POLICIES & PRINCIPLES: Take It Away

An American, a Russian and a Briton, conferring in Moscow, had agreed on what to do about German reparations. Last week their plan was ready for the Big Three at Potsdam (see above).

Oilman Edwin Pauley, U.S. member of the three-power Reparations Commission, either had sold a lot of his ideas to Russia's Ivan Maisky and Britain's Sir Walter Monckton, or had found them in substantial agreement with him from the start. The commission's plan read like a Pauley blueprint.

The plan's prime point was that Germany should pay first of all with the bone & sinew of German industry—machines, stocks,...