror of the Great War seems to have unhinged the European mind. Nations do not think normally. The blood pressure is still very high. The excitement over the Ruhr does not tend to improve it. When some of the articles written and speeches delivered to-day come to be read by the diligent historian a generation hence, he will recognise there the ravings of a continent whose mental equilibrium has been upset by a great shock. The real issue involved in all this struggle is a comparatively simple one. How much can Germany pay and in what way can she pay? America, Britain, Italy and Germany are all agreed that the only way to settle that question is to appoint competent experts to investigate and report upon it. The Pope also has blessed this reasonable suggestion. France, on the contrary, says it is a question to be determined by guns and generals—both equally well fitted for that task. Germany must present her accounts to the mitrailleuse and argue her case before the soixante-quinze. It is a mad world.
 
Every one is interested in one question—or [Pg 215]perhaps two. How will it all end and how soon is that end coming? Although I have nothing to fear from recalling the predictions of my early articles on this subject, I hesitate to hazard a fresh forecast. But one may review the possibilities and note the drift of the whirling currents. In assessing the chances, you must begin with some knowledge of the man who will decide the event. M. Poincaré is possessed of undoubted ability and patriotism, but he is also a man who lives in a world of prejudices so dense that they obscure facts. You have but to turn to one statement in his last note where he says the conferences and ultimatums of the past four years secured nothing from Germany. What are the facts? During the three and a half years that preceded the Ruhr invasion, Germany paid to the Allies in cash and in kind over ten milliards of gold marks,—￡500,000,000 in sterling, 2,000,000,000 in dollars—a considerable effort for a country which had but lately emerged out of the most exhausting of wars and whose foreign trade was down sixty to seventy per cent. You might imagine that a man who had taken the grave step of ordering armies to invade a neighbour's territories would also have taken the trouble to ascertain the elementary facts[Pg 216] of his case. Part of this gigantic sum went to pay for Armies of Occupation; part for Reparations, but it all came out of German assets. Will the next three and a half years bring anything approximating that figure to the Allied coffers?
 
It is a safe statement to make that no one in charge of the French movements anticipated a resistance approaching in its stubbornness to that which they have encountered. The friendly Press, both in France and in England, foretold a speedy collapse of the German opposition, and on this assumption all the French plans were based. During the first days of the occupation an Englishman asked a French officer how long he thought it would take. The answer is indicative of the spirit in which the venture started: "Optimists think it will take a fortnight," he said; "pessimists think it may take three weeks." A reference to the January telegrams from Paris and Düsseldorf will show that this officer accurately expressed the general sentiment of those who were responsible for the Ruhr invasion. Soldiers estimate the chances of resistance in terms of material and trained men, and statesmen too often build their hopes on the same shallow foundation. They never allow for the [Pg 217]indomitable reserves of the human heart, which do not figure in Army Lists or Statesmen's Annuals. The resistance of Paris in 1870 was as confounding to Bismarck as the stubbornness of the Ruhr miners is to Poincaré to-day. The last regular army had been destroyed, all docketed food stores exhausted, and still the struggle of the devoted citizens went on for months. There were few men in England who thought the Boer peasants could continue their resistance for more than three months after our armies reached South Africa. The three months ran into three years and only then capitulated on honourable terms. The Northern States of America never contemplated the possibility of a five years' struggle with a blockaded, starved and overwhelmed Confederacy. The War of 1914-18 is littered with miscalculations attributable to the blind refusal of rulers and their advisers to recognise the moral element as a factor in the reckoning. The Ruhr tragedy is not the first, nor indeed may it be the last, to be initiated by facile memoranda framed by General Staffs and civilian functionaries, drawing their inspiration from pigeonholes.
 
Whatever may transpire in the Ruhr it is already clear that the estimates of military men, of [Pg 218]transport officials, of intelligence departments, and of presiding Ministers, have been hopelessly falsified. Many more soldiers have been sent into the Ruhr than had been thought necessary: a great deal less coal has come out of the Ruhr than had been confidently expected. There are already as many Frenchmen in the Ruhr as Napoleon commanded at Waterloo; and they have succeeded in sending across the frontier in six months only as much coal as the Germans delivered in one month during the period of "default" which provoked the invasion. Desperate efforts have been made at great cost to increase the yield with a view to satisfying French and foreign opinion that resistance is gradually breaking down. Rubbish is shovelled into wagons in order anyhow to swell the quota. Coal is seized anywhere, even in the streets. And Monsieur Trocquer, the bluff and genial Breton in charge of the transport arrangements, breezily challenges all the critics to look at the mounting pyramids of his dustcart collection and rejoice with him in the triumph of French organisation under his control. Alas, the Celtic fire of Monsieur Trocquer, even when fed by the sweepings of the Ruhr, cannot keep going the blast furnaces of Lorraine! So we find [Pg 219]disappointment and discont............