Forced to surrender immediately a large quantity of live stock, to demobilize when the best part of her railway material had gone, still hampered by the blockade, Germany, against the interest of the Allies themselves, has been obliged to sacrifice her exchange because, in the absence of sufficient help, she has had to buy the most indispensable foodstuffs in neutral countries. Her paper currency, which at the end of 1918 amounted to twenty-two milliard marks, not excessive as compared with that of other countries, immediately increased with a growing crescendo till it reached, in a very short time, the figure of eighty-eight milliards, thus rendering from the very first the payment of indemnities in gold extremely difficult. The most skilled men have been thrust into an absolute impossibility of producing. To have deprived Germany of her merchant fleet, built up with so much care, means to have deprived the freight market of sixty thousand of the most skilled, intelligent and hard-working seamen. But what Germany has lost as a result of the treaty surpasses all imagination and can only be regarded as a sentence of ruin and decay voluntarily passed over a whole people. Germany, without taking into account the countries subject to plebiscite, has lost 7.5 per cent. of her population. Should the plebiscites prove unfavourable to her, or, as the tendency seems to be, should these plebiscites be disregarded, Germany would lose 13.5 per cent. of her population. Purely German territories have been forcibly wrenched from her. What has been done in the case of the Saar has no precedents in modern history. It is a country of 650,000 inhabitants of whom not even one hundred are French, a country which has been German for a thousand years, and which was temporarily occupied by France for purely military reasons. In spite of these facts, however, not only have the coal fields of the Saar been assigned in perpetuity to France as compensation for the damages caused to the French mines in the North, but the territory of the Saar forms part of the French customs regime and will be subjected after fifteen years to a plebiscite, when such a necessity is absolutely incomprehensible, as the population is purely German and has never in any form or manner expressed the intention of changing its nationality. The ebb and flow of peoples in Europe during the long war of nationalities has often changed the situation of frontier countries. Sometimes it may still be regarded as a necessity to include small groups of alien race and language in different states in order to ensure strategically safe frontiers. But, with the exception of the necessity for self-defence, there is nothing to justify what has been done to the detriment of Germany.