David Lloyd George on Justice

"We are offering Ireland not subjection but equality, not servitude but partnership."

"I ask anyone to point to any territorial change we made in respect to Germany in Europe which is in the least an injustice, judged by any principle of fairness."

"Never have I had such great minds around me—Smuts, Balfour, Bonar Law...and Curzon. Curzon was perhaps not a great man, but he was a supreme Civil Servant. Compared to these men, the front benches of today are pigmies."

"Having regard to the use which Germany made of her great army, is there anything unjust in scattering that army, disarming it, making it incapable of repeating the injury which it has inflicted upon the world?"

"unishment for offences against the laws of war. There is a longer category than the House may imagine. Some of them are incredible—I could not have believed it had it not been that the evidence was overwhelming. I should not have thought any nation with a pretence to civilisation could have committed such atrocities. I am not going into the categories, and I should not care to enumerate them, but they ought to be punished. Officers who are guilty of these things in a moment of arrogance, feeling that their power to do what they please is irresistible, ought to know in future that they will be held personally responsible. War is horrible enough without committing these unlicensed infamies upon rules which are quite cruel enough as they are. ... They will get fair play, and they have no right to more. What injustice is there in that? What undue harshness is there in it? It is the averting of it, and making it impossible for the future."

"...the question of indemnity. Who is to foot the bill? I am again going to talk to you quite frankly about this. By the jurisprudence of every civilized country in the world, in any lawsuit the loser pays. It is not a question of vengeance, it is a question of justice."

"My right hon. Friend says she is in such a condition that she cannot possibly pay . No, she cannot pay us. She is to pay France in full. Everything goes to France, everything goes to Italy, everything goes to Belgium; but, forsooth, she has not the capacity to pay Great Britain. I object. We were equal in the sacrifices we had to make, and I think it is about time that someone should stand up for the rights of Great Britain."

"Is it unjust that we should, in our economic terms, make it clear that Germany is not to take advantage of wanton destruction of the trade machinery of her rivals in Belgium and in France, in order to get ahead in the competitive race for business? Money does not put that right. You cannot get machinery in a year or, perhaps, two years, and meanwhile Germany, which has never been devastated, would be going a head. We had to put in clauses for protection against that. What injustice is there in that?"

"Dumping is the exporting to this country of goods from a foreign land under the cost—beneath the price at which they are sold in their own country. There could be only one object in doing that, and that is to make war upon a particular industry in our country. That is unfair. ... In the interests of fairness, as well as in the interests of British industry as a whole, the Government have decided to submit to Parliament proposals which will effectively deal with dumping in the sense in which I have defined it."

"All the trouble that had arisen in Europe had come from a flagrant breach of the undertaking to disarm by all the victors except one. ... He knew that there had been horrible atrocities in Germany, and they all deplored and condemned them, but a country passing through a revolution was always liable to ghastly episodes owing to the administration of justice being seized here and there by an infuriated rebel. He was neither a Nazi nor a Fascist nor a Communist. If the Powers succeeded in overthrowing Nazism in Germany, what would follow? Not a Conservative, Socialist or Liberal régime, but extreme Communism. Surely that could not be their objective."

"In so far as territories have been taken away from Germany, it is a restoration. Alsace-Lorraine—forcibly taken away from the land to which its population were deeply attached. Is it an injustice to restore them to their country? Schleswig-Holstein—the meanest of the Hohenzollern frauds; robbing a poor, small, helpless country, with a pretence that you are not doing it, and then retaining that land against the wishes of the population for fifty or sixty years. I am glad the opportunity has come for restoring Schleswig-Holstein. Poland—torn to bits, to feed the carnivorous greed of Russian, Austrian, and Prussian autocracy. This Treaty has re-knit the torn flag of Poland, which is now waving over a free and a united people; and it will have to be defended, not merely with gallantry, but with wisdom. For Poland is indeed in a perilous position, between a Germany shorn of her prey and an unknown Russia which has not yet emerged. All these territorial adjustments of which we have heard are restorations. Take Danzig—a free city, forcibly incorporated in the Kingdom of Prussia. They are all territories that ought not to belong to Germany, and they are now restored to the independence of which they have been deprived by Prussian aggression."

"I come now to the question of reparation. Are the terms we have imposed unjust to Germany? If the whole cost of the War, all the costs incurred by every country that has been forced into war by the action of Germany, had been thrown upon Germany, it would have been in accord with every principle of civilised jurisprudence in the world. There was but one limit to the justice and the wisdom of the reparation we claimed, and that was the limit of Germany's capacity to pay. ... Is there anything unjust in imposing upon Germany those payments? I do not believe anyone could claim it to be unjust. Certainly no one could claim that it was unjust unless he believed that the justice of the War was on the side of Germany."

"Germany has carried out her obligations. She was to reduce her army to 100,000. She was to scrap her great artillery and all her machinery of war. ... Germany had carried out her obligations. That was over three years ago. What have we done? What have the Allies done to carry out that obligation? ... Disarmament is the only guarantee of safety. ... Germany is demanding, and rightly demanding, that we should now carry out our obligations, seeing that she has carried out her's. ... The whole of the British Empire signed that bond, every part of it. When it is asked to carry it out, what is it to say? Is it to say, "We are treating you exactly as we are treating France—you with your army of 100,000 and France with her army of millions"? Is the British Empire to say, "We are treating you impartially and fairly"? Shall Caesar send a lie?"