At the end of May they made counter-proposals, agreeing to disarmament clauses, to the reduction of their army to one hundred thousand men, and also to the abolition of their navy. They agreed that Dantzig should be a free port, but rejected some of the territorial clauses and the penal stipulations. They refused to confess their sole responsibility for the war. They asked for plebiscites in territories taken from them by the treaty. They agreed to pay for reparations a total sum not exceeding 100,000,000,000 gold marks. The Allies answered the German notes, one by one, in writing. No honest effort was made to justify in detail the terms to which the Germans objected by bringing arguments to refute the German arguments. The attitude of the Allies, in every answer, was that the Germans forgot that they had lost the war, a war for which they were solely responsible and which had brought upon the world endless misery. They were reminded of the fact that they had done more wrong than the most unfavorable terms could atone for, and that the damages due to their invasions of other countries and their diabolical destruction of cities, factories, and mines had put them beyond the pale of civilization. They ought to be glad that the terms were not harder. The terms could easily have been made harder. In none of the Allied replies was attention paid to the German claim that there had been a pre-armistice agreement, and that the Allies were using exactly opposite principles in deciding different points, invoking self-determination to justify detaching territory from Germany where there were alien majorities, and assigning historic and strategic reasons where the majorities were German. In the replies nothing was said about the unfairness of unilateral transport advantages in time of peace. After five years, a careful reading of the Allied replies to the German observations on the Treaty of Versailles will convince one that the attitude of mind of the victors toward the vanquished was unstatesmanlike, to put it mildly. Many of the German arguments were poor, and could have been refuted; others were sound, and should have been ignored only if the victors felt that they could count upon remaining united and ready to make use of their military superiority, which was due only to their union, throughout the period of the execution of the treaty.