personal experience, last year on the dock I found the duty on my suits to be the figure just named, on embroidery seventy-five per cent, on jewelry eighty per cent, and on lace ninety per cent. In the old days we used to imprison debtors who could not pay. We gradually learned that shutting a man in jail and depriving him of the means of making a livelihood was a foolish way to expect him to pay his debt. By our tariff wall we are imprisoning our European debtors in much the same way. This phase of the problem is resented to some extent here because the situation is much better understood than at home, where most business men have had experience only with domestic debts, with no training in international finance. On the whole, however, one hears comparatively little here now about the debt. In responsible quarters there is a great desire to let the matter rest and to continue to make the annual payments without further comment unless the ultimate impossibility of the situation may become clearly apparent on both sides of the water. It does hurt and annoy them here when Mr. Mellon tells the American people that the debt is not costing England anything and is not hurting her. If Englishmen are not given either to whimpering or to welshing, they do believe in fair play. They may or may not eventually receive from other nations what they are already paying us. They have not received it yet, and may never do so. They are engaged in delicate negotiations with France about the matter now. Meanwhile they have signed the note to us and are paying it in cash. Therefore, when they are bleeding themselves white in their private[Pg 277] and corporate incomes to pay their own taxes (the lowest income-tax rate is twenty per cent), and are paying the debt to us on a scale which we have not exacted from any other debtor, they feel it is unfair to say they are not going into their own pockets at all. But even so, there was much criticism here of Churchill’s note as tending to start afresh a controversy which Englishmen feel is settled and which it is beneath their dignity to reopen of themselves.