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 to the British Treasury and chief of the department charged to look after the foreign exchanges and the financial relations between Great Britain and her allies.  A serious writer, a teacher of economics of considerable value, he brought to his difficult task a scrupulousness and an exactness that bordered on mistrust.  Being at that time Chancellor of the Exchequer in Italy, in the bitterest and most decisive period of the War, I had frequent contact with Mr. Keynes, and I always admired his exactness and his precision.  I could not always find it in myself to praise his friendly spirit.  But he had an almost mystic force of severity, and those enormous squanderings of wealth, that facile assumption of liabilities that characterized this period of the War, must have doubtless produced in him a sense of infinite disgust.  This state of mind often made him very exigent, and sometimes unjustifiably suspicious.  His word had a decisive effect on the actions of the English Treasury.