oup of
nations, be they friends or foes.

Here, then, is the strategy that will rule after the war. A huge allied
monopoly is projected--a sort of monster militant trust, with cabinets
of ministers for directorates, armies and navies as trade scouts, and
whole roused citizenships for salesmen.

Throughout this new Bill of World Trade Rights there is scant mention of
neutrals--no reference at all to the greatest of non-belligerent
nations. Yet the document is packed with interest, fraught even with
highest concern, for us. Upon the ability to be translated into
offensive and defensive reality will depend a large part of our future
international commercial relations.

Is the Paris Pact practical? Will it withstand the logical pressure of
business demand and supply when the war is ended? How will it affect
American trade?

To try to get the answer I talked with many men in England and France
who were intimately concerned. Some had sat in the conference; others
had helped to shape its approach; still others were dedicated to its
far-spreading purpose. I found an astonishing conflict of opinion. Even
those who had attended this most momentous of all economic conferences
were sceptical about complete results. Yet no one questioned the intent
to smash enemy trade. Will our interests be pinched at the same time?

Regardless of what any European statesman may say to the contrary, one
deduction of supreme significance to us arises out of the whole
proposition. Summed up, it is this:

Mutual preference by or for the members of either of the great European
alliances automatically creates a discrimination against those outside!
Whether we face the Teuton or the Allies' group--or both--in the grand
economic line-up, we shall have to fight for commercial privileges that
once knew no ban.

There are two well-defined beliefs about the practical working out of
the pact as a pact. Let us take the objections first. They find
expression in a strong body of opinion that the whole procedure is both
unhuman and uneconomic--a campaign document, as it were, conceived in
the heat and passion of a great war, projected for political effect in
cementing the allied lines. In short, it is what business men would call
a glorified and stimulated "selling talk," framed to sell good will
between the nations that now propose to carry war to shop and mill and
mine.

"But," as a celebrated British economist said to me in London, "while
all this ta