GERMAN HATE.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXV, Issue 34, 11 February 1915, Page 4

GERMAN HATE.

Why should the Germans see in England the source of all their woes and the one lit object of their frenzy of hate? This, says an Auckland Star writer, like all answers to vague and comprehensive questions, no single explanation can be expected to cover the whole ground. One element in the extremely frank and furious Anglophobia now so popular in Berlin is certainly the sense of failure and the bitterness of disappointed ambition. A few weeks ago, in New York, Herr Witting, a Privy Councillor and a leading German financier, expressed himself in the following appropriate terms to a newspaper correspondent : “God! How wo hate Eng-

land and the English, that nation of hypocrites and criminals, which has brought this misery upon us and the world. And what for? For greed and envy—to crush the German nation.” Such an utterance as this indicates very clearly that part, at least, of j Germany’s hatred of the English is' due to her consciousness of the desperate position in which her unscrupu- 1 lons policy and her unbridled lust of power have placed her. And naturally this state of mind has been seized upon and utilised by the militar-' ists and the ruling caste to divert public attention from their own irreparable lenders and failures. As the full knowledge of the terrible collapse of Germany’s magnificent plans of conquest breaks gradually upon her people it will be necessary to find a scapegoat against whom public indignation can l)e safely directed; and the leaders of the German people already realise that under cover of this furious outburst of Anglophobia they may vet hope to escape the retribution that the wrath of a deluded people might justly exact from them.