Dr. Simons communicated his formal reply. He would accept the _régime_ of the Paris Decisions as fixed for the first five years, provided Germany was helped to pay by means of a loan and retained Upper Silesia. At the end of five years the Treaty of Versailles would resume its authority, the provisions of which he preferred, as he was entitled to do, to the proposals of Paris. “The question of war guilt is to be decided neither by the Treaty, nor by acknowledgment, nor by Sanctions; only history will be able to decide the question as to who was responsible for the world war. We are all of us still too near to the event.” The Sanctions threatened were, he pointed out, all of them illegal. Germany could not be technically in default in respect of Reparation until the Reparation Commission had made the pronouncements due from them on May 1. The occupation of further German territory was not lawful under the Treaty. The retention of part of the value of German goods was contrary to undertakings given by the British and Belgian Governments. The erection of a special Customs tariff in the Rhineland was only permissible under Article 270 of the Treaty for the protection of the economic interests of the Rhineland population and not for the punishment of the whole German people in respect of unfulfilled Treaty obligations. The arguments as to the illegality of the Sanctions were indisputable, and Mr. Lloyd George made no attempt to answer them. He announced that the Sanctions would be put into operation immediately. The rupture of the negotiations was received in Paris “with a sigh of relief,”[11] and orders were telegraphed by Marshal Foch for his troops to march at 7 A.M. next morning. No new Reparation scheme, therefore, emerged from the Conference of London. Mr. Lloyd George’s acquiescence in the Decisions of Paris had led him too far. Some measure of personal annoyance at the demeanor of the German representatives and the failure of what, in its inception, may have been intended as bluff, had ended in his agreeing to an attempt to enforce the Decisions by the invasion of Germany. The economic penalties, whether they were legal or not, were so obviously ineffective for the purpose of collecting money, that they can hardly have been intended for that purpose, and were rather designed to frighten Germany into putting her name to what she could not, and did not intend to perform, by threatening a serious step in the direction of the policy, openly advocated in certain French quarters, of permanently detaching the Rhine provinces from the German Commonwealth. The grave feature of the Conference of London lay partly in Great Britain’s lending herself to a furtherance of this policy, and partly in contempt for the due form and processes of law.