HUMBUG EXPERTS.

Taranaki Daily News, 28 December 1915, Page 2

HUMBUG EXPERTS.

TEUTONIC OPTIMISTS. The German newspaper Friendenswarte comments incisively on the inancistl and economic situations as Ijhey have been expounded by Herr Helfferieh, the Secretary of State for the German Treasury. Herr Helfferieh's statement is briefly as follows:—The British starvation war against Germany has suffered shipwreck. Germany's internal food production, aided by the institution of the Bread Card, and by the establishment of maximum prices, has assured the necessary supplies to the poorest, and at prices lower than those prevailing iu Great Britain. Nor can Germany be starved in the matter of raw material. Germany, it ■is true, is suffering inconvenience in consequence of British action, but nothing very deadly. The most important things—coal and ironare abundant home products, and German organisation lias taken care that the supply of other necessary thingscotton, wool, copper, rubber, petrol, etc. —is practically inexhaustible. The spectre of unemployment has vanished. There is more work than workers. The war is proving itself a bigger employer of labor than tne export trade. What, asks the Friedenswarte, is the object oE all this eloquence? Is it to prove that under these flourishing circumstances Germans should be satisfied with the continuance of the war, and that they should no longer regret their vanished foreign trade? In quieter times, says the peace journal, wise economists pointed out that war was the most unprofitable of all industries, and that its results are out of all proportion to the capital expended. Yet here is this expert Secretary of State who would make his countrymen believe the contrary. The Friedenswarte wishes to know why this nonsense is talked about there being more work than workmen. There is no mystery about it. It is because the labor market has been depleted by the absorption of labor into the army. Stop this humbug of making a virtue of necessity, and of trying to persuade unsophisticated people that nothing promotes their general welfare more tban war.

The Chief Burgermeister of Berlin, Herr Wermuth, was guilty of the same suggestion also when lie boasted lately that the number of unemployed in the capital had sunk from 15,000 in July, 1014', to 3354, and that the night asylums now shelter only one-tenth of the hormal number of refugees. Are these high officials juggling with these statistics in order to prove that fiermany is passing through an unexampled period of prosperity? ' In the opinion of the Friedenswarte these and similar efforts are in the highest degree unworthy and dishonest. People are not idiots to believe that a year of war is the best thing that could happen to them. The German nation knows that nothing more frightful has ever occurred than this year of war. Neirc-rin the entire history of the human race has-there ever occurred so hellish a destruction of the nation's best energy and life. What are these arithmetical acrobats trying to prove? That a war resulting in unexampled devastation, in the desolation of a million homes, a war more cruel in one year than the entire Thirty Years' War from ICIB to 1648, is not so bad after all, be-, cause there is less unemployment than there wa.s a year ago, and because the night refuges of Berlin shelter fewer outcasts than, usual!