again as she does now
($65,000,000,000 as compared with $40,000,000,000). From 1936 onwards
she will have to pay to us $3,250,000,000 annually in order to keep pace
with the interest alone. At the end of any year in which she pays less
than this sum she will owe more than she did at the beginning of it. And
if she is to discharge the capital sum in thirty years from 1930, _i.e._
in forty-eight years from the Armistice, she must pay an additional
$650,000,000 annually, making $3,900,000,000 in all.[115]

It is, in my judgment, as certain as anything can be, for reasons which
I will elaborate in a moment, that Germany cannot pay anything
approaching this sum. Until the Treaty is altered, therefore, Germany
has in effect engaged herself to hand over to the Allies the whole of
her surplus production in perpetuity.

6. This is not less the case because the Reparation Commission has been
given discretionary powers to vary the rate of interest, and to postpone
and even to cancel the capital indebtedness. In the first place, some of
these powers can only be exercised if the Commission or the Governments
represented on it are _unanimous_.[116] But also, which is perhaps more
important, it will be the _duty_ of the Reparation Commission, until
there has been a unanimous and far-reaching change of the policy which
the Treaty represents, to extract from Germany year after year the
maximum sum obtainable. There is a great difference between fixing a
definite sum, which though large is within Germany's capacity to pay and
yet to retain a little for herself, and fixing a sum far beyond her
capacity, which is then to be reduced at the discretion of a foreign
Commission acting with the object of obtaining each year the maximum
which the circumstances of that year permit. The first still leaves her
with some slight incentive for enterprise, energy, and hope. The latter
skins her alive year by year in perpetuity, and however skilfully and
discreetly the operation is performed, with whatever regard for not
killing the patient in the process, it would represent a policy which,
if it were really entertained and deliberately practised, the judgment
of men would soon pronounce to be one of the most outrageous acts of a
cruel victor in civilized history.

There are other functions and powers of high significance which the
Treaty accords to the Reparation Commission. But these will be most
conveniently dealt with in a separate section.

I