GERMANY AS AN ECONOMIC OUTLAW.

Taihape Daily Times, 14 September 1918, Page 3

GERMANY AS AN ECONOMIC OUTLAW.

WHAT AMERICA THINKS OF IT. America, thanks —if for no other reason —to the commanding personality of President Wilson, and the curious strength and felicity of speech he has developed., must count for very much when the question of the terms of peace comes to be settled. So it is of importance to the rest of the world —and of special importance to Australia —to know what America is thinking on the great economic issues which peace will bring with it. The “Journal of Commerce,” a New York daily, is certainly the most trusted and most influential newspaper authority on commercial questions in the United States; and in a recent issue it published an article entitled “Germany’s Deferred Repentance,” which seems to be accepted by the American press as the sanest and most convincing exposition of the economic policy which the Allies ngeneral, and America in particular, must pursue towards what it calls “the Hohenzollern dynasty and its followers.” The article deserves to command great attention in Australia.

“In American Judgment,” says the “Journal of Commerce,” “if there be one outcome of the war' more certain than another, it is that Germany will not be allowed to renew the reign of terror she had established in her South African and Polynesian colonies. No blacker page of history has ever been written than that which records the German treatment of Herreros, Akwas, and South Sea Islanders. As an outlet for emigration the German colonies hardly figured at all. Germany’s object in colonisation was merely to do a profitable business; and there would have been no complaint had this end been pursued justly and equitably. But ‘frightfulnessv/as persistently employed as the weapon to subjugate and despoil the nat ive races, and the men sent to wield it were mostly failures at home or of plainly disreputable character. A courageous German, Dr Schaedler, speaking in 1906 called the story of the colonies one of ‘embezzlements, falsehoods, sensual cruelties, assaults on women, horrible ill treatment,’ and he added that ‘officials and officers who stink materially and morally are no good to us in the colonies, not even if they were royal princes.’ When the Herreros, goaded beyond enduranc, turned on their oppressors, the retribution dealt out to them made their country one vast graveyard. Thousands, driven into barren, water less regions, perished of hunger and thirst The rest, when they did not escape into British territory, were made prisoners, and were either forced to labour or were kept together in prison camps, where the death rate was appalling. It is reckoned that only some 20.000 Herreros remained out of 80.000 after the atrocities of the Herrerc War. “Humanity has stood aghast before the revelations of German cruelty and bestiality in dealing with native races whose lives the nation held in trust, and the people who tolerated these misdeeds will never be given a chance to repeat the experiment.”