THE GREAT GERMAN ILLUSION

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LVII, Issue 228, 5 March 1915, Page 2

THE GREAT GERMAN ILLUSION

I' THE KAISER'S SPIRIT. (By Eden Phillpotts.) If over a monarch embraced within liis own diathesis the very genius of his country at the particular moment when he ruled it, that monarch is William 11. of Germany. And to this accident n»l owes the extraordinary affection and isteem in which his subjects hold him. For together, the Kaiser and the Father'land, over a period of half a century, have slowly, but steadily, attained io the convictions which produce their present appalling situation, i They cannot, however, fall' together, since while a monarch or a monarchy is mortal, the State is not. That he was influenced bv the trend of thought nnd prevalent ambitions; that the atmosphere which ho breathed after the Franco-Prussian War «ent far to form the Kaiser's character, is most certain. Once free of restraining influences and the genius which created existing Germany, he launched forth on his own adventure, with none to show mm the sequel, none to manifest that, instead ,of building on the foundations so securelaid laid, he was about to undermine them.

Germany has long rejoiced in her , might, and a period of intoxicating su"i cess has blunted her intellectual percepi tion. But a sated man's brain is never at its best, and a sated nation stands in danger. She drank too deeply at the wheels of her own ambition;'her immense energy and abundant genius were poured into niaterial channels, and a patriotism vital to all nations became in her case, vitiated by a parochial selfishness, which lost count of humanity's larger welfare, and became concentrated upon that of herself alone. To be concerned only with her own prosperity uas natural to a nation newly consoli* dated, a nation without humor and without any world-wide experience of other kingdoms, their aims, aspirations and needs; but to underrate the power o) those kingdoms, to assume without i'easo n their decay and obsolescence, to instil contempt for them in her rising geneiation, to believe they envied her to imagine that her turn had come to dominate civilisation and impose her own vigorous, but provincial culture upo n the whole earth—this was not in reason; it \vas an attitude so bigoted and so fanatic that it can only be described as pathological. | i

TEMPORARY ABERRATION.

The Kaiser exhibits the very spirit of modern Ciermany in Ms own restless, versatile, self-eonscioits and egoistic person. A child of the dynasty from which he spriitjvs, he echoes the megalomania -.»f lis :wition, speaks with its voice, reverberates its convictions, exhibits all its active and acute danger-signals of temporary aberration. At present Germany is absolutely ignorant of the disease from which she suffers. An illusion more, profound and fatal than ever attacked in>y kingdom of earth lias fastened lip.m this magnificent people, and not a liviii" physician of their own blood stands in and proclaims their malady; not a living surgeon has spoken or announced by What heroic operation they may be saved. I heir mighty dead had. perhaps, rescued them; but among their mightv living there is none immune from the universal ailment. The shrewdest, (he wiseest, the most far-seeing have succumb \1 j to the epidemic, and if in Cermany today there < \i-st responsible men who per- ! ceive (lie significance of her calenture ' tiiey dare not voice (heir discovery or = declare the nature of her peril. ' T|... ! time is, however, at hand when from ! the months of their babes and sucklimrs i Uiey will hear the truth. ' j