Is the Paris Pact practical? Will it withstand the logical pressure of business demand and supply when the war is ended? How will it affect American trade? To try to get the answer I talked with many men in England and France who were intimately concerned. Some had sat in the conference; others had helped to shape its approach; still others were dedicated to its far-spreading purpose. I found an astonishing conflict of opinion. Even those who had attended this most momentous of all economic conferences were sceptical about complete results. Yet no one questioned the intent to smash enemy trade. Will our interests be pinched at the same time? Regardless of what any European statesman may say to the contrary, one deduction of supreme significance to us arises out of the whole proposition. Summed up, it is this: Mutual preference by or for the members of either of the great European alliances automatically creates a discrimination against those outside! Whether we face the Teuton or the Allies' group--or both--in the grand economic line-up, we shall have to fight for commercial privileges that once knew no ban. There are two well-defined beliefs about the practical working out of the pact as a pact. Let us take the objections first. They find expression in a strong body of opinion that the whole procedure is both unhuman and uneconomic--a campaign document, as it were, conceived in the heat and passion of a great war, projected for political effect in cementing the allied lines. In short, it is what business men would call a glorified and stimulated "selling talk," framed to sell good will between the nations that now propose to carry war to shop and mill and mine. "But," as a celebrated British economist said to me in London, "while all this talk of Economic Alliance sounds well and is serving its purpose, the fact must not be overlooked that, though war ends, business keeps right on. Self-interest will dictate the policy that pays the best." This is a typical comment. Now we get to the meat of the matter: By the terms of the pact half a dozen important nations--to say nothing of the smaller fry--are bound to a hard-and-fast trade agreement. Business, in brief, is projected in terms of nations. Go behind this new battle front and you will find that it conflicts with an uncompromising commercial rule. Why? Simply because, so far as business is concerned, nations may propose, but human beings dispose. Individuals, not countries, do business! Being human, these individuals are apt to follow the line of least resistance. Hence, the best-laid plans for imposing international industrial teamwork are likely to founder on those weaknesses of human nature that begin and end in the pocketbook.