It is here convenient to treat separately two issues which are none the less closely related, viz., the issue of international cooeperation for the immediate work of the salvage and restoration of Europe, and the issue of a permanent cooeperation or agreement for the equitable use of the economic resources of the world. The urgency for Europe of the first issue has been already indicated. If the weaker European nations are left to the ordinary play of economic laws for the supplies they need, they must lapse into starvation and social anarchy. A lifting of the war blockades and embargoes hardly helps them. The formal restoration of free commerce is little better than a mockery to those who lack the power to buy and sell. Free commerce would simply mean that America's surplus, the food, materials, and manufactured goods she has to sell abroad, would be purchased exclusively by those more prosperous foreigners who have the means to pay in money, or in export goods available for credit purposes. Now the populations and the governments of these broken countries have neither money nor goods in hand. The return of peace has left them with depleted purses and empty stores. If the purchase and consumption of the available surplus of foods, materials, and manufactures from America and other prosperous countries is distributed according to the separate powers of purchase in the European countries, the countries and the classes of population which are least in need will get all, those which are most in need, nothing. How can it be otherwise, if immediate ability to pay is the criterion? In ordinary times the machinery of international finance does tend to distribute surplus stocks according to the needs of the different nations, for the production of the actual goods for export trade with which imports are paid for, the true base of credit, is continually proceeding. But the war broke this machinery of regular exchange. It cannot be immediately restored. America or Argentina cannot sell their surplus wheat in the ordinary way to Poland, Austria, Belgium and other needy countries, because, largely for the very lack of these goods and materials, their industries are not operating, so that the goods they should produce, upon which credit would be built, are not forthcoming.