making sacrifices that the comfortable business man will not make. Notwithstanding the fact that France has made no sensational splash in foreign trade since the war, the standard of comfort among her people has been rising steadily, and is without doubt generally higher to-day than is that of the German people. This higher standard of comfort is reflected in her financial situation. It is Germany, the victor, which is to-day in the position of a suppliant in regard to France, and it is revealing no diplomatic secrets to say that, for many years now, Germany has been employing all the wiles of her diplomacy to obtain the official recognition of German securities on the French Bourses. France financially has, in a very real sense, the whip hand. That is not all. Those who point triumphantly to German industrial expansion, as a proof of the benefits of war and conquest, ignore certain facts which cannot be ignored if that argument is to have any value, and they are these: 1. Such progress is not peculiar to Germany; it is shown in an equal or greater degree (I am speaking now of the general wealth and social progress of the average individual citizen) by States that have had no victorious war--the Scandinavian States, the Netherlands, Switzerland. 2. Even if it were special to Germany, which it is not, we should be entitled to ask whether certain developments of German political evolution, which _preceded the war_, and which one may fairly claim have a more direct and understandable bearing upon industrial progress, are not a much more appreciable factor in that progress than the war itself--I refer particularly, of course, to the immense change involved in the fiscal union of the German States, which was completed before the Franco-German War of 1870 had been declared; to say nothing of such other factors as the invention of the Thomas-Gilchrist process which enabled the phosphoric iron ores of Germany, previously useless, to be utilized. 3. The very serious social difficulties (which have, of course, their economic aspect) that _do_ confront the German people--the intense class friction, the backwardness of parliamentary government, the survival of reactionary political ideas, wrapped up with the domination of the "Prussian ideal"--all difficulties which States whose political development has been less marked by successful war (the lesser European States just mentioned, for instance)--are not faced with in the same degree. These difficulties, special, among the great European nations, to Germany, are certainly in a large measure a legacy of the Franco-German War, a part of the general system to which that war gave rise, the general character of the political union which it provoked.