The growth of German industry in late years, comparable only to industrial growth in North America, was due, as with us, to the combination of coal with iron and of first-rate management with foreign markets. The Treaty has deprived Germany, in the east, of the Silesian coalfields with their dependent industries, and, in the west, of the Lorraine and Saar ores; which, together, may be compared to the loss of South Wales and Northumberland. It has also deprived Germany, not only of its colonies, but also of its commercial establishments abroad, so closing foreign markets to it except by way of foreign intermediaries, bankers, brokers and shippers. There is nothing left of German foreign commerce and little left of German industry but a mutilated torso; for it has not only lost its right hand in Lorraine but also its left in Silesia. Yet, what German men of business feel it hardest to forgive is not the injury done by the Treaty but the insult. That camouflaged receivership, the Reparation Commission, prejudges Germany as a fraudulent bankrupt. If we had in the Treaty fixed our claims as creditors and negotiated with Germany as to how they could be paid, the German middle class would have taken a pride in showing itself equal to the enormous emergency even as the French did in the far less searching trial of 1870. But this foreign Commission has been given such powers as have never yet been proposed for foreign financial control, even of the most wholly bankrupt and barbarous Sovereign State. Those powers will, of course, never be exercised, and they would defeat the object of the financial provisions of the Treaty if they were; but the unnecessary insult they involve has cost us the co-operation of the German middle classes in rebuilding the economic system of Europe. And, now for the last mistake. The one desire of the lower classes of Germany, whether industrial or agricultural, is for peace and plenty. In condemning them to a continuance of war conditions for nine months after their surrender and revolution we turned them from internationalists, ready to welcome us as representatives of democracy and as crusaders for an international ideal, into either nationalists who looked on us as enemies seeking the destruction of all Germans, or into internationalists who looked on us as enemies of the revolution seeking their destruction as we were seeking that of the Russians. The result has been that we have lost the co-operation of the German working class in extending our system of parliamentary Government to Central and Eastern Europe. And it requires no profound political knowledge of continental conditions to recognise that, without such co-operation, British political ideas and institutions and with them British political influence will not penetrate Europe.