116 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES. 



Had lost. England, of course, had acquired much colonial territory; 

 hut on the purely financial side the comparison between her and France 

 was most unequal. England's total national debt in 1817 was 

 848,000,000?. France's debt did not reach 200,000,OOOZ. until 1830. 



The reasons why France came out of the wars so well financially 

 were four. First, she had gone bankrupt during the Revolution, and 

 had wiped out most of her old debt. Second, under Napoleon she had 

 made war pay for itself, as the case of Prussia shows. Third, there 

 was no financial operation known to the world in 1815 by which 

 England's war debt, or even half of it, could have been transferred to 

 France. Fourth, England never suggested any such transference, or, 

 so far as I know, ever even discussed it. 



France's financial comfort, immediately after her defeat, extended 

 to her currency. During the Eevolution she had made a classical experi- 

 ment in the mismanagement of credit documents, with the assignats 

 issued on the security of confiscated Church property ; but after that she 

 had put her currency in good order. Her final defeat in 1812-14, and 

 again in 1815, did not seriously derange it. Indeed, the English 

 ouiTency was in worse order than the French, owing to the suspension 

 of cash payments by the Bank of England; and so rapidly did France's 

 credit recover after 1815 tliat in 1818 French 5 per cents stood at 

 almost exactly the present-day price of British 5 per cent War Loan. 

 That year she finished the payment of her war indemnity, and the last 

 armies of occupation withdrew. 



She had no doubt gained by waging war, and eventually suffering 

 defeat, on foreign soil. No Pi'ench city had been burnt like Moscow, 

 stormed like Badajoz, or made the. heart of a gigantic battle like Leipzig. 

 Napoleon fought one brilliant defensive campaign on French soil, in 

 the valleys of the Marne and the Seine, in 1814. In 1815 his fate was 

 decided in Belgium. Hardly a shot was fired in France ; hardly a French 

 coi-nfield was trampled down. But France, as in 1918, was terribly 

 sliort of men, and, again as in ]918, her means of communication had 

 suffered. Napoleon's magnificent roads — he was among the greatest 

 of road engineers — had gone out of repair; his gi'eat canal works had 

 been suspended. These things, however, were soon set right by the 

 Government which followed him. 



France's rapid recovery brings us to one of the essential differences 

 between Western Europe a century ago and Western Europe to-day. 

 In spite of Paris and her other great towns, the France of 1815 was a 

 rural countiy, a land of peasants and small farmers. Only about 10 per 

 cent, of her population lived in towns of 10,000 inhabitants or more. 

 The town below 10,000. in all countries, is more often a rural market 

 town, ultimately dependent on the prosperity of agriculture, than an 

 industrial centre. Parallels for France's condition must be sought 

 to-day in Eastern Europe — in Serbia or Piussia. It is a condition which 

 makes the economics of demobilisation easy. The young peasant goes 

 back from the armies to relieve his father, his mother, and his sisters, 

 who have kept the farm going. Moreover, France maintained a stand- 

 ing army of 240,000 men after 1815; and her losses in the Waterloo 

 campaign had been so heavy that the actual numbers demobilised were 



