This chapter was criticised by economists in Britain, France, and America. I do not think that a single economist of note admitted the slightest validity in this argument. Several accused the author of adopting protectionist fallacies in an attempt to 'make out a case.' It happens that he is a convinced Free Trader. But he is also aware that it is quite impracticable to dissociate national psychology from international commercial problems. Remembering what popular feeling about the expansion of enemy trade must be on the morrow of war, he asked the reader to imagine vast imports of enemy goods as the means of paying an indemnity, and went on:-- 'Do we not know that there would be such a howl about the ruin of home industry that no Government could stand the clamour for a week?... That this influx of goods for nothing would be represented as a deep-laid plot on the part of foreign nations to ruin the home trade, and that the citizens would rise in their wrath to prevent the accomplishment of such a plot? Is not this very operation by which foreign nations tax themselves to send abroad goods, not for nothing (that would be a crime at present unthinkable), but at below cost, the offence to which we have given the name of "dumping"? When it is carried very far, as in the case of sugar, even Free Trade nations like Great Britain join International Conferences to prevent these gifts being made!...' The fact that not one single economist, so far as I know, would at the time admit the validity of these arguments, is worth consideration. Very learned men may sometimes be led astray by keeping their learning in watertight compartments, 'economics' in one compartment and 'politics' or political psychology in another. The politicians seemed to misread the economies and the economists the politics. What are the post-war facts in this connection? We may get them summarised on the one hand by the Prime Minister of Great Britain and on the other by the expert adviser of the British Delegation to the Peace Conference. Mr Lloyd George, speaking two years after the Armistice, and after prolonged and exhaustive debates on this problem, says:-- 'What I have put forward is an expression of the views of all the experts.... Every one wants gold, which Germany has not got, and they will not take German goods. Nations can only pay debts by gold, goods, services, or bills of exchange on nations which are its debtors.[128]