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.NOTES:1.The figures for the United Kingdom are as follows:Monthly Net imports Exports Excess of importsaverage (1,000) (1,000) (1,000)1913 54,930 43,770 11,1601914 50,097 35,893 14,204Jan-Mar.1919 109,578 49,122 60,456April-June 1919 111,403 62,463 48,940July-Sept 1919 135,927 68,863 67,064But this excess is by no means so serious as it looks; forwith the present high freight earnings of the mercantile marinethe various 'invisible' exports of the United Kingdom areprobably even higher than they were before the war, and mayaverage at least 45 million monthly.2.President Wilson was mistaken in suggesting that thesupervision of reparation payments has been entrusted to theLeague of Nations.As I pointed out in chapter 5, whereas theLeague is invoked in regard to most of the continuing economicand territorial provisions of the treaty, this is not the case asregards reparation, over the problems and modifications of whichthe reparation commission is supreme, without appeal of any kindto the League of Nations.3.These articles, which provide safeguards against the outbreakof war between members of the League and also between members andnon-members, are the solid achievement of the covenant.Thesearticles make substantially less probable a war between organisedGreat Powers such as that of 1914.This alone should commend theLeague to all men.Get any book for free on: www.Abika.com THE ECONOMIC CONSEQUENCES OF THE PEACE1304.It would be expedient so to define a 'protectionist tariff' asto permit (a) the total prohibition of certain imports; (b) theimposition of sumptuary or revenue customs duties on commoditiesnot produced at home; (c) the imposition of customs duties whichdid not exceed by more than 5% a countervailing excise on similarcommodities produced at home; (d) export duties.Further, specialexceptions might be permitted by a majority vote of the countriesentering the union.Duties which had existed for five years priorto a country's entering the union might be allowed to disappeargradually by equal instalments spread over the five yearssubsequent to joining the union.5.This allows nothing for interest on the debt since theBolshevik Revolution.6.No interest has been charged on the advances made to thesecountries.7.The actual total of loans by the United States up to date isvery nearly 2,000 million, but I have not got the latestdetails.8.The figures in this table are partly estimated, and areprobably not completely accurate in detail; but they show theapproximate figures with sufficient accuracy for the purposes ofthe present argument.The British figures are taken from theWhite Paper of 23 October 1919 (Cmd.377).In any actualsettlement, adjustments would be required in connection withcertain loans of gold and also in other respects, and I amconcerned in what follows with the broad principle only.The sumsadvanced by the United States and France, which are in terms ofdollars and francs respectively, have been converted atapproximately par rates.The total excludes loans raised by theUnited Kingdom on the market in the United States, and loansraised by France on the market in the United Kingdom or theUnited States, or from the Bank of England.9.The financial history of the six months from the end of thesummer of 1916 up to the entry of the United States into the warin April 1917 remains to be written.Very few persons, outsidethe half-dozen officials of the British Treasury who lived indaily contact with the immense anxieties and impossible financialrequirements of those days, can fully realise what steadfastnessand courage were needed, and how entirely hopeless the task wouldsoon have become without the assistance of the United StatesTreasury.The financial problems from April 1917 onwards were ofan entirely different order from those of the preceding months.10.Mr Hoover was the only man who emerged from the ordeal ofParis with an enhanced reputation.This complex personality, withhis habitual air of weary Titan (or, as others might put it, ofexhausted prize-fighter), his eyes steadily fixed on the true andessential facts of the European situation, imported into thecouncils of Paris, when he took part in them, precisely thatatmosphere of reality, knowledge, magnanimity, anddisinterestedness which, if they had been found in other quartersalso, would have given us the Good Peace.Get any book for free on: www.Abika.com THE ECONOMIC CONSEQUENCES OF THE PEACE13111.Even after the United States came into the war the bulk ofRussian expenditure in the United States, as well as the whole ofthat government's other foreign expenditure, had to be paid forby the British Treasury.12.It is reported that the United States Treasury has agreed tofund (i.e.to add to the principal sum) the interest owing themon their loans to the Allied governments during the next threeyears.I presume that the British Treasury is likely to followsuit.If the debts are to be paid ultimately, this piling up ofthe obligations at compound interest makes the positionprogressively worse.But the arrangement wisely offered by theUnited States Treasury provides a due interval for the calmconsideration of the whole problem in the light of the after-warposition as it will soon disclose itself.Get any book for free on: www.Abika.com
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