PIRATE SUBMARINES.

Taranaki Daily News, 30 October 1915, Page 11

PIRATE SUBMARINES.

HOW THEY HAVE BEEN ROPED IN. London, Sept. 10. At last the British Admiralty lia.-i lifted the veil and told us something about those German submarine pirates. Readers of this letter will recognise the accuracy of the assertions made many weeks ago. Assuming the German submarine fleet at the 'beginning of the war to have numbered about CO, which was about the available figure, more than half of it has gone. The German losses have grown greater and more rapid as our naval authorities have perfected their means of coping with them.

Last Monday another German U boat was towed into Plymouth, with her periscope shot away, and the naval men who bagged her treated the affair very lightly. It might have been a rabbit for all the fuss they made over it. It wa? very characteristic of the Germans to make their "magnanimous" olVer to America and promise not to sink any more merchant ships without warning just when their submarine adventure was ncaring the end of its tether. And it was rather like the American press to go into ecstacies over President Wilson's great moral triumph, those who had denounced him most feverishly before being most emphatic in "their praises. What has the President done? He has got a vague assurance from the patentees of "the scrap of paper" policy and the inventors of general, frightfulness that no peaceful vessel will be sunk without warning. What warning? And what about the world's ukase about sinking merchant ships at; all: Americans mav be very proud 'of themselves over this 'business, and may explain the Hesperian and other eases lrv. saying that the U boats have not all" got their new instructions, yet, but it might do them some good to understand the general feeling about them in this country and in France. It is not an excited or enthusiastic feeling, but, to be quite honest, just a frigid and half-tolerant amused contempt. "Decadence" is the word most commonly applied to America now even in quite educated and cultured circles in Europe. And one imagines that in this respect the German opinion hardlv differs from the French and British. President Wilson and. his Yankee press admirers ,tnay stand forJ*rightoousness and the New America. But the far-off forbears of the American race would not have been too proud to fight for principle and right, and would not hare been fobbed off with assurances about "warning." They were not so protid perhaps as their present-day descendants, tat sturdier and grimmer. What they think on the Continent about America is aptly shown by an Italian cartoon. It shows President Wilson in a great state of pious indignation at his study table and Uncle Jonathan as a butler. The President is saying to his butler: "What! Another lot of American passengers murdered! This is too much! Fetch me some more ink for my fountain pen!"