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Updated: June 7, 2025
The eyes of Dr. van Heerden sparkled and he seemed to expand at the splendour of the vision which was conjured to his eyes. "No fortune which mortal man has ever possessed will be comparable. All the riches of all the world will lie at my feet. Milliards upon milliards " "In fact, a lot of money," said the practical Dr. Milsom. "'Umph! I don't quite see how you are going to do it.
As for the Polish mark, it can be said that before long it will not be worth the paper on which it is printed. There is, then, the fantastic position of the public debts! They have reached now such figures that no imagination could have forecasted. France alone has a debt which of itself exceeds by a great deal all the debts of all the European States previous to the War: 265 milliards of francs.
I don't think we stopped again till we got to Lyons, and all the way there I sat at the window looking at the landscape the long, long plain that the French peasant cultivates unceasingly. Out of that long plain came all the money that was lost in Panama, and all the money invested in Russian bonds fine milliards came out of the French peasants' stockings. We passed through La Beauce.
The import of made goods had in 1879 a value of 600 million marks, and in 1908 a value of 1 1/4 milliard marks, while the value of the export of manufactured goods mounted from 1 to 4 milliards. The value of the import of food-stuffs and delicacies has grown from 1 to 2 1/2-2 1/3 milliard marks, while the value of the export of articles of food remained at about the same figure.
Thus we arrive by stages at less hyperbolical figures, coming down from the twenty-five milliards a year to something less than a fifth. But to come to grips with reality, Germany in all ways, it must be admitted, cannot give more than two milliards a year, if, indeed, it is desired that an indemnity be paid.
To educate Russia it would take, to begin with, a million elementary schools with a yearly budget of several dozen milliards of roubles, and a corresponding number of higher schools and universities: if every educated Russian for the next twenty years were to become a teacher, there would not be enough of them not to speak of the requirements of transport, of raw materials and of agriculture.
Glance backward into the past, and you will see that in the course of thousands of years, out of milliards of people, only half a score of Confucius', Buddhas, Solomons, Socrates, Solons, and Homers have been produced. Evidently, they are rarely met with among men, in spite of the fact that these men have not been selected from a single caste, but from mankind at large.
More than eight milliards of assignats had been issued before the 9th Thermidor, and since that period thirty thousand millions had been added to that sum, already so enormous. Such a system could not be continued; it was necessary to begin the work again, and return to real money.
They were, first, the transfer to Germany of the northeast portion of Lorraine, with Metz and Diedenhofen, and of Alsace, Belfort excepted; second, the payment to Germany by France of one milliard of francs in 1871, and four milliards in the three years following; third, the Germans to begin to evacuate French territory immediately after the ratification of the treaty; Paris and its forts on the left bank of the Seine and certain departments at once; the forts on the right bank after the ratification and the payment of the first half milliard.
Germany, without any of these things, is to find herself able to pay an indemnity which a brazen-faced and ignorant Press deceived the public into believing could amount to twenty or twenty-five milliards a year.
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