as the invention of the Thomas-Gilchrist process which enabled the phosphoric iron ores of Germany, previously useless, to be utilized.
- The very serious social difficulties (which have, of course, their economic aspect) that do confront the German people—the intense class friction, the backwardness of parliamentary government, the survival of reactionary political ideas, wrapped up with the domination of the "Prussian ideal"—all difficulties which States whose political development has been less marked by successful war (the lesser European States just mentioned, for instance)—are not faced with in the same degree. These difficulties, special, among the great European nations, to Germany, are certainly in a large measure a legacy of the Franco-German War, a part of the general system to which that war gave rise, the general character of the political union which it provoked.
The general ascription of such real progress as Germany has made to the effects of the war and nothing else—a conclusion which calmly ignores factors which have evidently a more direct bearing—is one of those a priori judgments repeated, parrot fashion, without investigation or care even by publicists of repute; it is characteristic of the carelessness which dominates this whole subject. This more general consideration, which does not properly belong to the special problem of an indemnity, I have dealt with at greater length in the next section. The evidence bearing on