Mr. W. M. Hughes, Prime Minister of Australia, addressed to
the London Chamber of Commerce on Thursday week a characteristic appeal for the immediate construction and publication of a definite programme of Imperial economic organization after the war. He had no doubt of the ultimate victory of the Allies, though Germany's military as well as her economics position had been greatly strengthened by the Russian collapse. But were we prepared for peace ? Before the war we had allowed Germany to reduce us " almost to the position of caretakers in the house we had built." Even new Britain " has no settled policy, military, national, or economical." We were hampered by " doctrinaires, visionaries, agents of Germany " : he preferred the robust truth of the German, Emil Zimmermann, that Germany's economic advance had depended essentially on the British policy of the open door to her vast reser- voirs of raw material, and to alien merchants and agents. The Dominions to-day were anxiously awaiting a declaration of Britain's after-war policy—fiscal, economic, and commercial.
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