Napoleonic War Debts

Manawatu Times, Volume LIV, Issue 6618, 3 August 1931, Page 3

Napoleonic War Debts

ENGLAND’S MODERATION. “Will tlio United States now take a course, 13 years after the close of the Great War, similar to that which Great Britain followed at the close of the Napoleonic Wars in the second decade of -.the nineteenth century? Britain then under the guidance of (Jastleroagh, worked for and obtained a moderate peace, ’ ’ says a. writer in the Sydney Morning Herald. “Of the part which Great Britain played in the European settlement after 1815, Professor Edwin Gay, a former member of tho War Trade Board of the United States, told the American public in an issue of Foreign Affairs, published in 1926. Professor Gay related tho story of the reparations imposed on Franco in 1815, and what happened to tho interallied war debts of the Napoleonic period. He shows that of £61,300,000 forwarded i,by-Great Britain to her allies, at least £53,000,000 represented subsidy payments, not loans; the loans of £6,200,000 advanced to Austria became, with accrued interest, £15,600,000, and was settled in 1824 by the payment by Austria of £2,000,000, and £2,000,000 advanced by Holland to Russia. Great Britain took over half the debt, professor Gay added: Beset with difficulties of the gravest character at home, with taxes at an. unprecedented height, with such serious financial complications that Ricardo was supporting a demand for a capital levy, with agriculture in distress and industry languishing, with an army of unemployed, and with riots in her manufacturing towns, England, nevertheless, showed expedient moderation towards France, and prudent forbearance towards her allies. On the matter of tho war debts, it is probable that the historian of the future will judge that England chose a wiser course a . century ago than that which the. United States is now pursuing. He imagined that the historian of the future would record that ‘whether from motives of partisan politics, accentuated by the after-war reaction, or from callous indifference, or from sheer ignorance, a policy was followed ( by the United States) from 1920 to, perhaps, ‘i1930, which was difficult to explain or commend. Not the least of her errors endangering her political and economic future was the insistence upon the substantial repayment of tho war debts from her former associates in the war; or, perhaps, the initial failure of political judgment in granting aid during the .war by loans rather than by subsidies. ’ It is in 1931 that the United States has moved.”