Mr. Henry A. Forster, the New York lawyer, has gathered interesting statistics from various sources to prove that Great Britain, Germany, and France receive from investments abroad, many of them in the United States, incredibly large annual interest. It may be, therefore, that the United States is not the creditor nation--in the actual sense of that word--that she is assumed to be; and before we release any of our debtors abroad (they are debtors to the holders of American Government securities, and not to our Government out of Treasury surplus), it would be well for us to find out what are the investment holdings of these Governments and their citizens in securities of every kind in the United States, on which interest is being sent abroad. Then there will be a clearer and fairer conception of the merits of this question on both sides of the Atlantic. CHAPTER XXX THE NEXT MOVES IN THE INTERNATIONAL GAME Out of the Peace Conference and the welter of policies that followed it students of international affairs have learned one thing, if nothing else: to distrust the efficacy of formulas to improve relations among nations. Despite the sacrifices and the heroic deeds of countless millions of civilized human beings, despite the educational propaganda of the war years, despite the high ideals for the triumph of which we believed that we were fighting, there was a scramble for spoils immediately the war was ended. The Paris Peace Conference conclusively proved that there had been no conversion of statesmen from their faith in traditional foreign policies to the widely heralded and much vaunted principles of “self-determination,” “rights of small nations,” “making the world safe for democracy,” “a durable world peace,” and “the league of nations.” No effort was made to repudiate the Prussian idea that “might goes before right,” and it was soon evident that the war fought to liberate subject peoples had resulted in the destruction and ruin of some of them and in bringing out in the rest of them the bad traits we condemned the Germans for showing.