THE WAR AFTER THE WAR.

Taihape Daily Times, Issue 220, 17 July 1917, Page 3

THE WAR AFTER THE WAR.

GERMANY ORGANISING. To N understanu”The workings of industrial Germany at war we must consider, writes Mr. Fox, a neutrax who lias been investigating me iuuustnal situation m Germany, in “System,” an organisation formed in Germany at the outbreak ,cf wax. It is the Krielsrohstoff gesellschaft—literally, “War Raw Material Company.” This is presided over by Walter Rathenau, son of the founder oft the General Electric Company of Germany. This “War Raw Material Company” is practically a Government monopoly.

Excluding food, it controls every bit of raw material in Germany today. It buys fHTm the producers and sells to the consumers. There is only a 5 per cent, increase between the price at which it buys the‘raw materials and the price at which it turns them over to German industry. This 5 per cent, covers all the overhead charges of the Rathenau organisation. And this low figure is possible because men unfit for military service in the trenches give clerical service to the [nation. They havo to.

In distributing this raw material to industry the needs of the army and navy are first considered. Consumers producing for the army and navy make their applications for material to the Rathenau organisation. These requests are carefully checked, so as to make sure that nd~industry gets more than it needs to fulfil the contract that the Government has given it. FACILITIES FOR EXPORTERS.

Railways, inland waterways, and steamship lines are all harnessed to the Imperial trade policy. Railwaymanagers, canal managers, all these men know the goods, the factories, that Germany has chosen as "Ihe advance guard in her fight for world trade when peace comes. Preferential railway .rates, cheap inland waterway tolls and ocean freight rates will be given exporters upon Imperial suggestion to enable them to carry on “the war after the war.” Nearly two million men are in the prison camps of Germany, and much of their lalfßur (says Mr. Fox) is being used in German factories;. When peace comes Germany must export cargoes of goods that, generally speaking, far exceed in value the kind of goods she must export. Therefore, the more valuable the commodities, the more desirable will it be to Germany to encourage their exportation.

Among the commodities they are manufacturing for their export drive are certain chemicals, hardware, cutlery, and “knick-knacks.” They have built five factories near the Rhine and coalfields for the purpose of obtaining nitrates from the air, and they have made the process cheap enough to be profitable to run these factories after the war. Nitrogen is extracted from the air by electricity, ond the Germans have been so successful that they expect to export nitrates after the war. Mr. Fox tells us that they have extracted a new oil from coal, and from seeds and nuts made benzol with which they run motor-cars, and substituted wood and vegetable fibre for I cotton, wool, and leather. They are doing their best to exhaust the mines of Eastern France and Belgium; they are draining dry a copper mine in Servia; have stripped the factories of France, Belgium, and Poland of machinery, which has been put down in German factories; stripped the resin from Russian pine forests, and left their own alone; and have denuded whole forests in occupied countries, while their own remain intact.

Germany, says Mr. Fox, is to-day mobilising as shrewdly and as painstakingly for peace as she did for war.