THE TESTING POINT.
This mention of War Debts brings me at once to a consideration of what promises to be one of the greatest testing points in the New Year. There can, I think, be little question that the financial situation in the United States is as serious as it could well be. If Europe failed over a number of years to recognize the enormous financial and economic losses inflicted upon her as a result of the Great War, America failed lamentably to make good use of her years of unprecedented prosperity. She has not only enacted penal payments from her late Allies in the Great War, but unconsciously perhaps, to some extent, has blocked the way of payment of debts through goods and services by her high tariffs and shipping subsidies, and while taking her toll of payments in the shape of -gold, has allowed her enlarged credit resources to be used for speculative transactions at home which have grievously injured foreign countries and have finally brought trouble to her own borders. For the prosperity encouraged a scale of spending on the part of the American Government and peoples alike
which has brought about huge deficits in the National Budgets, and unemployment and distress to the people of America. • It is amidst such conditions that she now finds many of her debtors not only unable to meet their obligations but also disposed to challenge the Debt arrangements themselves as being out of harmony with the facts of the origin of the Debt and the present cir- cumstances in which the service has to be met.
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