The American delegates have recorded that the final argument which overbore the last scruples of the President was contained in a Memorandum prepared by General Smuts[106] on March 31, 1919. Briefly, this argument was, that a soldier becomes a civilian again after his discharge, and that, therefore, a wound, the effects of which persist after he has left the Army, is damage done to a civilian.[107] This is the argument by which “damage done to the civilian population” came to include damage done to soldiers. This is the argument on which, in the end, our case was based! For at this straw the President’s conscience clutched, and the matter was settled. It had been settled in the privacy of the Four. I will give the final scene in the words of Mr. Lamont, one of the American delegates:[108] “I well remember the day upon which President Wilson determined to support the inclusion of pensions in the Reparation Bill. Some of us were gathered in his library in the Place des États Unis, having been summoned by him to discuss this particular question of pensions. We explained to him that we couldn’t find a single lawyer in the American Delegation that would give an opinion in favor of including pensions. All the logic was against it. ‘Logic! logic!’ exclaimed the President, ‘I don’t care a damn for logic. I am going to include pensions!’”[109] Well! perhaps I was too near these things at the time and have become touched in the emotions, but I cannot “more or less shrug my shoulders.” Whether or not that is the appropriate gesture, I have here set forth, for the inspection of Englishmen and our Allies, the moral basis on which two–thirds of our claims against Germany rest. FOOTNOTES: [93] I have given the exact text of the relevant passages in _The Economic Consequences of the Peace_, chapter v. [94] _The Truth about the Treaty_, p. 208. [95] _E.g._, _The History of the Peace Conference of Paris_, published under the auspices of the Institute of International Affairs delivers judgment as follows (vol. ii., p. 43): “It is this statement then (_i.e._, President Wilson’s notification of Nov. 5, 1918) which must be taken as the ruling document in any discussion as to what the Allies were entitled to claim by way of reparation in the Treaty of Peace, and it is difficult to interpret it otherwise than as a deliberate limitation of their undoubted right to recover the whole of their war costs.”