THE OBJECT OF DEVASTATION

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LVII, Issue 196, 27 January 1915, Page 2

THE OBJECT OF DEVASTATION

A CANDID CONCESSION. A remarkably candid letter from a German in the New York Sun contains the following confession: —"In the welter of controversy about the present war there is one point of view which I wish to put as clearly as possible before the American mind. Germany is fighting for her existence; not only for her political unity and her right to grow, but for that most vital part of her national self, her ideal of life, threatened on every side by the march of change in the world. Politically, we Germans arc still in the eighteenth century, for a strong, absolute ruler, supported by an influential land-owning upper class, is our standard of government. Socially, we are feudal, not because the system is imposed upon us from above, but because it fills the deBire of the people, who are content to have a dominating class above them, if they can have a dominated one below. In domestic life we have stuck to the twelfth century; our attitude toward woman perhaps belongs, earlier. We consider her an inferior being because she lacks the qualities which we value most —force and tenacity of purpose—but we greatly respect in her that function for which she is best fitted, a function which she has been allowed to negleet under what are called the higher civilisations, much to the detriment of France at this moment. The German's word for women in mass is not a polite one. When he wishes to speak of her with respect, he calls her 'wife,' and by choice and training through the ecnturies he has developed an almost perfect type, a woman who, whether high or low in class, will keep house for her man and bear him children with singlehearted devotion. Our Government and Judiciary do not have to cope with a Mrs. Pankhurst or a Mime. Caillaux. To us the war is still war—not a game played by nice international rules, but fire and sword, battle and murder and rape. The country that our armies fight over will not defy us again, and we shall, I hope; in a few months prove to the world the effectiveness of our system."