IV

THE REPARATION BILL

claim for wliat were chiefly peasants' and miners'cottages and the tenements of small country towns.M. Tardieu has quoted M. Loucheur as saying that thehouses in the Lens-Courrieres district were worth5000 francs (£200) a-piece before the war, but wouldcost 15,000 francs to rebuild after the war, whichsounds not at all unreasonable. In April 1921 thecost of building construction in Paris (which had beena good deal higher some months before) was estimatedto be, in terms of paper francs, three and a half timesthe pre-war figure. 1 But even if we take the cost infrancs at five times the pre-war figure, namely 25,000paper francs per house, the claim lodged by the FrenchGovernment is still three and a half times thetruth. I fancy that the discrepancy, here andalso under other heads, may be partly explained bythe inclusion in the official French claim of indirectdamages, namely, for loss of rent— yerte de loyer.It does not appear what attitude the Eeparation

1 M. Brenier, who has spent much time criticising me, quotes withapproval (27te Times, January 24,1921) a French architect as estimating thecost of reconstruction at an average of £500 per house, and quotes also,without dissent, a German estimate that the pre-war average was £240. Healso states, in the same article, that the number of houses destroyed was304,191 and the number damaged 290,425, or 594,616 in all. Havingpointed out the importance of not overlooking sentiment in these questions,he then multiplies £500, not by the number of houses but by the numberof the population, and arrives at an answer of £750,000,000. What is oneto reply to sentimental multiplication ? What is the courteous retort tocontroversy on these lines ? (His other figures are clearly such a mass ofmisprints, muddled arithmetic, confusion between hectares and acres andthe like, that, whilst an attack could easily make a devastated area of them,it would be unfair to base any serious criticism on this well-intentionedfarrago. As a writer on these topics, M. Brenier is about of the calibre ofM. Raphael-Georges Levy.)