gression, and by Article XI. to alter as changing conditions may require, got marked out by the Council of Four, or its successor. The peace of the world in the future may depend very largely on the relative importance the League attaches to the two articles in question. All things in the affairs of men develop and change. The predominance of X., the static, means war. The predominance of XI., the elastic, means justice and peace.

T

CHAPTER VII

THE BILL FOR DAMAGES

HE indemnity question was in some respects the storm-centre of the Conference. It was

not astonishing that it should be. The war had brought impoverishment on an unprecedented scale on every country, with the possible exception of America and Japan, that had taken part in it, and every nation, again with the possible exception of America and Japan, was animated in varying degree by a desire to recoup itself at Germany's expense for some portion of its losses, and to penalise Germany by the imposition of a drastic indemnity for the ruin she had brought upon the world.

That attitude was intelligible enough. Logically there was no answer to the demand that the guilty author of the war-and no one at Paris was disposed to acquit Germany of any share of the full responsibility for what had happened-should contribute, to the utmost limit of her ability, to the reinstatement of the countries whom the war had driven far towards bankruptcy. The man of average common-sense saw only one term set to the demands of the Allies on Germany, that imposed by the fact that unless she were left some margin of subsistence it would be impossible for

her to restore her industries and make her contribution, whether in the form of indemnity or through the normal channels of trade, to the common wealth of the world. Perhaps it is putting it too high to say that men of average commonsense saw that, for the number who expounded that self-evident doctrine with any constancy was conspicuously scanty. Still smaller was the handful liberal-minded and far-seeing enough to set reconciliation and the restoration of true peace higher than the exaction of the uttermost measure of reparation.

The popular demand, though in its common form it was a demand for the impossible, was intelligible in France if it was intelligible anywhere. For one thing, France needed the indemnity as hardly any other nation needed it. She had neglected culpably to increase her revenue, as it should have been increased, by taxation, staking everything on the hope of liquidating her burden of debt out of payments by Germany. That was the practical side of the question. The psychological counted on the whole for even more. France had suffered from the war as no other of the major Allies had. Her borders had been invaded, her richest provinces had been ravaged, her capital had been under daily fire from longdistance guns as well under nightly attack from Gothas. It was little wonder that France should come to the court of judgment hot with anger and the zeal for retribution. Germany, moreover, had aggravated her offences by every embitterment,

in small matters as well as great, that a primitive and uncomprehending psychology could devise. She not only committed crimes but advertised them. One instance given me by Mr. Hoover will serve as example. In the occupied regions of Belgium and Northern France there were localised two celebrated strains of horses. They had become naturalised in these two districts and the stock of the whole world was replenished from there. When the Germans got possession of the districts in question they carried off every horse into Germany, "and," said Mr. Hoover, "I have in my drawer an advertisement notifying all and sundry that the whole stock of both breeds is now held in Germany and anyone desiring to replenish his stud should apply to such and such an address." That is merely a chance illustration in regard to a small matter of the working of the German mind in great matters. The gutting of the factories at Lille and elsewhere, and the deliberate destruction of blast furnaces even in the last month of German occupation, were other examples of a criminality that made the temper of France what it was.

The attitude of Great Britain was different. Apart from air-raids and an occasional naval dash across the North Sea the war had left the soil of England immune. There was no such stimulus as in France to a demand for retribution. But the British representatives came to the Peace Conference fresh from a General Election in which the cry of "Germany Must Pay" had

turned the votes of some millions of electors who knew as much about Germany's capacity to pay as they knew about the properties of helium. In his Bristol speech in December, Mr. Lloyd George had declared that "we have an absolute right to demand the whole cost of the war from Germany," and that "we propose to demand the whole cost of the war," and had mentioned £24,000,000,000 as a reasonable total for the claim. Other speakers preached from the same text without even the reservations with which the Prime Minister fortified himself. He did indeed regularly invoke the saving formula "up to the full limit of Germany's capacity to pay,"-a qualification amounting to the unimpeachable truism that you could not take from Germany what Germany had not got.

That policy had been far too often and too loudly proclaimed to be jettisoned out of hand as soon as the subject was approached in earnest at Paris. The Prime Minister was indeed at considerable pains to damp down the expectations his own utterances had excited, but it was not till comparatively late in the Conference that that basis of settlement was frankly abandoned. In the House of Commons questions on the subject were persistent, and the Government spokesmen made zealous endeavours to provide replies to suit every taste. Mr. Bonar Law's declaration of February 13th, for example, to the effect that "the British delegates on the Commission (on Repa