The War After the War

passed, and with it much of the dark night that enshrouded the Allies' arms. On land and sea rained the first blows of the great assaults that were to make a summer of content for the Entente cause. Its arsenals teemed with shells; its men were fit; victory, however distant, seemed at last assured. The time had come to prepare a new kind of drive--the combined attack upon enemy trade and any other that happened to be in the way.

Thus it came about that on a brilliant sun-lit day last June twoscore men sat round a long table in a stately room of a palace that overlooked the Seine, in Paris. Eminent lawmakers--Hughes, of Australia, among them--were there aplenty; but few practical business men.

On the walls hung the trade maps of the world; spread before them were the red-dotted diagrams that showed the water highways where traffic flowed in happier and serener days. For coming generations of business everywhere it was a fateful meeting because the now famous Economic Conference of the Allies was