Excerpt from Europe After the World War, 1921: A Financial and Economic Survey The Peace Conference of 1919 worked out - on paper - a political reconstruction of Europe. It has proved a very ramshackle structure, hut'so far it still holds together in its principal features. The Conference made no attempt at economic reconstruction. It only discovered afterwards, when it was too late for effective action, that that was the most important part of its task. It had, however, created an offshoot in the League of Nations, to which all sorts of odd jobs might be assigned. The League, though originally intended solely for a bulwark of the world's peace, had a very elastic constitution, which might embrace an endless variety of functions: among others to take over the economic and financial duties of the Peace Conference. It is finding them a stupendous task and cannot as yet be said to have made much impression on it. But it has served a useful purpose in acting as a common centre and rallying point for the vari ous national efforts to restore the war devastated countries. The object of this book is to present to British readers a general View of the many economic difficulties and perplexities with which the reconstructors of Europe have to grapple and may have to keep on grappling for many years to come. In other words, it is intended to diagnose the political, industrial and financial diseases which have been inherited from the war. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.