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Updated: June 7, 2025
The annual military budget of all the Great Powers would comprise many milliards it would be impossible with all the other burdens which the belligerent states will have to bear after peace is concluded. This expense, I repeat, would mean the ruin of the nations.
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.
We must also remember that Germany, in addition to the indemnity, must pay the cost of the Army of Occupation, which up to now has amounted to twenty-five milliards of paper marks a year, or more than 1,600 millions of francs at par. That is, Germany has to bear for the support of the Allied troops a charge equal to the cost of maintaining the armies of France, Italy and Belgium before the War.
At the king's death the loans amounted to more than two milliards and a half, the deficit was getting worse and worse every day, there was no more money to be had, and the income from property went on diminishing. "I have only some dirty acres which are turning to stones instead of being bread," wrote Madame de Sevigne.
And even if we put on one side the burden of the internal debt, which amounts to 24 milliards of marks, as being a question of internal distribution rather than of productivity, we must still allow for the foreign debt incurred by Germany during the war, the exhaustion of her stock of raw materials, the depletion of her live-stock, the impaired productivity of her soil from lack of manures and of labor, and the diminution in her wealth from the failure to keep up many repairs and renewals over a period of nearly five years.
We must say that inasmuch as France before the War had a public debt of 32 milliards, and now has a debt of 265 milliards, without calculating what she owes to Great Britain and the United States, France, by reason of the War, has immensely enriched herself, since, leaving aside the debt contracted abroad and the previous debt, she has saved during the War 200 milliards, quite apart from the increase in bank deposits and the increase in capital of limited companies.
It declined this and entered into the war; it has lost hundreds of thousands of lives, milliards in war expenses and values destroyed; it has brought want and misery upon its own population, and all this only to lose for ever an advantage which it might have won.
As her circulation has exceeded eighty-eight milliards, how can she straighten out her money? As for the Austrian and Hungarian crowns, the Jugo-Slav crowns, the Rumanian lei, and all the other depreciated moneys, their fate is not doubtful. As their value is always descending, and the gold equivalent becomes almost indeterminable, they will have a common fate.
"Our enemies are obtaining contraband of war from the United States, in particular rifles, to the value of many milliards of marks; this is within their rights. But toleration becomes serious injustice if the United States refuses to allow the occasional provisioning of our ships of war from her ports.
The United States of America are creditors only; Great Britain has lent the double of what she has borrowed. France has received on loan the triple of what she has lent to others. The credits of France are for almost two-thirds undemandable credits of Great Britain; more than 14 milliards being with Russia, they are for considerably more than one-third bad debts.
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