DOCILE GERMANS

Dominion, Volume 11, Issue 148, 12 March 1918, Page 6

DOCILE GERMANS

NO TALK OF REVOLUTION

(By Frederic William Wile, late Berlin Correspondent of the "Daily Mail").

Mr. H. G. Wells, I gather froman. article, wants to encourage the German people to overtlr.ow the Kaiser by revolution. He believes it is within our power "absolutely to revolutionise tha internal psychology of Germany." No> more dangerous hope, in my judgment, could possibly be planted in Allied breasts at this hour.

1 bow in admiration of Mr. Wells's perspicacity in foreshadowing various engines of war. But in the realm of political probabilities iu Germany I prefer the counsel of Mr. Gerard:- - "The German nation is not one which makes revolutions. There will be scattered riots in Germany, but no simultaneous rising of the whole people. Tho officers of the Army are all of ones class, and of a class devoted to the ideals of autocracy. A. revolution of tho Army is impossible; and at home there are only the boys and old men, easily kept in subjection by the police." Let us, for Heaven's sake, , relegate"revolution" to the scrap-heap to which wo should long ago have banished "starvation." Both of these hopes were, are, and always will be, iridescent dreams.

Mr. Wells states that "access to German 2>apers' ! would show .that the Germans are ripe for revolutionary sentiment. Hu declares that "in the German Press there is far more criticism of militant imperialism than those who have no access to it can imagine," and that "there is iar franker criticism o! militarism in Germany than there is of reactionary Toryism in this country, and it is more free to speak its mind.'

As readers of the "Daily Mail" know, I have unrestricted "access to German papers." I read twenty-live or thirty every day. 1 have dono so, with brief interruptions, ever since the beginning of the war. My eyes are growing positively dim from looking lw reliable evidence or revolutionary sentiment in Germany.* 1 cannot find it. 1 have never found anything a tithe as revolutionary as Mi. Weils's own proposal that "republican circles" should iorchwith be organised in Great Britain. I never see articles one-half as "upheavalisk" as those published every week in a certain class organ in this country. The price of printing "criticism" of that sort in Germany is suppression and hard labour, ao Harden iind Liebkilecht know.

Does iiir. Wells know that President Wiisou/'s eloquent- appeal to the Germans to throw off the tyrannous yoke of militarism produced a universal guffaw throughout the Fatherland? I do not mean a. journalistic guffaw, for, with few exceptions, newspaper opinion in Germany, like munition factories, is Government-controlled, I mean a. wave ot popular resentment, bitter and nation-wide, which welled up in countless public meetings—meetings of town councils, chambers of! commerce, universities, public schools, trade bodies of all sorts, churches, and jn priivtically every form of organised life in the country. But possibly Mr. Wells relies on. German "Liberalism" and Socialism to light the • revolutionary fire. He is Lmildinjr on -sands. Every "Liberal' or Socialistic utterance in Germany, almost without noteworthy exception, has pleaded for peace on the terms oC acknowledged German victory. I refer to utterances on which there is no restraint—in tho Reichstag and tho Prussian Diet. The speakers who deliver them "grouse" in the traditional manner about the iniquities of Junker rule But they never indicate any intention to smash it by force. They; make what the Germans call "a fisb in their pocket." Revolutions are noij born m that region. Political revolutions spring from a' people's intelligence as well as their: woe. Mr. Wells pays small tribute to the intelligence of Germans if he imagines they are going to accept au Allied victory—lie contemplates nothing else—while their own aims are undefeated. There is just one way to help tho German people to shake off the oppressing coils. That is to make them see that militarism is a bad investment. Wβ shall accomplish that end by defeating militarism in the field. That is the "point" it seems to me, that wo shall do best to "stick to."