In the official proceedings of the Washington Conference the war debts are never mentioned. It is an improper subject.

In the talks and discussions and the journalistic writings round and about the Washington Conference the war debts are perpetually debated. The nature of the discussion is so curious and interesting, it throws so strong a light upon the difficulties that impede our path to any settlement of the world’s affairs upon the sound democratic basis of a world-wide will, that some brief analysis of it is necessary if this outline of the peace situation is to be complete.

In private talk almost universally, in the weekly and monthly publications that are here called “highbrow,” I find a very general agreement that the bulk of these war debts and war preparation debts as between Russia and France, and between the European allies and Britain, and between Britain and America, and the bulk of the indemnity and reparation debt of Germany to the Allies, cannot be paid and ought not to be paid, and that the sooner that this legend of indebtedness is swept out of men’s imaginations the sooner we shall get on to the work of world reconstruction.

Only one of these debts is even remotely payable and that is the British debt to America. But with regard to that debt the situation rises to a high level of absurdity. The British authorities—it is an open secret—have been offering to begin the liquidation of their debt now. They cannot pay in gold, because most of the gold in the world is already sleeping uselessly in American vaults; but they offer what gold they have and, in addition, they are willing to get their factories to work and supply manufactured goods to the American creditor—clothes, boots, automobiles, ships, agricultural and other machinery, crockery, and so on, and so on.

Nothing could be fairer. Britain is full of unemployed—they must be fed anyhow—and if America insists upon her industries being buried under a pyramid of gold and manufactured articles, the British bankers and manufacturers believe they can, with an effort, manage the job and pull through. The exchange may take some strange flights and dives in the process, the British system may collapse even as the German system seems to be collapsing, but it is a strained situation anyhow. The British think the effort worth trying and the risk worth taking. And so behind the scenes it is Washington rather than London that wants at present to hold up the payment of the British debt.

Only one other of the outstanding debts looks at all payable at the present time, and that is so much of the reparation debts of Germany to France as can be paid in kind, in building material and manufactured goods not produced in France. The idea of any other European debt payments in full is just nonsense. The gold is not there and the stuff is not there, and there is no ability to produce anything like sufficient stuff under present conditions.

Now the interesting thing about the situation here is that the understanding people in America do not seem to be explaining this very simple situation as frankly as they might do to the mass of American people or at least that this explanation has not got through to the American people. There is a widespread conviction, which is sedulously sustained by the less intelligent or less scrupulous organs of the American press, that the wicked old European countries, and particularly Britain, that arch deceiver, are trying very meanly and cunningly to evade the payment of a righteous obligation.

Every effort to present the financial and economic disorder of the world as a world task in which the prosperous and fortunate American people may reasonably play a leading, intelligent and helpful part is misrepresented in this fashion. There is a vast vague clamor for repayment—aimed at Britain. Dealers in the old Irish hate business and the German hate business, now a little out of their original stock of grievances, join with shrill but syndicated Hindus in warning the simple citizen against counsels of financial sanity as though they were insidious propaganda. Until at last an Englishman is sorely tempted to an exasperated, “Well, take your debt!”—which does no justice to the patience and intelligence of either England or America.

Let us be clear upon one point. So far as the British debt goes, the Americans can have it if they prefer to take that line. The British here in Washington and the British writers here are here because the Americans invited them to come to discuss the world situation and the possibilities of world peace. They are not here to beg. The time is not likely to arrive when one English speaking community will beg from another. It certainly has not arrived now.

However, I am an obstinate believer in the common sense and good will of the American people, and I do not believe that a press campaign, designed to make a great people behave after the fashion of some hysterical back-street Oriental usurer who has struck a bad debt, is likely to do anything but recoil severely on the heads of those who have set it going. And I am not a believer in that sort of “tact” which would avoid reminding the American public of the circumstances under which these war debts were incurred.

The Russian debt to France was spent largely upon war and war preparations while Russia was the ally and helper of France; the war debts of the European Allies to Britain and America and the British debt to America were spent upon war material. All these debts are for efforts spent upon a common cause. Each country spent according to its resources, as good allies should. Russia gave life and blood—and blood. She gave 4,000,000 men; she smashed up her own social fabric. France and Britain gave the lives of men beyond the million mark. Also they gave much material, an enormous industrial effort. So also did Italy, according to her power.

The British developed a vast production of munitions as the war went on, using great supplies of material from America, for which they paid high prices and on which great profits were made in America. At last America joined the war, with her enormous reserves and strength, and gave not only great stores of material but the lives of between 50,000 and 75,000 men. And so, altogether, America and the Allied Powers, giving their lives and substance as they could, saved civilization from imperialism.

The British do not grudge the contribution they have made and all that they have still to contribute for their share in that colossal victory, but some of us English here are growing a little irritated at being dunned as defaulters when we are not going to default, and at having our attempts to work in co-operation with the Americans for the rehabilitation of a strained and collapsing civilization explained as the interested approaches of a cadging poor relation.

I wish that Americans would think of the Europeans more frequently as people like themselves. The boys who came to Europe saw the European armies in ranks like their own, good stuff and kindred stuff. They were their comrades in arms; they fought and died beside them. They saw countries and a common life very like the American country life; they discovered that the French and British and Italians were also “just folk.”

But these American papers of the hostile sort write of France or Britain as if they were wicked old spiders. They write of Britain as a monster with a crown and an eyeglass and such like concomitants loathsome to all sound democratic instincts. They write of the “designs” of France and Italy and Britain as if these horrid monsters were all playing a fearsome game with each other for the soul and body of America. It is easy enough then to clamor for repayments of war debts. It is easy then to excite people by a clamor for a war bonus for the veterans of the Great War to be saddled upon the European debtor.

But let me remind the American soldier that the real European debtor, the fellow on whom it will fall, the fellow who will have to toil and pay and want, if you can realize that dream of pitiless exaction, is no legendary monster France or Britain; it is that other fellow over there you fought beside, it is the wounded man in blue or khaki you passed by as you went into action, it is the man who smiled his courage at you as you blundered against him in the din and confusion of battle.

If you listen to these stay-at-home patriots and these exotic advisers of yours, it is he who will pay, he and his wife and his child; they will all pay in toil and privation and worry and stunted lives. It is they who will pay—but you will not receive. You too will pay in disorganized business, in restricted production, in underemployment. You will get nothing else out of it except whatever satisfaction you may feel in having made those other fellows over there in Europe pay—and pay bitterly.