LOOKING BACKWARD.

Taihape Daily Times, Issue 160, 25 July 1916, Page 3

LOOKING BACKWARD.

A GERMAN PROPHECY THAT

WAS NOT FULFILLED.

The following paragraph is taken from the September issue of “Life” for the year 1909, and will doubtless be read with some interest by our readers:

Following H. G. Wells’s “War of the Worlds” comes a pamphlet that ts being circulated in Germany, which describes the coming debacle of the British Empire, out of whose ashes a universal German sovereignty is to arise. It is entitled “After the Storm,” the storm being a great European war. The result to England is that her “world-wide empire collapses like a house of cards,” following “the destruction of her fleet.” The end of England will come, according to this cheerful pamphleteer, with the dismemberment and destruction of the whole British Fleet, off Heligoland. The news Is carried to England by a German army corps. France has been invaded and occupied by a vast German army, and Japan < which had pledged herself to send England a reinforcement of 100,000 men, seizes Hongkong, instead. Far from bringing any assistance, as she had promised, Russia sends her Cossacks into India and thus forestalls a second Sepoy uprising, and it is only through the intervention of Italy that Egypt is saved from a bloody insurrection. Then South Africa publishes a declaration ot Independence and hoists the flag of the United Free States of Africa. At , this point American troops march into Canada “for the preservation of law and order,” and Ireland becomes an independent republic. As German ships sweep the ocean, the commerce of England Is paralysed, all the provision ships are seized, and the Government, seeing that famine stares the country in the face, submits to a humiliating peace. While these dire predictions have not come to anything, events have shown that the German pamphleteers did not write their articles for the fun of the thing Doubtless if we as a people had taken more notice of them we would have been better prepared for the present war than we were at its commencement. However. while there is evidence that German Influence was at work during the many past years fomenting strife in the fields indicated in the paragraph, the insurrection in Ireland was the only success achieved, and that a poor one.