HUNS' HARI-KARI.

Taranaki Daily News, 12 February 1916, Page 2

HUNS' HARI-KARI.

A TRAGIC PROSPECT. GERMANY'S BLANK FUTURE. WHAT SHE HAS THROWN AWAY. (By Twells Brex). "The twentieth century belongs to ;',e Germans."—Pre-war German proverb. When the German Emperor takes a few days' respite from the war councils on his battlefronts, when the Imperial train rumbles over a Germany that has become a- haunted land of silent factories, shuttered warehouses, maimed men, broken women and fatherless children, docs lie ever lift a mental periscope and look i;uo Germany's future? Whetbtr he wins the war or loses the war, or whs'lter the war ends in a stalemate, the Kaiser knows now. that the prosperity of his Empire has melted like snow on the face of the desert. He knows now that the Germany that was built by liia grandfather and his father has crumbled as fortress walls have crumbled before -his mortars. , These are black days for us peoples of the Allied nations, but it is no mean mental tonic to borrow the Kaiser's periscope and look into this twentieth century that belongs so terribly to the Germans. The Kaiser is not always surrounded by generals drunken with transient victory ; he is not always surrounded by that caJnarilla of feverish decadents who a few years ago staggered Europe by their scandals of nameless vice; he is not always unborne by foaming PanGernmns who play on his megalomaniac ambition of the empiry of Europe. There are other men in Germany who still have access to the Kaiser; the remnant of Germany's divines who have not yet abjured Christianity; the remnant of Germany's professors and philosophers wlio have not yet abjured reason; the remnant of Germany's business men who still cling to her foundering trade. Do none of these ever dare to -hint to tho "All-Highest" of the black ilog that ride 3 their minds? Does Kaiser-Jekvll 'himself never whisper in the night to Kaiser-Hyde?

LOOKING FOR O\"F, GERMAN FUNNEL. "The twentieth century belongs to the Germans.'' There is one Herr Ballin who came come to his master with figures at his finger-ends to show how wellfounded was that, proverb until August, 1914. He can s'how nim that in that fateful summer Germany, ranked second among maritime countries, with upwards of "2000 large oceangoing steamers manned by 80,000 German sailors. He can show him that in 1912 the exports of German merchandise were 484 millions, her imports 578'/" millions, and that the normal growth of those exports and imports promised, in a few years to outpass the exports and imports of her rival, Great Britain. He can show that, before the war, Germany supplied onequarter of the world's production of raw iron; that the chemical industry, employing a quarter of a million Germans, supplied four-fifths of the total requirements or all other industrial countries; that the furriers' turnover at Leipzig alone was over five million pounds, and that the principal market for that turnover was the 'United Kingdom, He can point, out also that the whole trade of Germany had come to depend largely on imports of raw materials, that tlie bulk of those imports have been entirely stopped, and all that trade is paralysed. And all the history of tbe world records that commerce is like a man when paralysis has once stricken'him; it can never wholly recover.

RUSTING AWAY. Herr Ballin can hold up the periscope for liis imperial master, and urge liini to look tlirough It over all the seas of the world for one German funnel. He can bid him look across the Atlantic and behold, vast even against, the mammoth walls of New York. Germany's rusting sea glory, the leviathan Vatcrland, eating up a millionaire's income daily in the bare interest on her cost. He can then turn the periscope upon cobwebbetl Hamburg nnil show his master, rank upon rank, bowsprit to stern, the fleet of Germany's commerce, wasting even more surely and ignominiously than thiit other German fleet at Kiel. Does the German Emperor ever hold privy converse with that unhappy sinecurist, his Colonial Minister? Dr. Solf has a sorrv set of maps and statistics for the "All-Highcst's" eye. Before the war the German colonies had a total area of over a million square miles. But the truly terrible thing that the Kaiser beholds through that periscope that peers over the wall of the future is not political, financial or material. It is concerned not with dominion, colonies or commerce; it will be unaltered by victory or defeat. It is psychical. WHAT GERMANY HAS LOST. The twentieth century that "belong?" to the Germany is to witness the. long account of the Kaiser and his people with tue Christianity they have spurned, the humanity they have outraged, te coral reef of civilisation they have mined, and the common code of human conduct they have broken into shards. There are night watches already of the New Attila when lie must sweat at the thoughts of the epithets that history, even a thousand years after this century that ''belongs'' to him, will barb her pen with when she writes his name. There is a writing which flames on the midnight upon castle wall or Held tent of the German Emperor, and the words of it are: "As long as men have pens and women have tongues to tell children of the throes that you brought upon the world will your name be the most accursed of all human names except that of .Tildas."

No device or cajolery of Hip Kaiser or the Germain can alter that future. Xo repentance or conjuration can win lier tile stony and sickened heart of Europe. How many years will it be before decent men of this world will knowingly sit at table with a German, before they will shake the spotted German hand, or scelc travel for either business or pleasure in the German land, or hold indeed any ordinary hun'.an comity with the Teuton? Will tlie Belgians, with their memories of Vise and Louvain? Will the French—even after Rlieims has repaired her shattered holiness? Will the Russians—with that picture ever red before their evea of the massacres and tlie (lights of Poland? Shall we British —with the ghost of the Lusitania still wailing: her spectral siren? That is tlie twentieth century that belongs to Germany.