PREPARING FOR WAR.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXXII, Issue 86, 10 April 1912, Page 8

PREPARING FOR WAR.

A sensational description of j Gorman antipathy towards Britain ,is given by a correspondent of an English paper. The writer, who is,..s&yi to have special opportunities for studying the trend of jwblic opinion in Berlin, states that the German people, have become convinced that a war with Bri tain is inevitable. I ;"The newspapers have done their work only .tod ,well," he says. "Of course, ; the iuteslligent journalists know they are, /telling lies, but they are in the bands of the Government officials, who, to a man, are spoiling for war. An old German I know, .a friend of England who sees things clearly, told me bitterly the other day that the war party in,the Government are supreme, and aro bent on bringing things to .a head in March or April. They are engineering things, he said, just as they did in the Franco-Prussian war. They set to work to create an atmosphere of hatred against the country they want to attack, and make out that, the German people are being insulted,, and are to be attacked suddenly. They <ro on repeating this ad nauseam, until the nation really believes it to. ' e trup, and then, when they have forced on a war, the nation believes ' .iat the other side are aggressors,!) and tint they are defending the Fatherland." The correspondent was writing, it seems, before the triumph of the Socialists at the Reichstag «!]ecti<*r.s, and obviously his statements are highly coloured. But several of the leading German newspapers ha/e runted broadly that the sequel to Socialist successes would he an appeal to the country on a Jingo issue of a pronounced kind. ft may he that the correspondent has been misled by the preparations of official Germany for a venture of that kind. He men-

:tioned that the Kaisar is regarded generally as being opposed to the war party. He punished his son, the Crown Prince, severely for having shown a leaning towards Jingoism recently, but the young man was, nevertheless, the hero of the hour among the mass of the German people. The correspondent concludes by urging that Britain should relax none of her vigilence in preparing for a European war.