The Times. PUBLISHED ON TUESDAY AND FRIDAY AFTERNOONS. TUESDAY, APRIL 9, 1918 GERMANY'S LOST COLONIES.

Pukekohe & Waiuku Times, Volume 7, Issue 366, 9 April 1918, Page 2

The Times. PUBLISHED ON TUESDAY AND FRIDAY AFTERNOONS.

TUESDAY, APRIL 9, 1918 GERMANY'S LOST COLONIES.

"We nothing extenuate, nor let down auaht in malice."

General Smuts, than whom there are few, if any, men who have rendered more signal service to the Empire, is utterly opposed to those wild theorists by no means common to the Mother Country, who chatter of Super-National Authorities, and who are prepared to accept peace at any price. We have in New Zealand some of these irrational "idealists" who apparently see no objection to permitting the Germans to come back to be our neighbours in the islands of the Pacific. A speech recently delivered by General Smuts before the Royal Geographical Society selves as a useful counterblast to all such whimpering pacifists. His utterances were for the most part devoted to unmasking the designs which the Germans have long cherished in Africa. His argument, as concisely summarised by the author of 'The Letters of an Englishman," was that the British Empire is competent to conduct its own affairs overseas as at I lomc, and it does uot propose to set its neck in any noose contrived by its enemies. Moreover, our system of colonising, the fruit of long experience and patient industry, needs no checks upon its usefulness. It only remains for us, after the war, to exclude the

Germans from Africa as from the South Seas, For the Germans, whereever they go, are bad neighbours, If they set themselves in authority over native races, extortion is their benevol- > ence, and butchery their mildest form of Government. They do not desire new homes for settlers, new fields for human activity. The instinct of colonisation is not theirs, and Bismark showed a clear understanding of his countrymen when he frowned disapproval upon a Colonial Em« ' pire. The German, an egoist always, goes abroad either to extort money or to strengthen his 1 military power. The inhabitants of the unhappy countries wherein he has sought wealth and > agrandisement are mere slaves in his eyes—either forced labourers , or recruits for the native armies which he has always hoped to raise. In brief, what Germany aims at in Africa is, as General ■ Smuts said, " the establishment of a great Central African Empire, comprising not only her own colonies before the war, but also all the English, French, Belgian, ■ and Portuguese possessions south of the Sahara and Lake Chad and north of the Zambesi River in South Africa." A modest dream which happily shall never come true ! And if the Germans had reached the goal of their ambition, what would they have done ? "This Central African block," again it is General Smuts who speaks, " of which the maps are now in course of preparation and printing at the Colonial Orhce in Beilin, is intended in the first place to supply the economic requirements and raw material of German industry, and, in the second and far more important place, to become the recruiting ground for the vast native armies, the great value of which has been demonstrated in the tropical campaigns of this war, especially in East Africa ; while the natural harbours on the Atlantic and Indian Oceans will supply the naval and submarine bases from which both ocean routes will be dominated, and British and American sea-power will be brought to naught." There is only one way of checking this senseless, inordinate lust of power—a victory in the field. The Germans aim not at the peaceful developments of new lands, at the conquest of disease, at the extinction of poisonous flies and other pests. Every Colony they have has been a pawn in the game of worldpolitics. Wherever tliev go they

keep their fixed eyes upon military power. The commercial prosperity of their Colonies does not matter much to them. In peace or in war they fight only ,for their own hands, and if the murder of a hundred thousand natives saves them trouble they do not shrink from the crime. In the words of General Smuts, " the young nations of the British Empire. . . . should not be asked to consent to the restoration to a militant Germany of fresh footholds for militarism in the southern hemisphere."