Note 71 — Chapter IV

M. Brenier, who has spent much time criticizing me, quotes with approval (The Times, January 24, 1921) a French architect as estimating the cost of reconstruction at an average of $2,500 per house, and quotes also, without dissent, a German estimate that the pre–war average was $1,200. He also states, in the same article, that the number of houses destroyed was 304,191 and the number damaged 290,425, or 594,616 in all. Having pointed out the importance of not overlooking sentiment in these questions, he then multiplies $2,500, not by the number of houses but by the number of the population, and arrives at an answer of $3,750,000,000. What is one to reply to sentimental multiplication? What is the courteous retort to controversy on these lines? (His other figures are clearly such a mass of misprints, muddled arithmetic, confusion between hectares and acres and the like, that, whilst an attack could easily make a devastated area of them, it would be unfair to base any serious criticism on this well–intentioned farrago. As a writer on these topics, M. Brenier is about of the caliber of M. Raphaël–Georges Lévy.)