tored only slowly; commerce is spoken of as an aim. In Italy the
dangers and perils of reopening trade with Germany have been seriously
discussed; customs duties are raised every day; the industrial groups
find easy propaganda for protection. Any limitation of competition is
a duty, whether it be the enemy of yesterday or the enemy of to-day,
and so the greatest evils of protection are camouflaged under
patriotism.

None of the countries which have come out of the War on the Continent
have a financial position which helps toward a solid situation.
All the financial documents of the various countries, which I have
collected and studied with great care, contain enormous masses
of expenses which are the consequences of the War; those of the
conquering countries also contain enormous aggregations of expenses
which are or can become the cause of new wars.

The conquered countries have not actually any finance. Germany has an
increase of expenses which the fall of the mark renders more serious.
In 1920 she spent not less than ninety-two milliards, ruining her
circulation. How much has she spent in 1921?

Austria and Hungary have budgets which are simply hypotheses. The last
Austrian budget, for 1921, assigned a sum of seventy-one milliards
of crowns for expenses, and this for a poor country with 7,000,000
inhabitants.

A detailed examination of the financial situation of Czeko-Slovakia,
of Rumania, and of the Serbo-Croat States gives results which are at
the least alarming. Even Greece, which until yesterday had a solid
structure, gallops now in a madness of expenditure which exceeds all
her resources, and if she does not find a means to make peace with
Turkey she will find her credit exhausted. The most ruinous of all
is the situation of Poland, whose finance is certainly not better
regulated than that of the Bolsheviks of Moscow, to judge from the
course of the Polish mark and the Russian rouble if anyone gets the
idea of buying them on an international market.

The situation of the exchange since the War has not sensibly bettered
even for the great countries, and it is extraordinarily worse for the
other countries.

In June, 1921, France had a circulation of about thirty-eight milliard
of francs, Belgium six milliard of francs, Italy of about eighteen
milliards; Great Britain, between State notes and Bank of England
notes, had hardly L434,000,000 sterling. Actually, among the
continental countries surviving the War