Successive Cabinets since the war have been criticized for swelling the budget with enormous sums for railways and public works, for not taxing the people to the limit, for allowing the capitalists to send money out of the country. This policy, or lack of policy, has been interpreted as proof of dishonesty. But when a business Government, headed by Herr Cuno, the able shipping man, came into office in 1922, there was no longer doubt in the minds of impartial observers that Germany was ready to consent to any practicable reparations program and to put her house in order so that it could be carried out. The new Cuno Government, backed by Germany’s leading industrialists, received the support of the people and was ready to talk business with the Entente Powers. But all the negotiations proved that the reparations problem was a political and not an economic one. France wanted reparations if she could get them; but she wanted security more than reparations. Public opinion in France had come to believe that the economic recovery of Germany spelled the ruin of France. Therefore, there could be peace in Europe only when the Germans became again “the modest Germans of 1848,” that is, a disunited people, content to be in a position of inferiority, military and economic, to their neighbors. France may not have cherished these ideas at all. But the German people believed that she had them. So long as the French refrained from entering the Ruhr, the uncertainty of the situation demoralized the Germans completely. They seemed during the latter part of 1922 to be disintegrating socially, through the ruin of the bourgeois class. Then came the events of January, 1923, confronting Germany squarely with the issue, “To be or not to be.” The blow of the Ruhr invasion fell upon Germany despite every effort made at home and abroad to stave it off. Herr Cuno had raised postal tariffs twice, and had made a third increase of 100 per cent on January 1, 1923. On the same date a second substantial increase was made in passenger-fares and freight-rates. By removing the control of rents, which had ruined landlords and prevented payment of taxes on land, Herr Cuno revived an involuntary body of tax defaulters. Rents now stood at twenty-seven times the 1914 rate. Taxes on small incomes rose from 1.6 to 9.3 per cent during 1922, and were promptly collected because employers used stamps. But it was estimated at the beginning of 1923 that these increases, which brought all prices to pre-war level, while wages were only half the pre-war level, would necessarily result in so radical an increase in wage scales that Germany could no longer put cheap goods on world markets. This would bring about a collapse of the fictitious prosperity. Writing before the Ruhr invasion, the Dutch economist, Dr. Stuart, of the University of Utrecht, put the root of Germany’s problem in one short paragraph: