granting the Armistice, that the indemnity was only to cover damage to civilian property by land, sea and air. But legal ingenuity combined with poetic imagination in following out chains of consequential damage due to consequential losses and so ad infinitum could evidently put as many noughts on to the bill as would suffice to appease the groundlings. Nevertheless the inclusion of the cost of pensions in the Reparations bill always seemed to me to be an ugly blot on the scutcheons of the Allies; though it has been supported by authorities whose judgment and integrity are above question.
For this vindictiveness against the beaten enemy, un-English as it was, there was, as has been shown, a good deal of excuse, but the amazing thing is that there was so little readiness to show more forbearance to our Allies. On this point I am not, as we say in the City, "jobbing backwards," for before the end of 1918 I expressed in print the view that it would be a generous act, which would cost us nothing, to clean the slate of international indebtedness as far as we could by wiping out the whole of the debts due to us from our Continental Allies. They were poorer than we when the war began, had suffered much more from the war, were most unlikely ever to pay us a shilling, and if
