Secondly that Germany is first and foremost to blame for the world's mad race in armaments, the wildest lunacy that the human race has ever committed. The League of Nations Armaments Year Book is probably below the mark in saying that the world spent on armaments last year £2,400,000.000. At the present rate it cannot be long before the £3,000 million mark is reached.
Great Britain, which has lagged behind others, hoping for some turn for the better, spends this year £366000000 on armaments (does anyone recall the general horror when our total Budget first touched £200000000? I do very clearly) and next year will probably spend £500,000,000. Peaceful unmilitary countries like Switzerland, Holland and the Scandinavians are forced to spend large sums on defence. No neighbour of Germany's knows when he may be confronted with the old highwayman's "Your money or your life, And if Germany has squandered her all on guns to make the world miserable, why should we present her with gratuitous butter? Not to mention that to keep her guns in ammunition and transport, she needs all sorts of things that must be paid for in cash.
Many years ago when Imperial Russia was playing a similar though far less barefaced game, it was the then Lord Rothschild who threw all his weight against Russian loans being floated in London, and so saved us from very much greater losses than were actually incurred in the Bolshevik revolution, Surely a very sound example to be remembered now.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.