ENEMY IN AMERICA.

Taihape Daily Times, Issue 219, 31 January 1917, Page 4

ENEMY IN AMERICA.

Brief reference has been made recently in American news to the activities of a Mr. Jacob Schiff in the manoeuvres for bringing about through United States intervention a peace favourable to Germany. This Ger-man-American’s antecedents, his views mid -his undoubtedly great influence in certain quarters in the United Stale's arc discussed by Mr. D. Thomas Curtin, who has given the world some remarkable revelations of war-time life in Germany, in an article in the London Daily Mail. Mr. Curtin says the spear-head of the movement for a peace that would be a German victory is this Mr. Schiff, who is a well-known German banker in New York. Jacob H. Schiff is a native of Frankfort-,on-t!ie-Main. the cradle of Europe’s great financial dynasties, and he has lived in America since 1805; he has been an American citizen since 1870. He is tile beau of the banking house of Messrs Kuhn, Lceb and Co., of New York, which, with the exception of Messrs J. p. Morgan and Co., is the most powerful private banking concern in North America. “Mr. Schiff, as the wealthiest Jew in the United States," writes Mr. Curtin, “also looks upon himself as the pope of the Jewish community of the nation —a self-conferred distinction which is by no means concurred in by all American Hebrews, some of them my friends. In my judgment, from my knowledge both of conditions in my own country and of Germany's gnawing need of food, a great deal of attention should be bestowed upon the manoeuvres of die “American Neutral Conference Committee” and its plans (no doubt !o be financed out of Mr. Sc-hiffs plethoric purse) to stampede public sentiment in the cli:'octicn of ending .he war through America's good offices —ending it. always bo it remembered, because Germany wants it ended now while she holds vast regions of Allied land.”