[152] The figures for Italy are as follows: 

Excess of
Monthly         Imports     Exports     Imports
Average          $1,000      $1,000      $1,000

1913      60,760      41,860      18,900
1914      48,720      36,840      11,880
1918     235,025      41,390     193,635
Jan.-Mar. 1919     229,240      38,685     191,155
Apr.-June 1919     331,035      69,250     261,785
July-Aug. 1919     223,535      84,515     139,020

[153] In the last two returns of the Bank of France available as I write (Oct. 2 and 9, 1919) the increases in the note issue on the week amounted to $93,750,000 and $94,125,000 respectively.

[154] On October 3, 1919, M. Bilinski made his financial statement to the Polish Diet.  He estimated his expenditure for the next nine months at rather more than double his expenditure for the past nine months, and while during the first period his revenue had amounted to one-fifth of his expenditure, for the coming months he was budgeting for receipts equal to one-eighth of his outgoings.  The Times correspondent at Warsaw reported that “in general M. Bilinski’s tone was optimistic and appeared to satisfy his audience.”

[155] The terms of the Peace Treaty imposed on the Austrian Republic bear no relation to the real facts of that State’s desperate situation.  The Arbeiter Zeitung of Vienna on June 4, 1919, commented on them as follows:  “Never has the substance of a treaty of peace so grossly betrayed the intentions which were said to have guided its construction as is the case with this Treaty ... in which every provision is permeated with ruthlessness and pitilessness, in which no breath of human sympathy can be detected, which flies in the face of everything which binds man to man, which is a crime against humanity itself, against a suffering and tortured people.”  I am acquainted in detail with the Austrian Treaty and I was present when some of its terms were being drafted, but I do not find it easy to rebut the justice of this outburst.

[156] For months past the reports of the health conditions in the Central Empires have been of such a character that the imagination is dulled, and one almost seems guilty of sentimentality in quoting them.  But their general veracity is not disputed, and I quote the three following, that the reader may not be unmindful of them:  “In the last years of the war, in Austria alone at least 35,000 people died of tuberculosis, in Vienna alone 12,000.  Today we have to reckon with a number of at least 350,000 to 400,000 people who require treatment for tuberculosis....  As the result of malnutrition a bloodless generation is growing up with undeveloped muscles, undeveloped joints, and undeveloped brain” (Neue Freie Presse, May 31, 1919).  The Commission of Doctors appointed by the Medical Faculties of Holland, Sweden, and Norway to examine the conditions in Germany reported as follows in the Swedish Press in April, 1919:  “Tuberculosis,