I cannot imagine what black murder would not spring up in the hearts of an American or British population treated as the Germans were treated this spring. The behaviour of the Germans has indeed been amazingly patient. The rest of Germany has wrecked itself financially in a desperate attempt to sustain the Ruhr workers in an attitude of passive resistance, and now at last these overwhelming payments have to cease. For the better part of a year the trade and industry of Central Europe has been dislocated. A year of human life and human production has been frittered away in this struggle. The great economic machine of Western Germany is now like some complex piece of apparatus that has been fought for by infuriated children. How deep the physical and moral wounds inflicted on the war-exhausted, depleted being of Germany may be we can as yet only speculate. But France has achieved a great victory in this new war, for war it is, against an unarmed antagonist. She is victorious, and the tricolour triumphs over Europe. The passive resistance of the Ruhr has been abandoned and the German Government has been unable to get any conditions from France in exchange for this surrender. The debt looms as large as ever, the possibility of effective payments is much remoter than it has been before, and France is in a stronger position argumentatively than she has even been. She can still go on counting her steadily accumulating claim. She can proceed, whenever she wishes to do so, to fresh seizures, further occupations, and further humiliations for her defeated enemy. There is no boundary set, by anything that has happened, to the systematic disintegration of the great civilisation of Germany. Germans may be found vile enough and foolish enough to assist in the political fragmentation of their own people. Presently we may see Germany broken up into half a dozen nasty little retrogressive States, all played off against each other to their mutual enfeeblement by France.