all the
indemnities must be paid by Germany.

The French totals of the material damage claims in the invaded
districts have been absolutely fantastic and more exaggerated than in
the case of Belgium, whose indemnity claims would lead one to suppose
the total destruction of at least the third part of her territory,
almost as if she had undergone the submersion of, say, ten thousand
square metres of her small territory.

This problem of the indemnities, limited to the reparation of damages,
and in accordance with the costs contemplated in the Treaty of
Versailles, has never been seriously tackled. One may even say it has
not been seriously examined. And it is deplorable that there has been
created among the public, or among a large part of it, the conviction
that Germany will repair the damage of the War by her own effort. This
idea, however, finds no acceptance in England among serious persons,
and in Italy no one believes in it. But in France and Belgium the idea
is widely diffused, and the wish to spread the belief is lively in
several sections of opinion, not because intelligent people believe
in the possibility of effective payment, but with the idea of putting
Germany in the light of not maintaining the clauses of the peace, thus
extending the right to prolong the military occupation and even to
aggravate it. Germany, thereby, is kept out of the League of Nations
and her dissolution facilitated.

John Maynard Keynes, ever since the end of 1919, has shown in his
admirable book the absurdity of asking for vast indemnities, Germany's
impossibility of paying them, and the risk for all Europe of following
a road leading to ruin, thus at the same time accentuating the work
of disintegration started by the treaty. That book had awakened a
wide-sounding echo, but it ought to have had a still wider one, and
would have done but for the fact that, unfortunately, the Press in
free countries is anything but free.

The great industrial syndicates, especially in the steel-making
industry, which control so large a part of the Press among the
majority of the States of Europe, and even beyond Europe, find
easy allies in the inadequate preparation of the major part of
the journalists to discuss the most important problems, and the
indisposition on the part of the public to examine those questions
which present difficulties, and are so rendered less convenient for
discussion.

I knew Keynes during the War, when he was attached