It is reported that the people of Vienna, hearing that a section of the Reparation Commission is about to visit them, have decided characteristically to pin their hopes on it.  A financial body can obviously take nothing from them, for they have nothing; therefore this body must be for the purpose of assisting and relieving them.  Thus do the Viennese argue, still light-headed in adversity.  But perhaps they are right.  The Reparation Commission will come into very close contact with the problems of Europe; and it will bear a responsibility proportionate to its powers.  It may thus come to fulfil a very different role from that which some of its authors intended for it.  Transferred to the League of Nations, an appanage of justice and no longer of interest, who knows that by a change of heart and object the Reparation Commission may not yet be transformed from an instrument of oppression and rapine into an economic council of Europe, whose object is the restoration of life and of happiness, even in the enemy countries?

V. The German Counter-Proposals

The German counter-proposals were somewhat obscure, and also rather disingenuous.  It will be remembered that those clauses of the Reparation Chapter which dealt with the issue of bonds by Germany produced on the public mind the impression that the Indemnity had been fixed at $25,000,000,000, or at any rate at this figure as a minimum.  The German Delegation set out, therefore, to construct their reply on the basis of this figure, assuming apparently that public opinion in Allied countries would not be satisfied with less than the appearance of $25,000,000,000; and, as they were not really prepared to offer so large a figure, they exercised their ingenuity to produce a formula which might be represented to Allied opinion as yielding this amount, whilst really representing a much more modest sum.  The formula produced was transparent to any one who read it carefully and knew the facts, and it could hardly have been expected by its authors to deceive the Allied negotiators.  The German tactic assumed, therefore, that the latter were secretly as anxious as the Germans themselves to arrive at a settlement which bore some relation to the facts, and that they would therefore be willing, in view of the entanglements which they had got themselves into with their own publics, to practise a little collusion in drafting the Treaty,—­a supposition which in slightly different circumstances might have had a good deal of foundation.  As matters actually were, this subtlety did not benefit them, and they would have done much better with a straightforward and candid estimate of what they believed to be the amount of their liabilities on the one hand, and their capacity to pay on the other.