Central Europe only, together with large parts
of the Balkans, of Russia, and of Eastern Asia, that is in this evil
plight. Europe as a whole is unprovided with the foodstuffs with which
to feed its population and the raw materials with which to furnish
employment. If there were prevailing among them the best of wills and
of cooeperative arrangements, the European peoples could not keep
themselves alive this winter and make any substantial advance towards
reparation of the damage of war and industrial recovery. If human
cooeperation is to save these weak and desperate peoples, it must be a
cooeperation of more than the nations of Europe. Only by the better
provided nations of the world coming to the rescue can the
worse-provided nations survive and recover. It would be foolish to
mince words in so grave an issue. We are all acquainted with the main
facts of the world situation and are familiar with the place which
America occupies in it as the chief repository of those surpluses of
foods, materials, and manufactured goods which Europe needs so sorely.
The term 'surplus' is, of course, somewhat deceptive. Surplus depends
largely on home consumption, itself an elastic condition. But for
practical purposes we may take the exportable surplus to mean the
product which remains for sale abroad after the normal wants of the
home population are supplied. It might mean something more, viz., that
the home population would voluntarily keep down or reduce their
consumption, in order that more might be available for export. The
American people actually did exercise this self-denying ordinance to an
appreciable extent, in order to help win the war. Are they willing to
do the same in order to help the world in a distress as dire as war
itself?

It may be said, perhaps truly, that this presumes that America is in
the peace as much as she was in the war, that she has decided to link
her destiny closely and lastingly with that of Europe, that she
definitely accepts a proffered place as a member of the society of
nations, and under circumstances which make an immediate call upon her
economic and financial resources in a manner in which there can be no
direct reciprocity.

Now it may reasonably be urged that America is not prepared for such a
committal, that such obligations as she undertook, as an associated
power, in the conduct of the war, terminate with the making of peace;
and that, as regards the future structure of international re