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Updated: May 2, 2025
A great step towards peace may be made by admitting at once all ex-enemy States into the League of Nations.
All the newspapers devoted articles to Shakespeare, and one felt truly that a great master of words and of men was more honoured in ex-enemy Germany than in the land of his birth. And that should have been good for Germany; Shakespeare is universal, and it takes the universal to cleanse the national. As a German philosopher has said, it needs an ocean to receive such a muddy stream as man.
International trains with sleeping cars carefully avoid what are known as ex-enemy capitals. In this night-train from Belgrade all the arrangements are discouraging and fatiguing. First, second, and third class carriages are the same, all wood, but some are marked "1" and others "2" and others "3." There are no lights in the train, and it is very crowded.
But the main outlines of all schemes for an international loan are much the same, The countries in a position to lend assistance, the neutrals, the United Kingdom, and, for the greater portion of the sum required, the United States, must provide foreign purchasing credits for all the belligerent countries of continental Europe, allied and ex-enemy alike.
I still believe that before the main Conference, or very early in its proceedings, the representatives of Great Britain should have entered deeply, with those of the United States, into the economic and financial situation as a whole, and that the former should have been authorized to make concrete proposals on the general lines that all inter-allied indebtedness be canceled outright; that the sum to be paid by Germany be fixed at $10,000,000,000; that Great Britain renounce all claim to participation in this sum and that any share to which she proves entitled be placed at the disposal of the Conference for the purpose of aiding the finances of the New States about to be established; that in order to make some basis of credit immediately available an appropriate proportion of the German obligations representing the sum to be paid by her should be guaranteed by all parties to the Treaty; and that the ex-enemy Powers should also be allowed, with a view to their economic restoration, to issue a moderate amount of bonds carrying a similar guarantee.
On the other hand, the stalwart, honest type does not get on so well as he did. The war has confused his mind a little. Many still want to punish the Germans. And in punishing the ex-enemy they punish themselves. One would think that the supposed "nation of shopkeepers" would be appealed to on grounds of commercial sagacity.
Until the payment of an indemnity the amount of which is as yet not definitely stated, Germany loses the fundamental characters of a sovereign state. Not only part of her territory remains under the occupation of the ex-enemy troops for a period of fifteen years but a whole series of controls is established, military, administrative, on transports, etc.
Fourthly, considerable groups of ex-enemy peoples, chiefly Germans and Magyars, have been assigned to populations of an inferior civilization.
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