Our country has adopted more progressive and efficient methods in the industrial field than can be found in France, where efficiency is not the word so much as is the comfort of the workers. This is particularly true of the iron and steel business. We saw in France not a single steel plant that could compare in efficiency with the great plants of this country. By this is meant that in none of the plants visited was the output per man nearly so great or the share enjoyed by the worker nearly so large, as is the rule in this country. Since we did not see the plants to the north which had been captured by the Germans, perhaps it is not altogether fair to make this comparison. Nevertheless the same impression was gained in the inspection of other industrial operations. The French workman is more artistic but he does not move so rapidly or produce so much as does the American. Neither of course, does he enjoy so large a remuneration. On the whole, wages are much less in proportion to individual production in France than in this country. To the resident of a country which has not had a war within the memory of a generation, it is hard to convey by written or printed words a just conception of what a great war means to any country involved. The outward, visible evidence of individual restraint was one of the most vivid things witnessed on our trip through France: at least this was the case with me and, I believe, with some others of the Commission. In France the individual has disappeared; he has been swallowed by the State; the nation in its dire necessity, obeying the law of self-preservation has practically obliterated the individual as such. He has become simply a small part of a great whole, a whole so inconceivably more important than any of its parts that all of them are completely subordinated. The average American citizen would resent with heat the regulations regarded as a matter of course in France. He would fume and fret and all but rebel, if asked to live as the French people are forced to live during the war. From what we could learn the submersion of the individual is far greater in Germany than in France, but to a healthy American citizen, accustomed to doing about as he pleases so long as he is able to pay the price and injures no one else, there is abundant restriction on personal liberty at this time in France. Possibly under similar circumstances we would as a people show an equal spirit of self-repression for the benefit of the national welfare.