When the First World War ended, the political and economic system of prewar Europe lay in ruins. Though Allied politicians tried at various post war conferences to create a new and stable European order they failed because of conflicting and competing national interests. The peace settle ments neither established security from renewed attacks by the defeated nations nor did they lay the groundwork for a reconstruction of Europe's devastated economic system, because the members of the Allied war coali tion could not agree on the goals to be pursued by the treaties or on the means to enforce their settlement. In this context, reparations played a most signi ficant role. The conflict between the European protagonists France, Great Britain and Germany reached its peak at the beginning of 1923 when Franco Belgian troops occupied the Ruhr district in a last attempt to implement strategies developed in 1919 for a control ofthe German economic potential until reparations had been paid and to show to the Anglo-Saxon powers that any modification of Allied policy toward Germany could not be attained against French objections or without a simultaneous adjustment of French war debts. By focusing on the reparation issue during the period of the Cuno Cabinet, this book attempts to contribute both to the literature on Cuno and to the interrelationship of political and economic problems after W orId War I."

I. THE MAN, CONRAD OF PRUSSIA Conrad of Prussia is not so much as mentioned in any of the usual sources. And even such notable mediaevalists as Mlle. Marie-Therese d'Alverny, Conservateur en-chef, and J. Reginald O'Donnell, C. S. B., of the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, Toronto, Canada, have been unable to identify him. Nothing at all, therefore, is known about Conrad, if that is the author's name. For there is some doubt that it is. In the colophon of the Admont commentary on Aquinas' De Ente et Essentia, l we find a word, so completely erased that it is illegible, followed by the words "de Prusya. " Martin Grabmann argues that it is correct to feel that the erasure is an erasure of the name "Conradi," since in the colophon of the Admont commentary on Dominicus Gundissalinus' De Unitate et Uno,2 which follows the commentary on the De Ente et Essentia, we find again an erased word followed by the words "de Prusya. " But the erasure is not complete. One can here read the name "Conradi. " 3 And so, the manuscript of the commentary on the De Unitate et Uno clearly attributed this work to Conrad of Prussia before the attempted erasure.