a few days later at Newcastle (November 29) the Prime Minister was warming to his work:  “When Germany defeated France she made France pay.  That is the principle which she herself has established.  There is absolutely no doubt about the principle, and that is the principle we should proceed upon—­that Germany must pay the costs of the war up to the limit of her capacity to do so.”  But he accompanied this statement of principle with many “words of warning” as to the practical difficulties of the case:  “We have appointed a strong Committee of experts, representing every shade of opinion, to consider this question very carefully and to advise us.  There is no doubt as to the justice of the demand.  She ought to pay, she must pay as far as she can, but we are not going to allow her to pay in such a way as to wreck our industries.”  At this stage the Prime Minister sought to indicate that he intended great severity, without raising excessive hopes of actually getting the money, or committing himself to a particular line of action at the Conference.  It was rumored that a high city authority had committed himself to the opinion that Germany could certainly pay $100,000,000,000 and that this authority for his part would not care to discredit a figure of twice that sum.  The Treasury officials, as Mr. Lloyd George indicated, took a different view.  He could, therefore, shelter himself behind the wide discrepancy between the opinions of his different advisers, and regard the precise figure of Germany’s capacity to pay as an open question in the treatment of which he must do his best for his country’s interests.  As to our engagements under the Fourteen Points he was always silent.

On November 30, Mr. Barnes, a member of the War Cabinet, in which he was supposed to represent Labor, shouted from a platform, “I am for hanging the Kaiser.”

On December 6, the Prime Minister issued a statement of policy and aims in which he stated, with significant emphasis on the word European, that “All the European Allies have accepted the principle that the Central Powers must pay the cost of the war up to the limit of their capacity.”

But it was now little more than a week to Polling Day, and still he had not said enough to satisfy the appetites of the moment.  On December 8, the Times, providing as usual a cloak of ostensible decorum for the lesser restraint of its associates, declared in a leader entitled “Making Germany Pay,” that “The public mind was still bewildered by the Prime Minister’s various statements.”  “There is too much suspicion,” they added, “of influences concerned to let the Germans off lightly, whereas the only possible motive in determining their capacity to pay must be the interests of the Allies.”  “It is the candidate who deals with the issues of to-day,” wrote their Political Correspondent, “who adopts Mr. Barnes’s phrase about ‘hanging the Kaiser’ and plumps for the payment of the cost of the war by Germany, who rouses his audience and strikes the notes to which they are most responsive.”