The Sun MONDAY, FEBRUARY 20, 1928 GERMANY STILL A SCAREMONGER

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 283, 20 February 1928, Page 8

The Sun MONDAY, FEBRUARY 20, 1928 GERMANY STILL A SCAREMONGER

THERE is really no cause for wonder in the report from Berlin that Germany is preparing a great naval surprise for the world. Something of the kind was to be expected in time, and those nations who protest at the mote in Germany’s eye should not forget the beam in their own. It might even be said fairly that none of them is looking with straight, wide-open eyes at the true purpose of the League of Nations, Moreover, some of their representatives, particularly those of the United States, talk about naval disarmament with one side of the mouth and about increasing naval construction with the other. After nine years of enforced experience of an inferiority complex, it is now Germany’s turn again to raise another big scare which, if taken too seriously, will stampede the principal Powers into a mad competition in armaments and new devices for the quick destruction of life and property. It has been disclosed with apparent authority by the newspaper “Berliner Tageblatt” that Germany’s Naval Budget for this year involves a mystery of millions of pounds sterling for which no explanation is forthcoming. Whatever else is mysterious, it is at least clear that the aggregate of proposed naval expenditure this year has been pitched far beyond the actual constructive and maintenance needs of the skeleton German Navy. It is cited by experts, for example, that the provisional estimate of £4,000,000 for each one of Germany’s new 10,000-ton cruisers, as compared with £7,000,000 for the construction of TI.M.S. Nelson, the greatest battleship in the world, can only mean an enormous expenditure on deadly equip-' ment. Details must be left to conjecture; the best that experts can deduce from the data at their disposal is an awesome picture of “mysterious new naval weapons of unprecedented power and efficiency.” If the Berlin story be true it looks as though the new Republic of Germany already has forgotten the old Imperial Germany’s miserable scuttling of her mighty battle fleet in Scapa Plow, and also that there is a prospect of the slogan, “Deutschland über Alles,” again becoming an aggressive cry, instead of remaining buried in bleak history as “a dead and disgraced motto.” _ •_ Of course, as already noted, a keen revival of militaristic policy in Germany was to he anticipated. Whether other nations like or hate her Germany must always he one of the principal factors in European politics. A nation of sixty million people, generally highly educated and efficiently industrialised, cannot be kept permanently in subjection. What may he done about it* The threat of German naval expansion takes the world back to the Peace Conference of Paris. When the draft of, the Versailles Treaty was submitted to the Peace Congress at the Quai d’Orsay, all the peacemakers were confounded in silence by the cold, terse comments of Marshal Poch who wanted to know what would happen after fifteen years, when the sanctions and other punitive terms of the Treaty had expired f There was only one answer. This was to pin the world’s faith in peace and security on the League of Nations. Will the League he equal to the faith test 1 '