The World Not Yet Ruined At the Carlton C2fé, on Monday, Mr, Thomas W. Lamont and party, and Mr. Cheney and other members of the American Silk Association, were the guests of the American University Club and the Chinese Bankers' Association te tiffin. Mr. Sung Hung-chang, of the Chinese Bankers' Association, presided, and Mr. Tang Shao-yi acted as toastmaster.
Mr. Lamont, after thanking their hosts on behalf of the guests, spoke at some length on the financial situation as he saw it the world over and said:—The economic equilibrium of the world has been shaken as a result of the war and if we are to restore that equilibrium we must all work together. I am not one of those who think that the world has gone to rack and ruin. There are some financiers of eminence who go so far almost as to say that Europe is bankrupt. Such is not the ease. All the countries engaged in the war have suffered grievously. They have been spent with a consuming fever, and the convalescence at times seems hopelessly slow, but if in Europe we compare this time with a year ago we shall sco that decent progress has been made, at any rate in the Allied Countries, When the King of the Belgians was in America last autumn he told me that of the 800,000 men who in little Belgium were out of employment when I had left France a few months before, all but 200,000 were engaged actively in work and I have no doubt that now all but a remnant of that 200,000 have returned to holy wonted tasks.
Lamont said that the same phenomenon was found in France ly, and he continued h trade shows even greater signs of revival and restoration. Our British brethren are apt to be gloomy about themselves. They readily criticize their own institutions and are sometimes the first to detect their own shortcomings, but British trade is certainly on the upgrade and for the long future Great Britain has nothing to fear commercially in the Far East or, anywhere else.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.