October 31, 1918 
LAND 6? WATER 
spirit which inhabited them and made them guilty of treach- 
ery and abominable cruelty and organised theft and enslave- 
ment was the atheistic spirit of Prussia. But they volun- 
tarily accepted and followed that spirit, and they must bear 
the consequences of such a crime. They must pav ; and 
they must suffer the indignity of foreign garrisons (a point 
to "be discussed further) in order to guarantee payment. 
They m'lst be fined in their quota for the reparation of 
damage as much as Prussia must be. But politically there 
is no reason why the Allies should, as they are bound to 
do with the Hohenzollern system called Prussia, proceed 
to execution. 
RESPECT FOR NATIONAL TRADITIONS 
Politically it is a necessity to the Alliance and civilisation 
in general that the Hohenzollerns should cease, and that 
Prussia be reduced to the little territory upon which it arose, 
disgorge all her Polish provinces and all her artificial acquire- 
ments in Western Germany, and should cease to be a great 
Power. But there is no necessity for interference with the 
genuinely national traditions of the various German peoples.^ 
Upon the contrary, there is a political necessity as well as 
a political duty of respecting those traditions. Bavaria, for 
instance, is a nation ; the port of Hamburg has its traditions, 
though not of a nation, at any rate of an organised and 
settled community. Even Saxony, though modern, is a 
true political unit. There is no purpose in exasperating any 
tradition of nationality in the renewed Europe on which our 
great hope of the future is based. Upon the contrary, our 
effort is to safeguard nationality — and we must remember 
that in our own domestic problems here at home as much 
as elsewhere in Europe. That nation will be strongest and 
happiest in the near future which least pretends to govern 
other Europeans or to hyld foreign territory. There is here 
a passing of ideals, something like the passing of dynastic 
ideals at the end of the eighteenth century, and to cling to 
dead ideals no longer corresponding to the actual world is 
to bury oneself. 
We have a further motive in fostering the nationahsation 
of the Germanics in that from the beginning of recorded 
history the populations speaking the various German dialects 
(Swiss and Frisian, Germans of the middle Danube as well as 
of the upper Danube, Germans outside this novel experiment 
of a Prussian Empire) have always tended to exist as a number 
of separate States. The idea of a great United State slowly 
growing up round a national crown or centre is an idea alien 
to the German. It belongs to civilisation ; it is a Latin 
idea. The Germans have tried to copy it once or twice in 
history, and have failed. This is only their last failure. 
Leave them to themselves, and we need not be afraid of 
another such experiment for a very long time to come. 
3. But when one says that we can leave them to them- 
selves, it does not mean, of course, that the necessary imme- 
diate consequence of our victory should be foregone, and the 
Srst of these is occupation for the purpose of reparation. 
The third point, therefore, in the conditions of a true and 
fruitful victory conducive to peace — a point without which 
you would have neither victory nor peace — is the garrisoning 
of enemy territory for the purpose of exacting and compeUing 
reparation. There is no other way of subjecting the enemy 
to this duty, and it is not only the necessary, but also a most 
practicable and efficient way. The German people have 
their choice between such occupation, which, though vastly 
humiliating and onerous, is not destructive, and actual 
invasion ; they can choose. We shall find that they will 
choose occupation, garrisoning, and its consequences. 
Let us set that down, therefore, for our third point. If 
the Allies do not hold in pawn (to use a phrase which the 
enemy has taught us), such territories as best suit their 
purpose, they will not obtain reparation. Therefore they 
must occupy and garrison. The most valuable territories 
and those of most importance lie close to our hand : the 
coal and the iron of Westphalia and the Saar, and the towns 
and bridges of the Rhine. 
REPARATION BY LABOUR 
4. The fourth point is attached to this third, which is 
the peint of economic reparation. It is a little astonishing 
how so simple and material a point is lost in discussion. 
When people discuss it, as some do, arguing for and against, 
it always sounds to me a little like an argument about petty 
domestic matters when there is mortal sickness in the house. 
The outstanding economic facts of this war so far as the 
Allies are concerned, and connected with the enemy's respon- 
sibility, are the destruction of British mercantile shipping, 
and of the French and Belgian towns, villages, and farms. 
