I refer him to any work on conic sections and if not
convinced even then I refer him so far that he will never come back.

The indemnity being thus fixed, the next question is as to the method of
collecting it. In the first place there is no intention of allowing the
Germans to pay in actual cash. If they do this they will merely inflate
the English beyond what is bearable. England has been inflated now for
eight years and has had enough of it.

In the second place, it is understood that it will not do to allow the
Germans to offer 4,218, 390,687,471 marks' worth of coal. It is more
than the country needs.

What is more, if the English want coal they propose to buy it in an
ordinary decent way from a Christian coal-dealer in their own country.
They do not purpose to ruin their own coal industry for the sake of
building up the prosperity of the German nation.

What I say of coal is applied with equal force to any offers of food,
grain, oil, petroleum, gas, or any other natural product. Payment in any
of these will be sternly refused. Even now it is all the British farmers
can do to live and for some it is more. Many of them are having to sell
off their motors and pianos and to send their sons to college to work.
At the same time, the German producer by depressing the mark further and
further is able to work fourteen hours a day. This argument may not be
quite correct but I take it as I find it in the London Press. Whether
I state it correctly or not, it is quite plain that the problem is
insoluble. That is all that is needed in first class politics.

A really good question like the German reparation question will go on
for a century. Undoubtedly in the year 2000 A.D., a British Chancellor
of the Exchequer will still be explaining that the government is fully
resolved that Germany shall pay to the last farthing (cheers): but that
ministers have no intention of allowing the German payment to take a
form that will undermine British industry (wild applause): that the
German indemnity shall be so paid that without weakening the power of
the Germans, to buy from us it shall increase our power of selling to
them.

Such questions last forever.

On the other hand sometimes by sheer carelessness a question gets
settled and passes out of politics. This, so we are given to understand,
has happened to the Irish question. It is settled. A group of Irish
delegates and British ministers got together round a table and settled
it.