The Feilding Star, Oboua & Kiwitea Counties Gazette. Published. Daily. FRIDAY, JANUARY 24, 1896. GERMAN PERSECUTIONS.

Feilding Star, Volume XVII, Issue 172, 24 January 1896, Page 2

The Feilding Star, Oboua & Kiwitea Counties Gazette. Published. Daily. FRIDAY, JANUARY 24, 1896. GERMAN PERSECUTIONS.

Civilians in Germany who bave independent opinions do not lead a happy life, and the list ot arrests, prosecutions, and sentences for lesc-majeste, and other political offences, is daily increasing. The Imperial Gazette published a police ordinance recently, dissolving the committees and associations connected with the central organization of the Social Democratic Party in Berlin, and forbidding, under penalties, any attempt to reconstitute tbem under other names. In this connection the London Times of December 6th says : — " Liberty of the Press is at the best much narrower and more restricted in Germany than with us, but of late it has almost vanished under peculiarly harsh and rigorous applications of enactments framed with perilous vagueness. Liberty of association is also hedged round with restrictions the mildest of wbich would create a storm in England. The spirit of intolerance once fairly roused will not be confined only to one political party, and as far as the Socialists are concerned, the first result of repressive measures will be to make them close up their ranks and forget their internal dissensions. The Emperor is a man of high ability, but surely the hypersensitiveness of his Government to criticism tends to lower rather than enhance his personal prestige and dignity. The persecuting- zeal of the German official world is assuredly "> promoting everything that it most deprecates and dreads.