JOTTINGS.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXV, Issue 306, 24 December 1914, Page 8

JOTTINGS.

A present of tobacco and cigarettes from the -Mayor of Wellington’s patriotic fund has been sent to each member ol the expeditionary force encamped at Trentham and to every soldier in tiie forts and on duty at Somes island. Instructions have been cabled to London to distribute IGOOlbs of tobacco among the Mew Zealand troops in Egypt and this will also be the gift of the/citizens of Wellintgon.

The whole German idea of financing a war dates back to Frederick the Great’s “Instructions to my generals in cose of siege”' (says Colonel Maude). I can only regret that it is impossible to reproduce the extraordinary mixture bf broken French and German in which the original is couched. Quoting from memory, they run somewhat as follows:—“When the enemy appears before your town and threatens to invest it, you will call together all the prinicpal citizens and merchants, and borrow from them all their cash—pointing out that you will pay the money away in wages to the soldiers and civilians who work on the fortifications, who will spend the money in their shops, and so presently it will all be back in their tills again. When, then, you find your ready money running down, you will call them together again, and so yon will go on borrowing the same money over and over again until I come and relieve you and pay the bill.” Now, in very simple language this* is precisely the same security which the German Government is now offering for its war loan's; though its language is more conventional and financially more correct, the thought is the same. The lenders will be repaid—when “the King comes to his own again,” namely, out of war indemnities to be wrung from the conquered countries, and from England particularly, when the Kaiser’s armies are victorious. If now the Kaiser’s armies are forced back on the Rhine, the knowledge of their utter failure can no longer be concealed from the nation. The whole bubble of German financial credit will be pricked, and the ensuing smash will be about the greatest the world has ever known.