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 privation inflicted even upon the most prosperous members of the community by the impossibility of securing many comforts, necessaries and luxuries to which they had usually been accustomed, and finally by the effect of air raids which had inflicted actual physical suffering upon many civilians who had risked their lives without the satisfaction of being able to feel that they had a chance of endangering somebody else's. For these reasons it was evidently much more difficult to leave off the war spirit as soon as the war was over than it had been when war was a more or less gentlemanly business, with its most uncomfortable effects largely confined to the fighting forces, which at least had the pleasure of inflicting what they suffered. Moreover it was felt that the Germans in the matter of poison gas and many other things had introduced new and unnecessary beastlinesses into war, and that the destruction—much of it quite wanton—wrought by them in France and Belgium made it essential in the interests of international justice that retribution should be strict and severe.

Thus justice and vindictiveness joined together to show that Germany ought to pay every penny that could be wrung out of her. It is true that the Allies had agreed, before