BRITAIN'S SACRIFICE.
POINCAla made a statement in his last Note • -0-1- • to the British Government which could not be Left unchallenged. In brief', his argument was that the British offer of a month ago demanded sacrifices from our Allies but made none on our own part. This boldly inaccurate statement was challenged on all sides, but there has been no better or more detailed answer than in . Sir Robert Horne's able speech of last Saturday.
It was a speech full of talk of hundreds of millions and of A Bonds, B Bonds, and C Bonds, and thus can hardly be said to be easy reading. There is something peculiarly repulsive in these unimaginably large sums of money which make the eyes of the ordinary man skim hurriedly over the paragraph in which they are mentioned, accept- ing readily the conclusions which the particular authority he is reading has come to, without forcing himself to examine the essential data. This, if inevitable, has been, indeed, disastrous. It is, perhaps, not too much to say that the real cause of the failure to reach any settlement of reparations and war debts has been basically the failure of public opinion, which in each country is the con- trolling factor, to inform itself of the essential facts. It is only this bewildered ignorance of the ordinary man which makes it worth while for M. Poincare to make such flights of fancy as his statement that Britain was demanding sacrifices of France but making none herself.
Let us once more try to put down in black and white as lucidly and as tersely as possible the cardinal facts of inter-Allied indebtedness and reparations. The reparations which France is demanding are based upon the London Schedule of Payments. Under this schedule the French official calculation is that Britain's share amounts to 715 million pounds. The total indebtedness of Allied countries, excluding Russia, to the British Government amounts to 1,200 million pounds, of which one half-600 million—is owed us by France. These two amounts (1) of reparations, and (2) of inter-Allied debts, represent, to use a business expression, the book- debts of Great Britain. If Britain is to make no sacrifice, she must receive these moneys. What they would mean to us is, perhaps, most readily conceived by recalling that the interest on the debts owed to us by the Allies alone would, if paid, enable us to take a shilling off the Income Tax. At present Great Britain is receiving not a penny of interest on them, and is, therefore, to that not incon- siderable extent paying for the War and post-War military efforts of France, in addition to the admittedly not small part which she herself took in that conflict.
We now come to the offer which the British Govern- ment made on August 11th, and which M. Poincare describes as an effort to extract sacrifices from our Allies while making none ourselves. Our Government expressed itself as willing to relinquish all British claims on European countries for reparations or for War debts that were over and above our own debt to America—viz., 710 million pounds. Thus, were Germany enabled to pay reparations on the scale of the London Schedule, we should have cancelled with a stroke of the pen the whole of the Allies' War debts to us, relieving France alone of a debt of 600 million pounds. If France insists on wasting our German assets then she must bear some proportion of the debt she owes us.
These are the rigid facts and figures of the European situation, which no rhetoric and no legal sinuosities of phraseology can alter by so much as a pound. If M. Poincare does not like our offer, he must revert, as Sir .Robert Horne pointed out, to the original arrangements by which France pays us the debt which she owes and we will take our agreed proportion, i.e., 22 per cent, of. whatever France leaves of our common assets in Germany. France estimates her share of reparations at 1,700 million pounds and War debts owing to her at 800 million pounds. Thus, her potential assets on her own calcula- tion amount to 2,000 million pounds. On the other hand, her total indebtedness to us and America amounts to 1,850 million pounds. On the balance she should receive 650 million pounds. But M. Poincare has stated as axiomatic that France must reeeive at least 1,800 million pounds on the balance of her assets and liabilities. She demands, that is to say, just twice as much as on her own estimate she is entitled to. Britain, who, as M. Poincare says, is making no sacrifices, is demanding substantially less than half what the balance of our accounts would warrant.
Sir Robert Horne contrasted the prosperity of France and England. There is still a lingering idea in this country and a Conviction in America that France is a poor devastated country to whom it is brutal to recall the facts of any situation. Nothing, of course, could be further from the truth. France is, at the moment, the one really prosperous country in Europe. For our part we are unfeignedly . glad that' it is so, both because we are sincere friends of France, 'and because we are thankful to find at least one prosperous spot in Europe. France has gained the two magnificent mineral areas of Alsace and Lorraine ; she has largely restored her devastated provinces ; her agriculture is still the magnificently sure foundation on which her wealth rests ; and she has no unemployment in her industrial centres. Admittedly, she has achieved all this by dangerous means. She has resorted to inflation ; she has put off her creditors; and she has squandered her chances of receiving reparations from Germany. The fact is that she is refusing to honour her debts, not because' she is weak and poor, but because she is strong and rich, and feels that in no circumstances can she be compelled to pay.
To back her present policy, her Government is making two principal efforts : the first is to keep up by far the greatest Army and Air Force in the world, and the second to conduct by far the most adroit propaganda in the United States that any country has ever attempted. It would be exceedingly foolish for us in this country not to realize that both these efforts are very successful. The French Army dominates the Continent of Europe, as has been seen a hundred times during the last year and as was uncomfortably felt at Geneva last week. The French propaganda in the United States has kept the ordinary American thoroughly in sympathy with the Ruhr occupation. There is, of course, a strong counter-current which thoroughly understands the British point of view, and which deplores the Ruhr as strongly as we do, but it is only that part of American opinion which finds itself naturally and, perhaps, inevitably in the minority, that understands the European situation.
We cannot forbear to quote the opening paragraph of an article in the current number of the New York Nation. Though we ourselves should not have put the position quite so dramatically, it is .difficult to contradict the Nation's logic :— " The logic of M. Poineare's reply to the British Government is that the United States and Grelt Britain should at once proceed to a joint occupation of Bordeaux, le Havre, and Cherbourg, in
order to make France pay her debts to them. It would not matter whether France could pay—the debt was legally contracted • while France has on occasion repeated her promise to pay she has given no evidence of any serious effort to make good her promise ; she has not suggested methods of payment ; and it would therefore be our right to seize the ports and collect ■what we could, even though all France and ourselves were ruined in the process. That France and other nations might think the process illegal would matter no whit more, for the debt is a sacred debt, consecrated by the blood of our sons who died in France, and we could not submit such a debt to arbitration or adjudication. This sounds wild, but it comes very close to being a paraphrase of the latest Poincarti note. It is even somewhat more moderately phrased."
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