PREPARING TOR WAR.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIV, Issue 228, 25 March 1912, Page 4

PREPARING TOR WAR.

A »ensational description of German antipathy toward* Britain is given by a correspondent of an lingliih paper. The writer, who it laid to have special opportunities for studying the trend of public opinion in Berlin, states that th« Geraian people have become convinced that a war with Britain is inevitable. "The newipapers have done their work only too well," he says. "Of course, tht intelligent journali*ts know they are telling lies, but they are in the hands of the Government officials, who, to a man, are spoiling for war. An old German I know, a friend of England who sees things clearly, told me bitterly the other day that the war party in the Government are supreme, and are bent on bringing things to a head in March or April. They are engineering things, he said, just as they did in the Franco-Prussian war. They set to work to create an atmosphere of hatred against the country they want to attack, and make out that the German people are being insulted, and are to be attacked suddenly. They go on repeating this ad nauseam until the nation really believes it to b# | true, and then, when they have forced on a war, the nation believes that the other side are the aggressors, and that they are defending the Fatherland." The correspondent was writing, it seems, before the triumph of the Socialists at th» Reichstag elections, and obviously his statements are highly colored. But several of the leading German newspaper* have hinted broacßy that the sequel to Socialist successes would be a second appeal to the country on a Jingo issue of a pronounced kind. It may be that the correspondent has been misled by the preparations of official Germany for a venture of that kind. He mentioned that the Kaiser it regarded gen--1 erally as being opposed to the war party. He punished his son, the Crown Prince, severely for having shown a leaning towards Jingoism recently, but the young man was, nevertheless," the hero of the hour among the mass of the German people. The correspondent concludes by urging that Britain should relax none of her vigilance in preparing for a European war.