A GERMAN WAR INDEMNITY.
[To THE EDITOR Or THE " SPECTATOR."]
Sta,—Mr. Dixon's warning lest we ask for a war indemnity from Germany in gold is hardly necessary. Germany's aggregate of gold is at most two hundred millions, and cannot be replenished. Germany did, as Mr. Dixon reminds us, take her two hundred million indemnity in 1871 from France in gold, but she did it because she needed the metal to enable her to change from a silver standard and currency to a gold standard and currency, and Bismarck lived to express repentance for that blunder.
For the purpose of familiarizing public opinion with the subject of an indemnity, may I throw out for criticism the view that the indemnity asked should be eight thousand millions sterling ? This sum is one-fifth of the United States Treasury estimate of the whole cost to both belligerents. The sum I mention is well within Germany's competency to pay. In the years before the war our annual savings in this country were reckoned roughly at three hundred and fifty millions, and Mr. Clarence Baron, I think, reckoned the savings of the United States at no less than eight thousand million dollars (£1,600,000,000). Germany, with a much larger population than our own and better organized industrially, should have been able to save at least four hundred millions yearly, which sum at the scale of prime now would be fully eight hundred millions. I think, then, that an indemnity of eight thousand millions (twenty years of savings at the pre-war price level), although a large sum, errs on the side of leniency when we contemplate the dimensions of the historic crime for which she is about to stand at the bar.
As to how she will pay it, that is her oonoern. She would give the Allies, I suppose, the sum in interest-bearing bonds, and they would appoint receivers for her State Railways and Customs. Only in the event of prices falling to their pre-war level would Germany experience any real difficulty, and any such fall is extremely improbable. Instalments and a sinking fund on the lines of Irish Land Purchase finance will extinguish any indemnity in sixty years in a world where, subjected to the prodigies of modern soience, wealth breeds like rabbits. And even if we have to keep some "League of Nations Army" in Germany for sixty years, Germany has kept an army of occupation on French soil for near fifty and will have no reasonable ground for complaint.—
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