None of the countries which have come out of the War on the Continent have a financial position which helps toward a solid situation.  All the financial documents of the various countries, which I have collected and studied with great care, contain enormous masses of expenses which are the consequences of the War; those of the conquering countries also contain enormous aggregations of expenses which are or can become the cause of new wars.

The conquered countries have not actually any finance.  Germany has an increase of expenses which the fall of the mark renders more serious.  In 1920 she spent not less than ninety-two milliards, ruining her circulation.  How much has she spent in 1921?

Austria and Hungary have budgets which are simply hypotheses.  The last Austrian budget, for 1921, assigned a sum of seventy-one milliards of crowns for expenses, and this for a poor country with 7,000,000 inhabitants.

A detailed examination of the financial situation of Czeko-Slovakia, of Rumania, and of the Serbo-Croat States gives results which are at the least alarming.  Even Greece, which until yesterday had a solid structure, gallops now in a madness of expenditure which exceeds all her resources, and if she does not find a means to make peace with Turkey she will find her credit exhausted.  The most ruinous of all is the situation of Poland, whose finance is certainly not better regulated than that of the Bolsheviks of Moscow, to judge from the course of the Polish mark and the Russian rouble if anyone gets the idea of buying them on an international market.

The situation of the exchange since the War has not sensibly bettered even for the great countries, and it is extraordinarily worse for the other countries.

In June, 1921, France had a circulation of about thirty-eight milliard of francs, Belgium six milliard of francs, Italy of about eighteen milliards; Great Britain, between State notes and Bank of England notes, had hardly L434,000,000 sterling.  Actually, among the continental countries surviving the War, Italy is the country which has made the greatest efforts not to augment the circulation but to increase the duties; also because she had no illusions of rebuilding her finance and her national economy on an enemy indemnity.

But the conquered countries have so abused their circulation that they almost live on the thought of it—­as, in fact, not a few of the conquering countries and those come out from the War do.  Germany has passed eighty-eight milliards, and is rapidly approaching one hundred milliards.  Now, when one thinks that the United States, after so many loans and after all the expenses of the War, has only a circulation of 4,557,000,000 dollars, one understands what difficulty Germany has to produce, to live, and to refurnish herself with raw materials.