This was the attitude that prevailed during the armistice period. But the Peace of Versailles has inaugurated a more systematic and far-reaching exploitation. This is no place to review its economic and financial provisions; but no one could read them without realising that our policy is apparently to make Germany work for us as its bankers, brokers, shippers and creditors with unlimited claims. To take a rake-off as merchants and middlemen from all German manufactures and to set up a receivership over Germany that we call a Reparation Commission, with the right to claim any remaining profit. The powers of this receivership are such as to prevent the development of any German competition with us in the conduct or control of German production. Combined with the claims for damages these powers would, indeed, make all government impossible. For example, under them Germany is liable to pay the pension claims of the dependents of Sikhs, Senegalese or South Carolina negroes to the exclusion of its own wounded and widows. But the policy, in so far as a compilation of the unchecked schedules and uncriticised schemes of war profiteers can be said to have a policy, is that of making the German workmen produce for British Big Business. The functions ascribed to the so-called "Reparation Commission" represent an attempt to make the German proletariat work under foreign exploitation. Experiments in foreign financial control we have had in Eastern Europe, with semi-civilised peoples; but this is an attempt to set up foreign economic control over a people which in industry had won for itself the first place in Europe. At first sight one is inclined to reject this policy as a practical impossibility; but so extreme is the debility of Germany, and so exceptional the docility of the people, that I am inclined to think it might have had some temporary and partial success but for one thing--the Council movement and the demands of the workmen for the socialisation of industry. Without some measure of socialisation of industry, without some measure of political representation through Councils, the unemployed will not return to work and the employed will only work in fitful intervals between strikes. Between the November revolution and the end of February the coalminers alone forfeited 23 million marks of wages in more or less meaningless strikes; and this was before the great strikes of the spring, which had an obvious political purpose. This is three times the loss incurred in the last pre-war strike of 1912. The decrease in production rose from a quarter-million tons in December to a million in February, and this was little compared with the loss that followed, estimated at no less than ten million tons.