Prevailing opinion in the trade appears to be that the big sale of shoes in the Grand Central Palace at cost prices by the Nemours Trading Corporation reflects chiefly the failure of war-devastated Europe to come up to American expectations in demand and ability to pay for needed American products.

This is no doubt the fact of the matter. The selling company is neither a manufacturer nor, ordinarily, a retailer of shoes or anything else. In the present case it had shoes manufactured for it in various factories, and in immense quantities on the speculative chance that after war Europe would provide a greedy and almost unlimited market for them. But the chance did not pan out. Badly as Europe needed shoes, it could not pay the prices asked. They were high for the American market. They were made doubly high for the European market by the adverse exchange rates on the United States. So the great stock of around 1,500,000 pairs is now thrown as a sacrifice upon the home market, which the accumulation of the stock helped largely to inflate.

As with the shoes may it not be so with clothing and foodstuffs and many less necessary commodities? Our speculative markets were going wild a year ago over the new riches an impoverished Europe was going to pour in here for rehabilitation purposes. Now they are finding out not only that Europe cannot pay, but that our own people will not pay the prices they had made. The inevitable consequences of that crazy performance are now in process of being slowly worked out. New York World