because the labor will be
absorbed in her armies.

There is not the same access to her markets. She has difficulty in
exporting her goods, and in addition to that her purchases abroad are
enormously increased in consequence of the war. Russia, therefore, has
special difficulty in the matter of financing outside purchases for the
war. Those are some of the difficulties with which we were confronted.

France has also special difficulties. I am not sure that we quite
realize the strain put upon that gallant country [cheers] up to the
present moment. For the moment she bears far and away the greatest
strain of the war in proportion to her resources. She has the largest
proportion of her men under arms. The enemy are in occupation of parts
of her richest territory. They are within fifty-five miles of her
capital, exactly as if we had a huge German army at Oxford. It is only a
few months since the bankers of Paris could hear the sound of the
enemy's guns from their counting houses, and they can hear the same
sound now, some of them, from their country houses. In those
circumstances the money markets of a country are not at their very best.
That has been one of the difficulties with which France has been
confronted in raising vast sums of money to carry on the war and helping
to finance the allied States.

There is a wonderful confidence, notwithstanding these facts, possessing
the whole nation. [Cheers.] Nothing strikes the visitor to Paris more
than that. There is a calm, a serene confidence, which is supposed to be
incompatible with the temperament of the Celt by those who do do not
know it. [Laughter.] There is a general assurance that the Germans have
lost their tide, and that now the German armies have as remote a chance
of crushing France as they have of overrunning the planet Mars.
[Cheers.] That is the feeling which pervades every class of the
community, and that is reflected in the money market there. The
difficulties of France in that respect are passing away, and the
arrangement that has now been made in France for the purpose of raising
sums of money to promote their military purposes will, I have not the
faintest doubt, be crowned with the completest success. [Cheers.]

But we have a number of small States which are compelled to look to the
greater countries in alliance for financial support. There is Belgium,
which until recently was a very rich country, devastated, desolate, and
almost entirely in the hand