CRUMBLING    HERITAGE	309
peramental British inability to nurse a grudge, they wished
Germany nothing but well. The anxious efforts of the French
to keep their ancient and terrible enemy prostrate, only increased
British sympathies for her. Moreover, an island state dependent
on foreign trade found that she could ill afford so disturbing an
economic factor as a ruined central Europe. When the French
Premier pointed to his country's devastated areas as a reason for
tightening the screw, Lloyd George retorted by pointing to the
export districts of industrial South Wales and northern England
with an unanswerable "These are our devastated areas."
But of the Treaties still standing in their name—their content,
the extent of their enforcement, their effects on the conquered—
the British people, except for a small minority of intellectual
Socialists and Liberals who had always opposed the Peace Treaties
as politically inexpedient and economically suicidal, were almost
totally ignorant. They were unaware that Germany had been
ruined economically before a single mark of reparations had
been paid or even demanded. They did not know—or had for-
gotten if they had ever known—that for several years the peoples
of central Europe had starved, that the entire middle dass of
Germany had lost its savings in the inflation, that hundreds of
thousands of German civilians had been driven at a few hours'
notice from their homes by French soldiers. Because in the
latter 'twenties Germany thrived fora while on the reck-
less loans with which British and American financiers tried to
Resuscitate and exploit her industries, they never realised that
millions of Germans, were secretly nursing bitter grievances and
irrational hatreds. They knew nothing of the dry timber which
the orator Hitler was seeking to ignite.
According to their lights such grievances as existed had been
allayed. The Locarno Pact, concluded in 1925 between Austen
Chamberlain, Stresemann, and Briand, which, in effect, merely
congealed the status quo, they enthusiastically acclaimed in the
belief that it consecrated the policy of let bygones be bygones,
and restored equality between victors and vanquished. That it
had not done so they learned with perplexity when, in their
successive attempts to achieve disarmament—their historic
practice after all wars—the Germans insisted on parity with the
French and the French on an overwhelming superiority in every
weapon as their only security against Germany. Wanting
nothing but peace—the one positive gain from the wastage^
&s.	'	x