Advice to Welsh Students, 1924

Abstract

From ‘Symposium’, Cap and Gown: the Magazine of the University College of South Wales and Monmouthshire, November 1924. Under the treaty of Versailles (1919) obligations were imposed upon Germany to make reparations to the Allies for war damages. In August 1924, after the breakdown of many other attempts to devise workable reparations schemes, a conference was held in London under the chairmanship of an American, Brigadier General Charles G. Dawes (1865–1951), and a scheme known as the Dawes Plan was adopted. According to Charles S. Maier (Recasting Bourgeois Europe [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975] pp. 589–90) the Dawes Plan and the gold-exchange standard it entailed caused in Europe ‘a downward pressure on employment’ and ‘tended to reinforce a corporatist and bourgeois settlement’. In 1922 Shaw had described the reparations as ’simply the plunder of the vanquished’ (Anon, ‘GBS among Modern Philistines’, Evening Dispatch, 8 April 1922).