There will be a great incentive to them to seek their friends in other directions, and any future rupture of peaceable relations will always carry with it the enormous advantage of escaping the payment of external debts, if, on the other hand, these great debts are forgiven, a stimulus will be given to the solidarity and true friendliness of the nations lately associated.
The existence of the great war debts is a menace to financial stability everywhere.

There is no European country in which repudiation may not soon become an important political issue.

In the case of internal debt, however, there are interested parties on both sides, and the question is one of the internal distribution of wealth.

With external debts this is not so, and the creditor nations may soon find their interest inconveniently bound up with the maintenance of a particular type of government or economic organization in the debtor countries.

Entangling alliances or entangling leagues are nothing to the entanglements of cash owing.
The final consideration influencing the reader's attitude to this proposal must, however, depend on his view as to the future place in the world's progress of the vast paper entanglements which are our legacy from war finance both at home and abroad.