Three-quarters of the c maximum. Therefore, on this computation, which is a reasonable view of what may be obtained in the near or not two distant future, we should be receiving £33,500,000 a year. We are at present paying £33,000,000 a year to the United States. Probably by the time that all this is fully gathered in, we shall be paying the £38,000,000, or be within a few years of having to pay it. There is a gap, a margin, which perhaps some day Russia may be anxious to At and rate, there is a place for her. In surveying the situation as a whole, whatever may be said about our paper claims, I do not think that we are so far from having achieved the principle and objects of the Balfour Note that we can regard our declarations in that respect as having been nugatory. We might easily at an earlier period have reached a less favourable conclusion.

There is only one more remark which I wish to make, and that is on the general future of these debts. It is a very remarkable fact that at the present moment the amount that the United States is receiving from Europe under arrangements which have already been made is approximately equal to the whole amount of reparations which Germany is paying. But the distribution of the receipts from Germany and the payments to the United States is entirely different. The bulk of the receipts from Germany go to France, who at present is making no payments on account of her War debts, and the bulk of payments to the United states are made by this country largely out of our own resources. But the day is coming at no great distance when this situation will undergo an obvious modification. When France as well as Italy has funded her debts, both to this country and to the United States, and when the minor Powers have all funded their debts, then it is quite clear that the United States will be receiving, directly and indirectly, on her own account from reparations, from Italian sources, balanced against reparations, from British sources, from French sources through British hands, from Italian sources through British hands—by all these various channels, indirectly or directly, America will be receiving by far the larger part, at least 60 per cent., of the total probable reparations of Germany, and the first reparations, the first 60 per cent., as it were, which will be payable by Germany. That is the last thing I have to say on this subject.

It seems to me an extraordinary situation that will be developed—that by all these chains and lines and channels, the pressure of debt extraction will draw reparations through the different channels from the devastated and war-stricken countries of Europe, which will flow in an unbroken stream across the Atlantic to that wealthy and prosperous and great Republic. I believe that these facts will not pass out of the minds of any responsible persons, either in the United States or in Europe.