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Updated: June 26, 2025
He told them of the shattered condition of the fortifications, and urged the necessity of speedy reparations; and for this end proposed a voluntary subscription, beginning with a generous offer himself, as an example to others.
We were born rich; we revel in the "reparations" that our fathers wrung from a conquered Nature. But Nature, like Germany, is not really whipped. If we relax, she will default on her payments. As long as Nature is not really whipped, her treaty is a scrap of paper. Nature, right now, is preparing for a come-back. She will not arm openly, for we would then arm to meet her.
A million advertisements tell me that all decent people shave with Apple-Blossom soap, and with Apple-Blossom soap I shave. A score of papers tell me Germany is undertaxed and can pay Reparations, and I sit quiet while France occupies the Ruhr. Or vice-versa, as the case or another may be.
Could France or Italy, by any kind of sacrifice, have paid any indemnities after ending the War? Germany has not only to live and make reparation, but to maintain an inter-allied army of occupation and the heavy machinery of the Reparations Commission, and must prepare to pay an indemnity for thirty years.
And their yearly rents are so small and uncertain, that there runs away many times more in reparations and taxations annually then the rents amounts to. This occasions disquiet.
Why interdict to yourselves the means of reparation? Why condemn yourself to powerlessness to help opprest innocence? What good can come of the sterile regrets, these illusory reparations you grant to a vain shade, to insensible ashes? They are the sad testimonials of the barbarous temerity of your penal laws.
Their protests touched chiefly upon the economic clauses and reparations, the solution of the Saar problem, the cession of so much German territory to Poland, and the exclusion of Germany from the League of Nations.
The Americans, on the other hand, were infinitely more conservative in their estimates of what Germany could pay. Even after certain Allied experts, including Montagu and Loucheur, affirmed the necessity of scaling down the suggested sum of reparations, the difference between the American proposals and those of the Allies was serious.
In October, 1918, the French government, in doubt about the full significance of that one of Mr. Wilson's Fourteen Points which dealt with reparations, asked officially for explanations, and received from Mr. Lansing the answer by telegraph that it involved the making good by the enemy of all losses inflicted directly and lawlessly upon civilians, but none other.
It would have been humiliating to go back to the Allies asking special privileges, but Europe needed American assistance too much to fail to heed these demands. After all America had gained nothing in the way of territorial advantage from the war and was asking for nothing in the way of reparations. It was at this crucial moment that Wilson's peculiar temperamental faults asserted themselves.
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