Quite apart from what can be regarded as the necessary 
expense of war, quite apart from the inevitable wastage 
which it involves, quite apart from the enormous expendi- 
ture in economically useless production which is the charac- 
teristic of war, there is the obvious and simple trvith before 
YOU that Prussia and her allies, the authors of this war, are 
directly responsible for the damage it has caused as a whole, 
and that a particular policy hitherto imknown in civilised 
war has caused the particular loss of British tonnage, and 
of French and Belgian buildings and agricultural land. 
That can be made good. It is not a question of money ; 
it is a question of labour. What you really do when you 
exact reparation from an enemy is not to get money out 
of him, nor even a promise to pay upon paper. That is 
only the external form or medium which masks the economic 
reality. The economic reality is that you get from him 
services, and goods which are the product of services ; that 
you make him hand over those goods and services to you 
instead of keeping tViem for himself. The amount you can 
get is a function of two factors : the productive capacity 
available (coupled with the material at disposal) and the 
time over which you extend the operation. When people 
say such and such a country "cannot pay more 1,han so 
much," they are talking nonsense, unless they mean that 
in practice the operation cannot be expected to last more 
than a certain number of years. We shall all be very much 
poorer after the war ; that is inevitable. All the belligerent 
nations have wasted capital wholesale. There is a theory, 
indeed, that the energ}' exercised in production will increase 
after the war. Time will show whether that theory is true. 
Personally, I should imagine that so terrible a strain would 
involve the reaction of fatigue. But, anyhow, we have 
wasted wealth, and we cannot rapidly recover it. In other 
words, we must remain subject to very high taxation or 
levies, or both combined — alternative domestic policies which 
I have discussed elsewhere, but which are not at the moment 
suitable to these pages. But some part at least of the expense, 
notably the wanton damage, can be and must be recovered. 
The amount obtainable is simply a question of the length 
of time during which we may think it practicable to enforce 
our claim upon the enemy's energies. 
MORAL REPARATION 
5. Apart from the material reparation, there is a moral 
reparation which, if it is not exacted will deny victory and 
will deny peace. This Prussian war has been stained with 
particular crimes of a sort unknown before in the history of 
the world. Things as bad have been done in the anarchy of 
passion ; things as bad never have been done before by 
calculation and method or continued systematically for 
years. Pirates, outlaws from human society, have massacred 
civilians upon mercantile ships time and again, and savages 
have rrturdered even the women and children falling into 
their hands, and troops taking a city by assault have through- 
out history done abominable things. But in this war alone 
of all wars of which we have record — it is a strong thing to 
say, but a perfectly true one — there has appeared an element 
of calculation in villainy hitherto absent. 
If we allow that to go unpunished, the whole standard of 
Europe declines. It is a highly practical point. It has 
nothing to do with the satisfaction of indignation, thoujgh 
the satisfaction of indignation is a very honest and moral 
thing. It is a point as practical as the point of material 
reparation. 
Some months ago I visited the house of a prominent French 
public man, and I heard of (though I did not see, for they 
were behind the enemy lines at the time) the tombs of the 
family. This house had . been completely, wrecked by long- 
range enemy fire, directed specially against it. Shell-holes 
round it were more enormous than the chance shots of the 
neighbourhood. It was a piece of deliberate destruction 
undertaken by the enemy without any military object what- 
soever. It lay far behind the line. There was no observa- 
tion from it. It was the calculated brutality which did the 
thing. As for the tombs of the family in the church where 
those members had been buried for generations, the crypt 
dedicated to them had been deliberately allocated to use of 
latrines for the local German force. 
Now, this sort of thing has happened upon an immense 
scale. The Germans; under Pnissian leadership, have done 
this sort of thing everywhere. They have not only destroyed 
and befouled, they have stolen enormously. There has 
been loot in nearly all wars, but never loot upon this scale 
or with this cold calculation. It is a thing so different in 
degree that it has come to differ in character from anything 
of the past. The French armies, for instance, took from 
Spain and from Italy many works of art, most of which the 
