e
Entente cause. Its arsenals teemed with shells; its men were fit;
victory, however distant, seemed at last assured. The time had come to
prepare a new kind of drive--the combined attack upon enemy trade and
any other that happened to be in the way.

Thus it came about that on a brilliant sun-lit day last June twoscore
men sat round a long table in a stately room of a palace that overlooked
the Seine, in Paris. Eminent lawmakers--Hughes, of Australia, among
them--were there aplenty; but few practical business men.

On the walls hung the trade maps of the world; spread before them were
the red-dotted diagrams that showed the water highways where traffic
flowed in happier and serener days. For coming generations of business
everywhere it was a fateful meeting because the now famous Economic
Conference of the Allies was about to reshape those maps and change the
channels of commerce.

All the while, and less than a hundred miles away, Verdun seethed with
death; still nearer brewed the storm of the Somme.

These men were assembled to fix the price of all this blood and
sacrifice, and they did. In what has come to be known as the Paris Pact
they bound themselves together by economic ties and pledged themselves
to present a united economic front. They unfurled the banner of
aggressive reprisal with the sole object of crushing the one-time
business supremacy of their foes.

The chief recommendations were: To meet, by tariff discrimination,
boycott or otherwise, any individual or organised trade advance of the
Central Powers--already Germany, Austria, Turkey and Bulgaria have
reached a commercial understanding; to forego any "favoured-nation"
relation with the enemy for an indefinite period; to conserve for
themselves, "before all others," their natural resources during the
period of reconstruction; to make themselves independent of enemy
countries in the raw materials and manufactured products essential to
their economic well-being; and to facilitate this exchange by
preferential trade among themselves, and by special and state subsidies
to shipping, railroads and telegraphs. Another important decree
prohibits the enemy from engaging in certain industries and professions,
such as dyestuffs, in allied countries when these industries relate to
national defence or economic independence.

In short, self-sufficiency became the aim of the whole allied group, to
be achieved without the aid or consent of any other nation or gr