The Dominion. THURSDAY, JANUARY i, 1917. A NATION SLOW TO LEARN

Dominion, Volume 10, Issue 2968, 4 January 1917, Page 4

The Dominion. THURSDAY, JANUARY i, 1917. A NATION SLOW TO LEARN

What purports to be an honest account of internal conditions in Germany was given by an Amsterdam correspondent in a dispatch published yesterday. A great part of the population, he declares, particularly in the larger towns, is living in & state of semi-starvation, and enduring privations which are especially severe in the case of women and ohildren. According to the neutral merchant upon whom tho correspondent relied for hia information, revolutionary ideas are growing, and the Emperor and tho military cliques are between the two abysses of revolution within and defeat without. "All classes of people," the dispatch asserts, "are-convinced that famine will surely come in tho spring, and a revolution will break out unless peace is made," People told the merchant to inform the outside world: "Wβ are starving. If our soldiers can stand it longer, wo cannot see our. children suffering hunger. Death is better than such a life. Ask the world .to have pity; bur own Government has none." Stories of this kind resting upon undisclosed authority are always open to the suspicion that they may have been concocted in Germany with the idea of quickening the sympathy of neutrals, and of the happily insignificant coteries in Entente countries which advocate peace at any price. There is no doubt that German publicity agents have.contrived to disseminate a great deal''of falsehood, regarding internal conditions in Germany and other matters, through the agency of neutral and Allied correspondents'; and it would be quite in keeping with their known tactics to stimulate peace sentiment at the present juncture, even at the cost of suggesting- that Germany is weaker and harder hit than sho really is. But assuming that conditions in Germany are as the neutral merchant describes them, the revelation, from a strictly practical standpoint, is not devoid o£ interest and importance. From any other standpoint it calls for little attention or remark. Apart from the fact, that the German people have a remedy for their woes in their own hands, any pity' that might be. felt for their sufferings is overshadowed by the thought of the abominable crimes against humanity for which every man and woman in the guilty nation must take some share of responsibility. Any suffering now or henceforth to be endured by the German people is at most a partial and inadequate retribution for the. atrocious treatment meted out by the German' armies to the inoffensive oivilian population (especially the women and children) of Belgium, Serbia, Eumania, and other occupied territories, and the innumerable crimes of murder and outrage which Germans have committed on land and sea. If the story we have quoted is true in every particular, its arresting featuro is not the suffering of tho Gorman people but the fact that they have sunk so low in adversity without making any purposeful effort to gain relief by the only remedy, that offers; in other words, that they have profited so kittle by the hard teaching of tho war. It may or may not be true that the resolution of tho German people is threatening to give way under the intensity of their privations, but they have certainly been and still are obedient and amenablo to the brutal methods of their rulers, they have in tho past exulted over and gloried in the crimes of their submarines against merchant shipping, and from all accounts they still exult and glory in their piratical exploits. That they are not ashamed of their past dreadful practices may be gathered from the fact that whenever they arc thwarted in their designs they relieve their feolings in wild outbursts calling for the prosecution of the campaign of "frightfulness" with still more dreadful abominations. There is no clear moral distinction to bo drawn between the military and political leaders who have covered the name of Germany with infamy and the armies and people who have been and are the pliant instruments of their will.

If the German people are at length being stirred to revolution, so much the better. But it will be wise to base ri'o very definite hopes on the phenomena which the neutral merchant above quoted, and others, have described until they have actually borne their promised fruit. The German nation probably embodies less in its composition than does any nation known to history of the native inspiration to freedom and progress, and it is far from being certain that even the bitter experience of the war will rouse the Germans to the point of casting off their shackles. It is possible that even final defeat and disaster may find them in the tragic condition which a recent writer foretold for them of being filled with the desire for revolution and yet lacking the spirit and resolution to overthrow the tyrants to whom they have been, up k> the present, obedient slaves,

Observers of a type more numerously represented in America than elsewhere are fond of asking such questions as: "Are the German people growing weary of the Prussian ideal'!' 1 Some of them find matter'for a hopeful answer in increasing indications of popular discontent in Germany and in the changed tone latterly taken by the Imperial Chancellor and others who speak with authority. Common .sense bids us bo wary of rashly accepting these things as evidence of a change of heart or of political growth in Germany. It would be foolish to take the recent professions of Bethjiann-Hollweo and his associates ns meaning more- than an endeavour to escape from a dangerous position by means of the expedient which at the moment appears to offer this best hope of success. And muttcrings and cries of popular discontent arc admittedly an indication of discomfort, but they do not necessarily indicate a change of hoart in those by whom they are i raised. As far as they have gone, I these symptoms and manifestations are quite overshadowed by the fact that after twenty-nine months of devastating war, in which the doctrines of Prussian militarism have been fully expounded and tested, the German people are still yielding servile- obedience to their tyrants and rendering- fifo services they demand.