 In 1926, Robert C. Binkley and A. C. Mahr of Stanford University, wrote that German accusations of the article assigning war guilt were "ill-founded" and "mistaken". The article was more "an assumption of liability to pay damages than an admission of war guilt" and compared it with "a man who undertakes to pay all the cost of a motor accident than to the plea of guilty entered by an accused criminal". They wrote that "it is absurd" to charge the reparation articles of the treaty with any "political meaning" and the legal interpretation "is the only one that can stand". They concluded that German opposition "is based upon a text which has no legal validity whatsoever, and which Germany never signed at all." Sidney Fay was the "most outspoken and influential critic" of the article. In 1928, he concluded that all of Europe shared the blame for the war and that Germany had no intention of launching a general European war in 1914.
