We confess that when we first read these words we
were in doubt as to their meaning. Mr. Wilson's- phrase " invaded territories" is not obliterated, and a defensible interpretation of the whole reservation is that the reparation to be made by Germany shall apply only to invaded territories, and to actual military damage elsewhere " by land, by sea, and from the air." In other words, the Allies have no right to demand more than compensation for damage wrought by deliberate military devastation, by naval raids and submarine torpedoings, by shellfire, air raids, and such-like. The " cost of the war " is excluded. On the whole, however, having read the words of the reservation over and over again, we came to the conclusion that it was the intention of those who drafted it to make com- pensation applicable, not merely to invaded territories or to towns and seaports In Great Britain which have -been bombed or shelled, but to all the civilian populrtions of the Allies Note carefully the second sentence of the reservation. Compensation is to be made for all damage. The reservation, surely, is an expansion on a grand scale of Mr. Wilson's original point. The very word " aggression " seems to us to connote this great ex- pansion of the sense, for "aggression" is a wide word, applying to a general policy rather than to specific military acts. We have never heard of the aggression of a gun or a torpedo, though we have heard of the aggression of one nation against another.
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