At the London Conference, on March 1, Dr. Simons, the German foreign minister, declared that Germany never could pay any such sum, whose annual instalments were far beyond her total surplus wealth in the years of her greatest prosperity before the war. He made a counter-offer of 50,000,000,000 gold marks, less 20,000,000,000 already paid (according to German figures), but pointed out that even this sum was possible only if the decision in regard to Upper Silesia did not go against Germany. Dr. Simons suggested that if the value of payments already made was disputed, a joint commission should be appointed to determine it. Lloyd George delivered a long speech to the German delegation on March 3, in which he ridiculed their proposals and described them as “simply provocative.” Lloyd George two years later was taken to task in Parliament for his attitude at this London Conference. He frankly admitted that he knew the absurdity of the Entente program, but that it was insisted upon in order to force from Germany a counter-offer up to her real capacity to pay, and also that other factors entered into the decision of the British Cabinet to stand with the French. These other factors were, as we have seen in other chapters, the desire to keep France from opposing the British plan in the Near East by supporting French plans on the Rhine. France, Great Britain, Italy, and Belgium sent a joint note to Germany, threatening to levy an import tax of 50 per cent on German goods entering their countries, and to force Germany to pay the tax, which would be pooled and divided as indemnity. The German Cabinet was firm in its refusal to pay down 12,000,000,000 gold marks on account before May 1 and to agree to the London program. Lloyd George himself proposed an ultimatum in which military occupation of the Ruhr Valley was threatened if Germany did not accept without reservation the indemnity schedule fixed at Paris on January 29. On May 5 Lloyd George told Parliament that he was sure of Germany’s yielding, for “with the Ruhr gone industrial Germany withers: it cannot exist.” With Marshal Foch on the Rhine and ready to march in, the German Government agreed to the Paris program. It was the only means of preventing the Ruhr occupation.