THE MAILED FIST.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LVII, Issue 287, 13 May 1915, Page 6

THE MAILED FIST.

XO CIVILISED lAVK UXLKSS "'A few weeks ago I read in a German paper 11 discourse on the decadence of ihe British i'impire, which used an its crowning illustration the fact that there wr.s only one British soldier to every I 1000 of the people of India," says Mr. .). 1 A. Spender, the editor of the Westminster Cuzcttc, in one of his interesting letters to the Antipodes. ''l pass this on to you as the supreme revelation" of the Prussian militarism, written by people who aren't Prussians. Clearly tin; fellow who wrote it had in his mind the colonies of the Fatherland, where there are three soldiers to every colonist, and to him it was absolutely incomprehensible that any virile or selfrespecting nation should pretend to govern with this deplorable inadequacy on the side of the mailed list. "There was no argument about it. He tool; the fact as a self-evident reducio ad absurdum of the British system, and he went on to say that though he hadn't the ligures for the other colonies handy he had no doubt they would be equally fatal to our pretence of being a governing race. Why, Germany had more soldiers in Alsace-Lorraine alone than Great Britain had in all India! "It is that thought whidi keeps me and all your old Liberal and Jtadical friends braced up to this struggle. We see this mailed fist tyranny up against tlie Liberal Knrpire which governs India with 250 troops to the million and glories in the fact that she needs no more. We see our German without an idea, in war or peace except to trample down and hack through and assert what lie calls his power, and then wondering why he isn't loved. "A very distinguished neutral whom T saw the other day asked me whether there was any Liberal movement in this country towards peace. I said to him that the proceedings of Germany in this war, beginning with Belgium and coming to a climax in the submarine decree, had been such that Liberals were, if anything, more determined than the rest of their fellow-countrymen to fight this thing through till the. entire Prussian system and the whole order of ideas behind it were smashed, and, since he was going to .Berlin, I begged him to say that to his German friends. "If they refuse to believe it, so much the worse for them'; but you may take it as a vitally important' factor in the situation here that the quietest and most pacific people have been driven to the. conclusion that there can be no tolerable or civilised life in the future unless the German power is, in this sense, crushed."