To a lesser degree the same will be true of the countries receiving the indemnity. Mr. Lloyd George promises that it will not be paid in cheap goods, or in such a way as to damage home industries. But it must be paid in some goods: ships, dyes, or (as some suggest) raw materials. Their distribution to private industry, the price that these industries shall pay, must be arranged by the receiving Government. This inevitably means a prolongation of the State's intervention in the processes of private trade and industry. Nor is it merely the disposal of the indemnity in kind which will compel each Allied Government to continue to intervene in the trade and industry of its citizens. The fact that the Reparations Commission is, in effect, to allocate the amount of ore, cotton, shipping, Germany is to get, to distribute the ships and coal which she may deliver, means the establishment of something resembling international rationing. The Governments will, in increasing degree, determine the amount and direction of trade. The more thoroughly we 'make Germany pay,' the more State-controlled do we compel her (and only to a lesser extent ourselves) to become. We should probably regard a standard of life in Germany very definitely below that of the rest of Western Europe, as poetic justice. But it would inevitably set up forces, both psychological and economic, that make not only for State-control--either State Socialism or State Capitalism--but for Communism. Suppose we did our work so thoroughly that we took absolutely all Germany could produce over and above what was necessary for the maintenance of the physical efficiency of her population. That would compel her to organise herself increasingly on the basis of equality of income: no one, that is, going above the line of physical efficiency and no one falling below it. Thus, while British, French, and American anti-socialists are declaring that the principle enunciated by the Russian Government, that all trade must be through the Soviet, is one which will prove most mischievous in its example, it is precisely that principle which increasingly, if the Treaty is enforced, they will in fact impose upon a great country, highly organised, of great bureaucratic efficiency, far more likely by its training and character to make the principle a success. This tendency may be in the right direction or the wrong one. The point is that no provision has been made to meet the condition which the change creates. The old system permitted the world to work under well-defined principles. The new regimen, because it has not provided for the consequences of the changes it has provoked, condemns a great part of Europe to economic paralysis which must end in bitter anarchic struggles unless the crisis is anticipated by constructive statesmanship.