Sooner or later France and England have to say to each other: “We have been sore and sick and exasperated and suspicious and narrow. Let us take a lesson from this American plan and set about discussing an Atlantic treaty, an Afro-European treaty, worthy to put beside this Pacific treaty.” And since this has to be said, it was a pity that Mr. Balfour could not take up M. Viviani’s half lead and begin to say it at the fourth plenary session of the Washington Conference. XXVII ABOUT THE WAR DEBTS Washington, Dec. 13. In the official proceedings of the Washington Conference the war debts are never mentioned. It is an improper subject. In the talks and discussions and the journalistic writings round and about the Washington Conference the war debts are perpetually debated. The nature of the discussion is so curious and interesting, it throws so strong a light upon the difficulties that impede our path to any settlement of the world’s affairs upon the sound democratic basis of a world-wide will, that some brief analysis of it is necessary if this outline of the peace situation is to be complete. In private talk almost universally, in the weekly and monthly publications that are here called “highbrow,” I find a very general agreement that the bulk of these war debts and war preparation debts as between Russia and France, and between the European allies and Britain, and between Britain and America, and the bulk of the indemnity and reparation debt of Germany to the Allies, cannot be paid and ought not to be paid, and that the sooner that this legend of indebtedness is swept out of men’s imaginations the sooner we shall get on to the work of world reconstruction. Only one of these debts is even remotely payable and that is the British debt to America. But with regard to that debt the situation rises to a high level of absurdity. The British authorities—it is an open secret—have been offering to begin the liquidation of their debt now. They cannot pay in gold, because most of the gold in the world is already sleeping uselessly in American vaults; but they offer what gold they have and, in addition, they are willing to get their factories to work and supply manufactured goods to the American creditor—clothes, boots, automobiles, ships, agricultural and other machinery, crockery, and so on, and so on.