_The Elimination of Germany from Cultural and Economic Participation in the Development of the World._ For more than a hundred years before the World War, the European nations had come to realize that their prosperity depended upon contacts with the extra-European world. These contacts they had established at the cost of great sacrifices, through colonial wars, wars with one another, and the gradual building up of investments, banks, shipping, and trading companies in all parts of the world. Because of her later unification and slower industrial development, Germany was a late comer in world politics. She struggled under great handicaps in finding a large part of the world already preëmpted when she began to look for colonies, coaling-stations, and fields for investment and economic development. But her progress in the few decades preceding the World War had been marvelous, and her whole economic structure was built, like that of England, upon foreign trade. Her population had gone beyond the number that could be sustained by home markets. The greatest blow to Germany in the Treaty of Versailles was the ban it placed upon her contacts with the outside world. She was compelled to give up her colonies; to renounce her commercial treaties and concessions in every country in the world except a few South American countries that had not declared war upon her; and to surrender everything that she had built up in the way of import and export markets, by the confiscation of her shipping, foreign investments, banking and commercial establishments, concessions, privileges, etc. The aim of the treaty was to eliminate Germany as a competitor in world markets, and to make it impossible for German capital to accomplish anything in the future in Africa and Asia. Germany was called upon, also, to renounce her treaties and private concessions, her loans, and everything else that she had acquired in her relations with her former allies. Her nationals were barred from Turkey, from former German colonies, and from French and British protectorates in Africa and Asia. Her mission work in foreign countries was to be given up entirely and not renewed. Her missionaries, Catholic and Protestant, were never again to return to their field. Provisions were inserted in the treaty by which the victors had the right to bar German newspapers and magazines and books, as well as German goods, without reciprocity. Some one at Paris--I forget which of the outstanding figures it was--said that in the Treaty of Versailles we had reverted to the law of the jungle. The papal nuncio, Monsignor Ceretti, told me that the devil at his worst could hardly have conceived so thorough a destruction of the soul of mankind.