Restoring Trade After the War

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THE war confronts the whole horizon of spirit and of mind. Our own participation in it advances step by step. We do not know the cost or duration of the struggle, only that it must be won. Still the impulse survives, amidst the deepening fury, to seek the terms on which a peaceful world, more satisfactory and more stable than the one we have known, may be established. Students and public officials, responding sympathetically and almost instinctively to the feeling of the nation, join in this search. I do not know whether it was true of other wars; but certainly in this one, though laws may be silent, students are not. This being so, one more brief suggestion for the improvement of the future can add little to the distraction. This must be my apology for this article if one is needed.

My aim is to advance for critical consideration a suggestion for improving the basis of international economic relations. In essence, it is a suggestion for what might be termed a "Trade Stabilization Budget or Fund." In form it may appear to be novel. But most of its elements have in substance already made their appearance in agreements and actions of the United States.

II

The rapid and widespread defection of the nations, in the last few years, from the arrangements and agreements which in the past had come to form the pattern of international trade was sudden and unexpected. For these arrangements and agreements had seemed so solidly established...