lations,
she proposes to preserve full freedom to cooeperate with other nations,
or to stand alone, according to her estimate of each occasion.

It is here convenient to treat separately two issues which are none the
less closely related, viz., the issue of international cooeperation for
the immediate work of the salvage and restoration of Europe, and the
issue of a permanent cooeperation or agreement for the equitable use of
the economic resources of the world. The urgency for Europe of the
first issue has been already indicated. If the weaker European nations
are left to the ordinary play of economic laws for the supplies they
need, they must lapse into starvation and social anarchy. A lifting of
the war blockades and embargoes hardly helps them. The formal
restoration of free commerce is little better than a mockery to those
who lack the power to buy and sell. Free commerce would simply mean
that America's surplus, the food, materials, and manufactured goods she
has to sell abroad, would be purchased exclusively by those more
prosperous foreigners who have the means to pay in money, or in export
goods available for credit purposes. Now the populations and the
governments of these broken countries have neither money nor goods in
hand. The return of peace has left them with depleted purses and empty
stores. If the purchase and consumption of the available surplus of
foods, materials, and manufactures from America and other prosperous
countries is distributed according to the separate powers of purchase
in the European countries, the countries and the classes of population
which are least in need will get all, those which are most in need,
nothing. How can it be otherwise, if immediate ability to pay is the
criterion? In ordinary times the machinery of international finance
does tend to distribute surplus stocks according to the needs of the
different nations, for the production of the actual goods for export
trade with which imports are paid for, the true base of credit, is
continually proceeding. But the war broke this machinery of regular
exchange. It cannot be immediately restored. America or Argentina
cannot sell their surplus wheat in the ordinary way to Poland, Austria,
Belgium and other needy countries, because, largely for the very lack
of these goods and materials, their industries are not operating, so
that the goods they should produce, upon which credit would be built,
are not forthcoming.

This is one of