WAR CERTAIN.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LII, Issue 332, 7 March 1910, Page 4

WAR CERTAIN.

IF EXGLAXD ADOPTS PROTECTION, GEBMAXY WILL FIf!TIT AGAIXST BAXKIII'PTC'Y. "'WITH EVERY SHIP AND EVERY MAX." Mr Powell, author of "The Fight for the Highway of Xations," contributes a highly interesting article to "Everybody's Magazine," in which he declares war with Germany to be inevitable if Great Britain adopts protection and discards freetraderGermany's main reason for going to war' with England is protection, and perhaps that is the strongest reason of all. The most insistent' demand of Germany to-dav is a market for her goods, and it is in freetrade England that she finds it. Tint if the signs of the times .point right, England is not going to be freetrade much longer. The triumph of tariff reform in England is to the minds of most thinking men inevitable; but therein lies a very real and very imminent danger. There are no negotiations which demand a deeper knowledge of a special sort than those attendant upon the treaties of trade and commerce which follow in the wake of tariffs. Protection, if it does for England what its advocates claim for it, is going to hit Germany a staggering blow; with one stroke of the pen she will lose her I>est market, or, .rather, markets, for she will lose those of South Africa, Australia, Canada, and India as well. Do you appreciate what it will mean to over-populatad, over-taxed, over-productive Germany to have the British outlet for her goods closed bv a tariff wall? Tt will mean bankruptcy, bankruptcy with a capital B, and nothing less. What, then, you ask, 'Hi lie Germany's answer to such a move on the part of England? The answer will come from the guns of her battleships and the rifles of her soldiers; the answer lies behind that toast which is drunk in every -ward-room and moss-hall in the Empire; the answer is War. I can hear you laugh, my sheltered .friends, as you sit in your comfortable club window or by your cosy fireside, and say that all this is nonsense, is visionary, that. for~a nation to declare war because a neighbour derides .to change its fiscal policy from freetrade to protection smacks more of tne Middle Ages, with their senseless quarrels, than of this twentieth century civilisation of which we are so proud. I repeat that protection in England means financfa* disaster in Gerntony, and to avert that financial disaster Germany, unless T very much mistake the scope of the Imperial mind, i» prepared to fight for those life-sus-taining markets with every ship and every man. Why, she went to Wir with France for far less reason, and the ghosts of Bismarck and Von Molt If e still flit through tlie corridors of that old palace in the Wilhelm-slrasse. still hover over the chair of the foreign minister, still stand behind the tlirone of the War Lord. Tn such case what, think you would those grim old men have done?