THE TWO VOICES WITH WHICH GERMANY SPEAKS.

Taihape Daily Times, 19 September 1918, Page 2

THE TWO VOICES WITH WHICH GERMANY SPEAKS.

i WHICH CAN BE TRUSTED! i i As to the question of whether Ger- | many is to bo taken, into terms of free | commercial intercourse, this, the I "Journal of Commerce," says, "is a 1 matter which lies In 1 Germany’s own | hands. First, her people must make i up their minds in what voice they are I to address the rest of the world. Shall |it be, for example, in that of Baron ! von Frey tag-Loringh oven, the ddputy | chief of the German Imperial Staff, ! whoso ‘ Deductions from the World. I War, ’ written for home consumption, j has recently been published .abroad? j If so, it must be concluded that the j experience of the war has taught Germany nothing, and That she will faco the years of peace obstinately clinging \to such prepossessions as these: ‘We j miscontrue reality if we imagine that it is possible to rid the world of war by means of mutual agreements. . - The ideal of a State co-extensive with humanity is no ideal at all. . . As regards us Germans, the World War should disencumber us once and for all of any vague cosmopolitan sentimentality. If our enemies, both our recret and our avowed enemies, make confessions of this nature, that is for us sufficient evidence of the hypocrisy } which underlies them. . . In the future, as in the past, the German people will have to seek firm cohesion in its glorious army iand in its belaurelled young fleet.’ A PESSIMISTIC OUTLOOK. "It is certain that in this syetem of government has lain rooted the lack of sympathy and the mistrust which the German trader has had to meet everywhere. But the distrust can only be accentuated, and the lack of sympathy become more profound, if, in the face of the lessons of the war, the system is to remain unchanged and i its spirit is to be perpetuated. Then, surely, the pessimistic view of Germany’s enemies will have to be accepted as the truth; namely, that the militarist party will go on fighting till the German people stop them, and /when the fighting has been stopped' the German people will begin building militarism up again, because it is the only form of life they know, and the only form of government they deserve. A BARRED DOOR. "The obvious corollary which Gerans alone can invalidate is that unless the door is barred ruthlessly to the whole German nation, every country closed to its trade and every sea to its commerce, the whole bloody Easiness will have to be enacted' over again in the course of twenty years. Obviously, against an empire saturated with a spirit like this all the economic weapons which the Allies possess would have to be used without scruple. That is to say, there would have to be a concerted effort to deprive the German manufacturer of his raw material and to exclude German products from foreign markets."