"Perhaps the greatest surprise of the war to most people, even to those who had studied political economy, has been the enormous expenditure of money which a nation can incur, and the length of time which it can go on fighting without complete exhaustion. This should not have been in reality a surprise to anyone who had studied past history, for all experience shows that lack of money itself has never prevented a nation from continuing to fight, if it were determined to fight. The financial condition of Revolutionary France at the commencement of Napoleon's career was wretched in the extreme, yet France went on fighting for nearly twenty years after that. The Balkan States can hardly be said ever to have had great financial resources, and yet they fought, one after the other, two severe wars, and are now fighting a third still more severe and prolonged. The Boers in South Africa found no difficulty in fighting the British Empire for three years with practically no financial resources. The Mexicans recently managed to fight one another for a good many years in the same way. Lastly, the Southern states in our own Civil War fought for years a desperate and losing fight and were ultimately beaten to the ground, not so much by a lack of money, as by an actual lack of things to live on and fight with. In fact, all history proves, and this war proves over again, that if what the Germans call 'the will to fight' exists lack of money will never stop a nation's fighting, provided it possesses or can obtain its absolutely minimum requirements of food, clothing, and munitions of war. It was Bismarck who said: 'If you will give me a printing press, I will find you the money.' In finding the money required for an exhausting war a nation is driven to all sorts of desperate financial expedients which may very seriously affect its economic life, but if a nation wants to continue fighting and can produce, or be induced to produce, the things that are absolutely necessary for life and warfare, the government will get hold of those things somehow. If it cannot get them in any other way, ultimately it will take them." STRONG POSITION OF UNITED STATES