[162] This allows nothing for interest on the debt since the Bolshevik Revolution.

[163] No interest has been charged on the advances made to these countries.

[164] The actual total of loans by the United States up to date is very nearly $10,000,000,000, but I have not got the latest details.

[165] The financial history of the six months from the end of the summer of 1916 up to the entry of the United States into the war in April, 1917, remains to be written.  Very few persons, outside the half-dozen officials of the British Treasury who lived in daily contact with the immense anxieties and impossible financial requirements of those days, can fully realize what steadfastness and courage were needed, and how entirely hopeless the task would soon have become without the assistance of the United States Treasury.  The financial problems from April, 1917, onwards were of an entirely different order from those of the preceding months.

[166] Mr. Hoover was the only man who emerged from the ordeal of Paris with an enhanced reputation.  This complex personality, with his habitual air of weary Titan (or, as others might put it, of exhausted prize-fighter), his eyes steadily fixed on the true and essential facts of the European situation, imported into the Councils of Paris, when he took part in them, precisely that atmosphere of reality, knowledge, magnanimity, and disinterestedness which, if they had been found in other quarters also, would have given us the Good Peace.

[167] Even after the United States came into the war the bulk of Russian expenditure in the United States, as well as the whole of that Government’s other foreign expenditure, had to be paid for by the British Treasury.

[168] It is reported that the United States Treasury has agreed to fund (i.e. to add to the principal sum) the interest owing them on their loans to the Allied Governments during the next three years.  I presume that the British Treasury is likely to follow suit.  If the debts are to be paid ultimately, this piling up of the obligations at compound interest makes the position progressively worse.  But the arrangement wisely offered by the United States Treasury provides a due interval for the calm consideration of the whole problem in the light of the after-war position as it will soon disclose itself.