It was this occupation of the Ruhr—the threat of its happening, the entry of the French troops, and the results of it—which poisoned the relations between England and France, flung Germany back into the arms of her Nationalists, and thwarted all efforts of international good will in the spirit of the League of Nations. It kept the wounds of war open and salted in Central Europe. It checked the economic recovery of all nations dependent upon Germany as buyers and sellers. France failed to get her reparations, and instead of building up security the policy of Poincaré made a future war between the two nations almost inevitable by stirring a cauldron of boiling pitch. It turned the justice of the War into an injustice of peace, with the Germans as the victims of injustice. For how could they pay reparations if their industrial heart was strangled? And how could they submit to a military tyranny over their great working population from an enemy which had professed to fight the war for liberty and democracy? How could any peace be justified which enabled a foreign army, after war, to hold up the chief industries of a great country, to destroy the machinery of its life, to coerce its workers at the point of the bayonet, to expel them when they refused to work under their military command, to take their money, to fling out their furniture, to imprison their working chiefs, to cut off their food supplies, to prevent their intercourse with their own folk, to deal with the passive resistance of proud and hungry men as though it were a crime against France, to use their whips in German theatres, to terrorise the inhabitants of a great district, to break their spirit by a thousand tyrannies, insults, humiliations and brutalities? That was how the Germans argued, and the argument stands in the soul of Germany as a memory that must one day be wiped out in blood. I think France under Poincaré was unwise in giving to Germany that sense of injustice and that cause of vengeance. I think France under Herriot thinks so too, although it cannot forget, as none of us can forget, the abominable acts of German officers and men during time of war in France and Belgium. The argument on the French side was logical enough, to a certain point, where its logic broke abruptly. France, as its mind was expressed by Poincaré, said: “These people have not paid us. They are not trying to pay us. They are in wilful and flagrant default.” They paid no attention to the German reply that they had paid all they could—enormous sums—and could pay no more without utter ruin. In any case, they did not yet know the fixed sum of their debt, and the figures France demanded were beyond the capacity of any nation on earth.