AMERICAN VIEW OF GERMAN MILITARISM.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXVIII, Issue 1496, 13 January 1916, Page 2

AMERICAN VIEW OF GERMAN MILITARISM.

Argue about it as much as we please, says Everybody’s Magazine, our standing army comes down to us Irom the old feudal

days when barons paid their retainers so many pieces of gold to furnish so many soldiers. It is a survival of the days of Frederick the Great, long ago abandoned by every important nation save Great Britain, ourselves and China. The danger to a democracy that lies in the professional soldier, aside from the economic waste, is his eagerness to practice his profession, and his tendency, if he is powerful enough, to subvert the national interest to his inclination. Our forebears recognised this. Feeling that abhorrence to anything approaching military rule, bred in the bone of the AngloSaxon, in giving us a standing army they took elaborate precautions to subordinate military to civil authority. In Germany militarism has been super-imposed on a theory ot national defence which is thoroughly democratic. The German armed force, as do the armies of Switzerland and Austria, comes directly irom the citizenship. Her military machine was evolved by Prussia, after Napoleon, under the spur of necessity. When Prussia poured her armies imo the field in 1813, they were no longer professional, but citizen, organisations, Once the French laughed at this citizen army as a “sort of militia.” It is essentially the marvellous war machine of to-day. In considering our own defence we are beginning to appreciate that it Is not this war machine, not the German system of government, not wholly the Prussian influence personified in the Kaiser and his party, not even compulsory military service that make up the militarism so hateful to us, but that German militarism is the state of mind of the German people.