JACK LONDON'S VIEW OF GERMANY.

Pukekohe & Waiuku Times, Volume 5, Issue 132, 14 January 1916, Page 2 (Supplement)

JACK LONDON'S VIEW OF GERMANY.

AX INSANE NATION: SEVENTY MILLION PARANOIACS. Jack London, the novelist, has been interviewed on the war and the Germans. He was asked what the United States ought to do about it. "See here," replied Jack London. who now has a ranch in California. "On this ranch there are fifty men and women. Suppose I am lying here asleep and I hear a cry I'm- help. I rush out and fin 1 a bloodthirsty brute of a paranoiac nnniae engaged in the pleasant task of shooting everyone he can see on the ranch. " What can 1 do. y Benson with him? Speak to h : m kindly? No, I get my own gun, the best one I've got; and I creep up as close to him as 1 can and I pump his body full of lead. It's tne only treatment possiMe: the onlytreatment whereby the place may be freed of this paranoiac and his crazy egotism. •'There are 70,000,000 such paranoics in the world to-day—Germans—-a'l trying to shoot up the ranch. Think of' it—70,000,000 of them ! And people want to use kindness; want to sit down and talk tlrngs over: Farcy talking tilings over with a homicidal maniac! How would you begin? How far would you get? How would it end? "Germnny to-day is paranoiac. She lias the crazy person's idea of her own ego. Al*o she has the delusion of persecution—the thinks all nations are .igainst her. And the religions mania —she thinks God is on her side. These are the very commonest forms of insanity. Never before in history has a nation gone insane." The interviewer suggested that perhaps there might lie something in the paranoic German to which an appeal might be made, some nerve centre which might be touched. "Not with 70,000,000 other paranoides all yelling 'Kill"' replied Jack London. ''By slow development through the centuries man has achieved intellect and civilisation. But we have anthropoid men w'th us still and paranoiac*. We must deal with them as is proper for anthropoids and paranoial. We must get a gun." The interviewer, discerning in this a suggestion of "militarism"' as applied to the pacific millions of the United States, suggested that perhaps the pos-set-:-ion of a gun renders a man or a nation liable to paranoia. Perhaps, he went on, even Jack London, having :i gun, might sometimes feel inclined to ;:o and shoot up his neighbour's ranch. What fias one to do about keeping a gun f "It might very well be," replied London, "that if I should spend a great deal of time at target-shooting, ami should keep a large force of ranchhands cleaning and polishing up that gun. in the absence of regulative force 1 should do exactly that thing. But life i< essentially a series of compromise? : we live in a world, not in n fancied rea'm of ideal conditions—a world that contains real bushmen and real paranoiacs. When yon have one evil pulling one way and another evl pulling the other, you fight the one with the strongest pull. "The paranoiac who is snooting up the ranch is real and present: the possible paranoia that I might catch from the gun is likewise real, but remote. And again I say, 'Get a gun.' "