effects of her payment and would thus be most reluctant to press her: time and currency chaos were on her side; she only had to leave things drifting and go on printing notes and she might, with luck, escape the indemnity payment altogether.
How much ground was there for these fears? They always seemed to me enormously exaggerated if not altogether baseless. Of course it was easy to make our flesh creep by imagining the scope of the trade that Germany would have to do before she could place an export surplus of £400,000,000 a year at the disposal of her victorious enemies. But that was most unlikely to happen and could only happen if the world at large had shown an effective demand for industrial goods such as would have justified the hopes of tremendous trade expansion that were current at the end of the war.
That she could provide a surplus of £150,000,000 a year, the figure at which she was asked to begin, and gradually increase it ought surely to have been a programme which need not have terrified British industry, because British industry would, from the circumstances of the case, have had a double handicap in her favour. For Germany industry would have had to bear the taxation involved by the
