The Stratford Evening Post WITH WHICH IS INCORPORATED THE EGMONT SETTLER WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 11, 1916. FOR HUMANITY’S SAKE.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXXI, Issue 63, 11 October 1916, Page 4

The Stratford Evening Post WITH WHICH IS INCORPORATED THE EGMONT SETTLER WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 11, 1916. FOR HUMANITY’S SAKE.

There is growing evidence that Germany is really feeling the effects of Britain’s blockade and it may well be believed that the Kaiser would give a great deal to avoid another winter campaign. Mr Archibald Hurd in the Fortnightly Review shows that] our blockade of Germany is fully justified even by German standards, and if the positions were reversed there would be no high humanitarian talk such as one now occasionally hears. The blockade is, what is far more to the point, quite within the code of international law, which the Allies still adhere to, despite the ruthless disregard of all honourable obligatione which the enemy has shown. The London Chronicle says that if the blockade were not effective we should nevertheless-persist in it in the hope and resolution of making it so. But it facilitates the dialectics of a. war measure to know that it has been .exhaustively apologised lor and vindicated in advance by its present victim. Germany, in 1870-71, starved the Parisians until they had to eat the wolves of the Zoological Gardens and the rats of the sewers. In 1892 the German Chancellor, Count Caprivi, justified the very pressure which we arc attempting by means of our Navy to exert upon the German army to-day—“ln such conduct I should see absolutely no barbarity or any difference from the measures taken in a war on la,nd. Mr Hurd in the article above referred to shows how verv far German teaching goes beyond the Allies practice m this matter, for non-combatants of the enemy country, according to the German plan of war. are to be fought indirectly by the destruction of their propertv, by requisitions and contributions' exacted from them by the soldiers, by the capture of their foodstuffs and commodities of trade at sea. In so far as we stop the food importations in Germany we stop them because they are, primarily, supplies for the German army; we should certainly not stop them if they wore for the civilian population. When the German military authorities assumed control over all German food they thereby made it impossible for us to discriminate; we have since seized all the food intended for Germany that we can, and presumably we shall continue to do so. But our good faith i? demonstrated by our not only having allowed food to go into German Belgium, but by the more active steps which we have taken to feed the population ..of that country, even at the risk of releasing German .supplies for Germany, I'or Germany to cry whimperingly to neutrals that Britain. France and Russia are acting against the dictates of humanity is pure hypocritical nonsense. Wo are' pressing every advantage to-day to cru-ii lor e\ei German militarism in the real in to rests of humanity.