The Treaty as it stands has sown the world with fresh discord, and ultimately can lead to nothing but repudiation and revenge. Still further, the Treaty as it stands is unworkable. Already it shows signs of breaking down under the weight of its own contradictions. By demanding too much it bids fair to create a situation in which nothing will be obtainable. It is not business to tell a bankrupt he must pay thirty shillings in the pound, and at the same time sit on his head so as to make it impossible for him to earn thirty pence. If a bankrupt is to discharge his debts, he must be put into a position to earn. If he is to be loaded with chains, that spectacle may have its own satisfaction, but it will not produce money on the credit side. A hungry bankrupt Germany cannot work to pay off the indemnity on which France has just claim. If Europe crumbles further; if Bolshevism finds a new recruiting ground in the anger and despair of a whole people--where is France likely to stand in this matter of payment? We must in common fairness recognise how serious are the difficulties even of a well-intentioned German Government in carrying out the demands it has to meet. The people as a whole are inexperienced politically. The nation has had no training in self-government. It has been run in the past by a highly efficient bureaucracy saturated in autocratic and Bismarckian traditions. To-day the old machinery of government is in ruins. We cannot expect that Germany with a wave of the wand can suddenly produce public men and civil servants of the type with which we are familiar. The cry that the government is in the hands of men “steeped in militarism” is far from untrue. The real problem, however, is to find men of any sort of training or experience in government work outside the close ring of Prussianism. Inevitably the public has to rely, anyway for the present, on officials trained in the old theory that a lie was a virtue so long as it served the State. From this grave disadvantage there is no immediate escape, and the circumstance calls for special vigilance and care in our relations with the German official classes. We can, however, help or hinder the growth of another spirit. In so far as we support a democratically constituted German Government and give it some encouragement and consideration, we shall tend to produce men of a new type. But if these early steps in democratic government are at each stage to be associated with rebuffs and humiliations, we play straight, as I have pointed out in an earlier chapter, into the hands of the military party. The old gang, though they dare not raise their heads at the moment, are a compact body among themselves, and desire nothing so ardently as the failure of constitutional government in Germany. We cannot expect German mentality to be changed in a night. The new forces must be given time and space in which to develop.