HERR EBERT.

Taihape Daily Times, 11 December 1918, Page 6

HERR EBERT.

o— — NEW GERMAN CHANCELLOR. The new German Chancellor is of the people, his father, Karl Ebert, being well known as a Heidelberg master He was born at Heidelberg on November 1871. Therefore he is a Badener and a fellowcountryman of Prince Max (heir to the Baden crown) and the Imperial Regent, who appointed him to the

high post vacated by himself. After having received his elementary education at one of the Heidelberg State Schools, Friedrich Ebert was apprenticed to a Heidelberg saddler. The smell of the leather w T as apparently distatseful to the future Chancellor. He preferred the scent of printing ink, for in 1892 he migrated to Bremen, and was editing the Bremer Buergerzeitung, of Socialistic tendencies. The Socialist leaders, are, or have been, journalists who quickly became editors; the more enterprising found their own journals. After eight” years of editing, Ebert became the secretary of the Workers’ Association of Bremen.

By the end of 1905, Ebert had become a member of the committee of the Younger Workers’ Section of the German Socialist Party. From 1900 lo 1906 he was an influential member of the Bremen Citizens’ Association, and the reward of his devotion to the Socialist was his election to the Reichstag in 1912. Next year he became a member of th/ commfttce of the German Social Democratic Party. Since the war he has never opposed the Government in the violent way some of his more extreme fellow-So-cialists have done. Yet he is undoubtedly a forward Socialist and a "stalwart,” who is prepared to suffer for his opinions. The difference between a man like Liebknecht is that Ebert is a man of affairs while Liebknecht can sec only his side of the case. Herr Ebert can hardly be accused of being an opportunist, but he never fails to take full advantage of every opportunity to advance his cause and his influence in his party, always with an air of reasonableness which gains him friends, while his opponents are made to feel that he is thoroughly in earnest. There is no doubt that the new Chancellor is a very able man, and that he has an instinct for affairs. He made his personality deeply felt among his fellow-Socialists; now he has the opoprtunity of serving not only his party but the State. He has already showm himself to be a remark- 1 able man; he may prove a great statesman. As he rose in influence, Herr Ebert showed no swollen head. He did not buy a sho’wy house, but continued to live in a modest way in the tiptop quarter of Berlin, a northeastern suburb of the capital.