LONG HAIR AND SOUND WORDS

Germany has again protested against the burden that the reparation payments place upon her people and now declares that the limit of privation has been reached. Senator Borah, chairman of the committee on foreign affairs, took immediate notice of this plea. He reiterated the old but forceful objections to the reparations as placing a burden on Germany without helping the recipients of the payments and as a possible cause of the seriousness and extensiveness of the depression. With a touch of demagoguery but with none the less soundness he pleaded for the reduction of the debts that "ground down into unspeakable misery the working-people of Germany", now further oppressed by their serious business troubles.

Ten or twelve years ago Senator Borah would have been accused of being in the pay of the German government or at least of being disgracefully pro-German. But after the steadying influence of a decade of prosperity and peace the attitude will be quite different. People have come to realize that in imposing the tremendous debt on Germany they were not wreaking vengeance on some barbarous huns who had strung babies up by the toes and wantonly destroyed everything in their path. With the return to sanity they have found that the debt was merely an imposition on a people like themselves of a burden which did much harm and no good. Idealism is no longer tolerated as a defense for the terms which France insisted be exacted from Germany.

The question now is whether the debtor nations have not more to lose by insisting on the payment of the debt. This is a problem which the most able economists write about uncertainly, but the general opinion among these men seems to be that nothing has been gained and probably much lost in foreign trade. Accordingly, the only two arguments that could support a continuation of this oppressive policy are far from sound. There seems to be no reason for continuing it.