Q. _What do you mean by the term “slavery”? The French people are not being driven about in slave gangs, are they, with an overseer carrying a black-snake whip and all that as in_ Uncle Tom’s Cabin_? I understood the Germans were behaving very “correctly.”_ A. It is true that only the prisoners of war, who still number about a million and a half, are in this literal, physical sense enslaved. The rest of the French people, though, are just as much the slaves of the Germans as if they were housed in slave pens and driven to work in chains. Why? Because they must give up to their German masters all the fruits of their labors except a bare subsistence. The French people have been paying the Germans an indemnity of roughly ten million dollars a day, or $3,650,000,000 a year, and with this money the Germans have been buying from the French, who are forced to sell, all the property of any value in the country, from objects of art to great industrial plants. Consider the size of this indemnity. The maximum yearly reparations payment Germany had to make after the last war was $600,000,000. That is one sixth of what the French have had to pay in the first twelve months of German rule in this war. Q. _How was this indemnity fixed?_ A. In the armistice agreement which Pétain so trustfully signed, it was stipulated that the French would pay for the cost of maintaining the German Army in France. No sum was named. You can imagine the astonishment of the French when, after they had laid down their arms and there was no possibility of refusing, they learned they had to pay the Germans 400,000,000 francs, or roughly $10,000,000 a day. It will give you some notion of the difference between the old-fashioned German conqueror and the new-fashioned Nazi to recollect that after the Franco-German War of 1870 Bismarck exacted a _total_ indemnity of $1,250,000,000, or one-third of what the French of today are forced to pay _yearly_. Q. _How does this French payment compare with the total amounts Germany paid for reparation after the last war?_ A. The maximum estimate of German reparations payments in cash and kind is about $5,000,000,000, which is almost precisely the amount of money Americans lent Germany and never got back. It is the literal truth that Germany paid no reparations. The United States paid them. I was a correspondent in Germany during all those crucial years from the French occupation of the Ruhr onward, and most of us who were on the spot agree that despite the dislocation of wealth in Germany the country as a whole had not lost wealth through payment of reparations, since for every dollar that went to France or England, an American dollar came in.