to cover her debt to the United States two or three times over. France and italy he believed to have no similar reserves, and so he concluded that "these international debts are far too great for the capacity of any of the debtor countries except England."
My own yiew has already been expressed that France and italy ought to have been released from their debts to England on the day after the Armistice, and that this act would have cost us nothing, and would have had an immeasurable effect for good on Europe's financial atmosphere. But Mr. McKenna surely proves too much in implying that it is not possible for a nation like Germany, gifted with great natural resources and with unrivalled powers of work and application, to produce a very considerable exportable surplus if she made the necessary effort and the necessary diversion of her productive power.
For how, except by producing an exportable surplus, can England and Germany have in the past accumulated the foreign assets which now alone, in his view, give them the power to make payments abroad? Germany may have done it by selling marks to speculators. But we, as Mr. McKenna shows in the course of this very address, have done it by doing just what he seems to think that Germany
