The most skilled men have been thrust into an absolute impossibility of producing.  To have deprived Germany of her merchant fleet, built up with so much care, means to have deprived the freight market of sixty thousand of the most skilled, intelligent and hard-working seamen.

But what Germany has lost as a result of the treaty surpasses all imagination and can only be regarded as a sentence of ruin and decay voluntarily passed over a whole people.

Germany, without taking into account the countries subject to plebiscite, has lost 7.5 per cent. of her population.  Should the plebiscites prove unfavourable to her, or, as the tendency seems to be, should these plebiscites be disregarded, Germany would lose 13.5 per cent. of her population.  Purely German territories have been forcibly wrenched from her.  What has been done in the case of the Saar has no precedents in modern history.  It is a country of 650,000 inhabitants of whom not even one hundred are French, a country which has been German for a thousand years, and which was temporarily occupied by France for purely military reasons.  In spite of these facts, however, not only have the coal fields of the Saar been assigned in perpetuity to France as compensation for the damages caused to the French mines in the North, but the territory of the Saar forms part of the French customs regime and will be subjected after fifteen years to a plebiscite, when such a necessity is absolutely incomprehensible, as the population is purely German and has never in any form or manner expressed the intention of changing its nationality.

The ebb and flow of peoples in Europe during the long war of nationalities has often changed the situation of frontier countries.  Sometimes it may still be regarded as a necessity to include small groups of alien race and language in different states in order to ensure strategically safe frontiers.  But, with the exception of the necessity for self-defence, there is nothing to justify what has been done to the detriment of Germany.

Wilson had only said that France should receive compensation for the wrong suffered in 1871 and that Belgium should be evacuated and reconstructed.  What had been destroyed was to have been built up again; but no one had ever thought during the War of handing over to Belgium a part, however small, of German territory or of surrendering predominantly and purely German territories to Poland.

The German colonies covered an area of nearly 3,000,000 square kilometres; they had reached an admirable degree of development and were managed with the greatest skill and ability.  They represented an enormous value; nevertheless they have been assigned to France, Great Britain and in minor proportion to Japan, without figuring at all in the reparations account.

It is calculated that as a result of the treaty, owing to the loss of a considerable percentage of her agricultural area, Germany is twenty-five per cent. the poorer in regard to the production of cereals and potatoes and ten to twelve per cent. in regard to the breeding of live stock.