Soon after the French settlement was a fact, the Italian Government appointed a commission to treat with the Cuthell Board. The Italian agreement, dated August 13, 1919, admitted an obligation on the part of Italy in the sum of $5,200,000, representing Italian war purchases of picric acid, smokeless powder, airplane lumber, linters, and trinitrotoluol, this agreement not including an admitted obligation of approximately $395,000 for Liberty engines, clothing, and other small items not yet invoiced. Against this obligation Italy presented a claim for $4,053,073 for the overseas transportation of American troops on Italian ships. The Italian Government paid the difference, namely, $1,146,927 to the War Department on September 26, 1919, and also paid the minor claims as they were presented. Minor claims against the governments of Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Cuba, and Czecho-Slovakia, to the total of $4,709,330.89, were presented by the Cuthell Board and paid by the governments concerned. * * * * * While the Cuthell Board was engaged in rendering the bills to the Allies for supplies purchased by them in America and collecting the money on those bills,--and here let it be said that the collections were greater in aggregate amount than the total sum involved in all the claims for or against the United States prosecuted or resisted by the nation’s official diplomacy from the beginning of our national existence up to the outbreak of the war in Europe; international transactions which included the Louisiana Purchase, the purchase of Alaska, and the purchase of the Canal Zone,--all the while that Mr. Cuthell and his associates were collecting money for Uncle Sam, the United States Liquidation Commission was busy adjusting the fit of the shoe on the old gentleman’s other foot. In other words, the Commission was paying the war bills owed by the United States to the Allies. This was a business equally great and even more important. There was some question whether the President, with all his war powers, could legally empower boards and commissions to conclude international settlements involving the passing of money, since such power resided only in the State Department, the acts of which had to be ratified by Congress before they were binding upon the United States. The Cuthell Board and the United States Liquidation Commission were actually created in January and February, 1919; but to remove any doubt as to the binding force of their settlements, Congress, on March 2, 1919, passed an act empowering the Secretary of War to settle, through any agency he might set up, all international war claims in which the War Department was involved.