VON BETHMANN-HOLLWEG.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXIX, Issue 1741, 28 July 1917, Page 1

VON BETHMANN-HOLLWEG.

The late Imperial Chancellor of Germany is the statesman who in that country corresponds most closely with the British Prime Minister. But he has more power than the Prime Minister, and in the ordinary course is subject practically to only the Kaiser. Neither he nor the other Ministers are responsible to the Reichstag; and they are chosen by the Kaiser. Bethmann-Iloll-weg has at limes borne a reputation for reasonableness in regal'd to the war, and an'inclination towards compromising for its conclusion. But, whatever his personal views, they have been subjugated to those of the real rulers of the nation. He has the unique record of being the only politic:)l leader who has retained his position throughout the war to date—itself an indication that he is merely a channel, and not a bearer of responsibility. Mr E. W. Wile, late Berlin correspondent of the Daily Mail, wrote about him as follows: —“Dr. Theobald Theodore Frederic Alfred von Bclhmann-Holl-weg is what Americans mill a ‘falsealarm statesman.’ The successor of Prince Bulow when that shrewd politician was driven from ollice in 11)08, Bethmann-llollweg has been swept along like chad, before the wind of the German War Party. Professedly an ardent advocate of peace and ‘good relations’ with England, he was worse than putty in the hands of the military and naval clique, particularly von Tirpitz, which restlessly plotted for the war. It became Bethmann-IToll-weg’s inglorious fate to be condemned by them to tell the Reichstag, and the world, on August 4th, 1014, that Germany was about to ‘do wrong’ by trampling an international treaty underfoot because it was only a ‘scrap of paper,’ and necessity knows no law. As Bismarck achieved immortality with a phrase: ‘We Germans fear God, and nothing else in the world’ —so will this pinchbeck successor be stigmatised by history for the criminal axioms he coined on the eve of the great war. Bcthmann (pronounced Betman) —he is seldom called Beth-mann-Hollwcg —is sixty-one years old, a native of the Mark of Brandenburg, a typical Prussian bureaucrat, and celebrated in the German Civil Service as an industrious, experienced, and thorough-going official. His ignorance of foreign affairs is boundless, but he somewlrat made up for his ‘world-strangeness’ (German idiom) by rugged personal integrity. His career in the Chancellorship has been marked, by supine submission to the whims of the Kaiser, the War Lords, and the agrarian land-barons.!’