John Maynard Keynes, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
Europe before the war was a single economic organism, delicately organised, whose parts could not be dismembered without impoverishing the whole. The Treaty attempted to extract from Germany sums that could be paid only by an export surplus the victors would not tolerate, and it did so while destroying the industrial machinery that alone could generate them. The settlement was not vengeance disguised as justice; it was vengeance that had not troubled to calculate.12345
Germany is not as rich as she was before the war, and the diminution in her future savings for these reasons, quite apart from the factors previously allowed for, could hardly be put at less than ten per cent, that is £40,000,000 annually. These factors have already reduced Germany's annual surplus to less than the £100,000,000 at which we arrived on other grounds as the maximum of her annual payments.Persuasion, collected essays 1919-1931, pp. 28–29
The Allied governments gave it, in any case, no serious consideration, and I doubt if anything which the German delegation could have said at that stage of the proceedings would have much influenced the result.The Economic Consequences of the Peace
Germany is not as rich as she was before the war, and the diminution in her future savings for these reasons, quite apart from the factors previously allowed for, could hardly be put at less than ten per cent, that is $200,000,000 annually. These factors have already reduced Germany's annual surplus to less than the $500,000,000 at which we arrived on other grounds as the maximum of her annual payments.The Economic Consequences of the Peace
Nevertheless, these objects are not to be gained by bargaining and cannot be imposed from without. Therefore they must not be dragged into the Reparation Settlement. This Settlement must be offered France on one condition only,—that she accepts it. But if, like Shylock, she claims her pound of flesh, then let the Law prevail. Let her have her bond, and let us have our bonds too.A Revision of the Treaty
Was it not better that Mr. Lloyd George and M. Briand, both secretly sensible, should remain colleagues at the expense of a little nonsense in unison for a short time? This view of the situation prevailed, and an ultimatum was conveyed to Germany on the following lines. The Reparation payments, proposed to Germany by the Paris Conference, were made up of a determinate part and an indeterminate part.A Revision of the Treaty
The most famous and most disputed economic polemic of the century. Mantoux's rebuttal is taken seriously by historians; the counter-case is that the transfer problem was real and that the sums actually paid were extracted at a political cost that vindicated the warning.