er unnecessary the intolerable powers of the
Reparation Commission.

By a moderation of the clauses relating directly or indirectly to coal,
and by the exchange of iron-ore, we permit the continuance of Germany's
industrial life, and put limits on the loss of productivity which would
be brought about otherwise by the interference of political frontiers
with the natural localization of the iron and steel industry.

By the proposed Free Trade Union some part of the loss of organization
and economic efficiency may be retrieved, which must otherwise result
from the innumerable new political frontiers now created between greedy,
jealous, immature, and economically incomplete nationalist States.
Economic frontiers were tolerable so long as an immense territory was
included in a few great Empires; but they will not be tolerable when the
Empires of Germany, Austria-Hungary, Russia, and Turkey have been
partitioned between some twenty independent authorities. A Free Trade
Union, comprising the whole of Central, Eastern, and South-Eastern
Europe, Siberia, Turkey, and (I should hope) the United Kingdom, Egypt,
and India, might do as much for the peace and prosperity of the world as
the League of Nations itself. Belgium, Holland, Scandinavia, and
Switzerland might be expected to adhere to it shortly. And it would be
greatly to be desired by their friends that France and Italy also should
see their way to adhesion.

It would be objected, I suppose, by some critics that such an
arrangement might go some way in effect towards realizing the former
German dream of Mittel-Europa. If other countries were so foolish as to
remain outside the Union and to leave to Germany all its advantages,
there might be some truth in this. But an economic system, to which
every one had the opportunity of belonging and which gave special
privilege to none, is surely absolutely free from the objections of a
privileged and avowedly imperialistic scheme of exclusion and
discrimination. Our attitude to these criticisms must be determined by
our whole moral and emotional reaction to the future of international
relations and the Peace of the World. If we take the view that for at
least a generation to come Germany cannot be trusted with even a modicum
of prosperity, that while all our recent Allies are angels of light, all
our recent enemies, Germans, Austrians, Hungarians, and the rest, are
children of the devil, that year by year Germany must be kept
impove