The Daily News. FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 27, 1912. THE WAR CLOUD.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LV, Issue 112, 27 September 1912, Page 4

The Daily News. FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 27, 1912. THE WAR CLOUD.

Some British newspapers of high standing art insisting that certain interested parties are, for sellish purposes, sedulously fomenting friction between the great Powers. One of their statements lias been that war scares, if not actually created by enterprising manufacturers of armor-plate, are, to say the least, not discouraged by them. Failing to convince the public that fear of war is entirely baseless and nothing more than a scare, these journals have slightly changed their ground. They admit the possibility of danger, but declare that it has been caused by those to who.-e commercial interests it is to see nations indulging in an orgy of armaments. As an English paper points out. with singularly prophetic insight, Mr. Winston Churchill and the Government to which he belongs have been singled out for eastigation for abetting the illfeeling, especially with Germany, and setting a ruinous pace in naval expenditure. ''Mr. Churchill," remarks this paper, ''after kissing the Blarney Stone, will pour out a new vocabulary of panic,

strong as his old vocabulary of antipanic." But the possibility of the changed attitude of Mr. Churchill and of the Liberal Government on the matter oi preparedness for war being due to realisation, reluctant perhaps, of the rea\ circumstances, is ignored. It would be humiliating and repellant to think that the war cloud now hanging over Europe had been voluntarily called up by those who have vast sums invested in plant for the manufacture of armor-plate and engines of war, and who desire to see their capital reproductive, careless whether the cloud hursts or not. But there would be a grain of comfort in the thought that the issue—Peace or Warrested entirely with Britain, and that a cessation or a great slackening off in her programme of naval construction would dispel the cloud. Unfortunately, the great weight of evidence is behind the diametrically opposite view, that Great Britain, by relaxing her efforts, would speedily precipitate war. And this, from what can be gathered at this end of the world, is the feeling and belief of the mass of people in Britain. It is this conviction which reconciles them to a taxation for army and navy purposes that constitutes a burden only bearable because self-preservation dictates it- The statement in our cablegrams' last week that the mei-cantile marine is being reminded of how to comport itself, should trouble arise, is somewhat ((isquietening. It will be the earnest: prayer of every loyal Britain that war may be averted; but should that not be granted, it is to be hoped that thprc will be no mistaken Impression that the nation has been forced into war by tlie selfish greed of capitalists concerned in certain branches of manufacture.; Anglophobia, as another cablegram injforms us, was greatly in evidence at Berlin, even at a congress which, by a large' majority, adopted" the principle of international"disarmament. And, as has been stated in the House of Commons, the British- Government has unofficially sought a rapprochement with Germany, with a view to a mutual reduction of Those overtures, if not exactly,, repulsed, were at least, barren of thp,-desired result, and this fact alone makes the position, as it is recorded in our later cablegrams, exceptionally significant. ,