A MATTER OF INDIFFERENCE.

Taranaki Daily News, 27 March 1916, Page 8

A MATTER OF INDIFFERENCE.

The Paris edition of the New York Herald, has an article on the Kaiser's malady, of which the following is a translation:—lt was said of a certain diplomat, "What object has he to be ill," We likewise ask, "What object, has the Kaiser in annually proclaiming hi,s cancer?" For every, year we hear that Willium 11. will soon'render up his soul to his "Old God," and, as if by chance, this announcement always occurs at the same period of the year. We must wait for something definite; we do not wisli any good for our worst enemy. But the worst that we can wish for him is to live long enough to be chastised for the crimes that he has committed. If he died before the end of the war which he has unchained, if he died before having seen want and ruin beat his people to the earth, before having been judged by all the poor wretches who owe their misfortunes to him, it would be for him a divine bene-fit,-an escape. But let us be assured; William 11. will live; the hand that grips his throat has not yet tightened its dutch. The only talk is of a phlegmatic condition, which the Imperial doctors translate by "an inflammation of the cellular tissue." We shall soon learn that the Wicked Man is not dead. And when he is dead, what purpose wilt have been served? It is not one man only whom the whole, world is fighting; it is a military caste; it is the idea of absolutism and domination; it is all that band of chieftains who have welcomed the war as a windfall, and who, even if conquered, will try to keep up the scourge of armaments.' When the Crown Prince succeeds his: father the ambition of Prussian .Imperialism will not be weakened thereby. It is not the Kaiser who has created the plans which his armies carry out, it is the statesmen, in accord with the generals, who have drawn up the five or six projects whie.h the Kaiser has successfully 'attempted It would be paradoxical to maintain that this Sovereign, the most absolute of a ll depends in reality on his court, 'But we! cannot be contradicted if we affirm that he has done no more than conform his will to that of the powerful intellects that surround him; ai>d his successor will be compelled to do the same. It is not an Emperor that must disappear, it is the whole social state that must be annihilated; so whether cancer, cold tumor, ar abscess, it matters little to us what complaint William 11. suffers from. His country suffers from another evil, and it will be necessary to have recourse to "intervention."