ABSTRACT
The economic life of Europe was strongly enclosed within a nationalist framework; within this framework again the habits of economic life, persisting from an earlier time, were strongly individualist. An analysis of the calamity threatening Western Europe was met by the force of sentiment and vested interest which the nationalist organisation of European resources had gathered in its progress. The class which made peace and war, the reigning and princely families of Europe, the great magnates of Germany and Austria, of Hungary and Russia, were unfamiliar with the technique of ‘high finance’; monarchs and governments went to their bankers as mediaeval princes went to the Jews. European Russia trebled its population in the nineteenth century; Ireland suffered a decrease. The growth of towns in Germany was affected by the willingness of Germans to migrate to the New World. The emigration of the European peoples, in other words, the extension of European ideas, was not a new factor in history.
