A. Many of our people would probably try to sabotage any realistic handling of the Germans. After the last war and at the beginning of this one you could hear many Americans remarking: “How could you expect the Germans or any upstanding, self-respecting people to tolerate being treated unequally, to put up with being disarmed while their neighbors were armed?” These remarks disclosed misapprehension of the German mind which will surely be duplicated at the end of this war by similar persons. That will not matter so much since the British will have a great deal to say about how the Germans are to be restrained, and this time the British will not be as shortsighted as they were after the last war. You may remember that the French in 1919 wanted to occupy permanently various strategic points in Germany, including the Rhineland, but the British said no. They had two principal reasons for not consenting to proper restraint of the Germans and both reasons were, as we can see from our perspective of today, completely invalid. First, they did not want France to become too strong; they believed they had to maintain a balance of power with Germany, apparently leaving out of account the enormous, patent facts that there were 80,000,000 Germans to 40,000,000 Frenchmen, that the French birth rate was nearing the point of racial suicide, that Frenchmen were concerned not at all with expansion but only to keep what they had in their beloved “security.” Second, the British people had failed during the war to suffer any of the pain and tribulation the Germans had visited upon the French, who had seen their towns and villages destroyed, their families blown to bits by German artillery. Today when the British sit down to a Peace Table they will be a different people. In Britain today are upward of 44,000,000 persons who have been under bombardment for two years and have suffered a strain upon their courage such as has no parallel. They have witnessed the mutilation of their dear ones, the destruction of their monuments. They have heard the menace from their enemy that he intended to destroy England as Carthage was destroyed. Is it likely that when the British sit down victorious in a Peace Conference they will shrink from the application of methods, no matter how severe, to prevent the recurrence of this horror? We shall not earn the right to speak at all at the Peace Conference until we have borne our share of the heat of the day. I hope we shall not try to exercise our influence to obstruct whatever solutions may seem appropriate at the end of years of war, to solve this essentially insoluble problem of the Germans. Q. _Why do you call the German problem insoluble?_