Betty B.
speaker
3,598 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 2 Jul
Betty B.’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
As I look over some of the items of the new construction, I can get a faint idea of where this vast amount of money has gone.
At one time, the government ordered 100,000 doors and 90,000 windows, and the same purchase included 3 million hinges and hundreds of thousands of faucets.
It bought iron beds four feet wide by the tens of thousands.
and a single order was given for 12,000 school desks and seats.
All this expenditure has been met by the National Treasury.
While the war was still on, the government decided that it would pay in full all of the war damages to individuals and towns and demand the money back from the enemy.
Every loss was to be paid for, no matter how it occurred.
This included furniture, machinery, deterioration, bills for troops quartered in the homes of the people,
and the money required to bring the farms back to their old state of cultivation.
The law providing for these measures is so long that it would fill about 10 columns of an ordinary newspaper.
In rebuilding the factories and restoring the mines, the government furnished a large part of the capital, all of which is supposed to be repaid in the sum received for reparations.
If the money is advanced by private parties, the government pays the overhead and five percent
on such advances until it could repay the whole.
It has bought machinery as fast as possible for the various factories.
It has purchased most of the farms and located many new boundaries.
According to the real estate laws of France, property must be equally divided among all the heirs.
This has resulted in tens of thousands of farms no bigger than an American garden, and one man may have in one region a hundred different patches which he has either bought or inherited.
In the new location, such ownerships have been, as far as possible, consolidated, and many small farms made into one by means of exchange.
Indeed, reconstruction is added enormously to the economic value and beauty of France.
But all this takes work, and with a million and a half men lost by the war, France is still short of manpower.
Showing 461–480 of 3,598 · page 24 of 180
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