The Daily News. WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 27, 1916. "NEVER AGAIN!"

Taranaki Daily News, 27 September 1916, Page 4

The Daily News. WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 27, 1916. "NEVER AGAIN!"

Mr. Henry Wickham Steed, the foreign editor of the London Times, has recently watched at close quarters the battle af Verdun and heard the tempest of its guns—"a tempest rendered tragic by the consciousness that, at every detonation, the devoted French infantry, some of the finest and most intelligent men in the world, were being dismembered, buried alive, or slain outright," and he writes an article that merits world-wide publicity. "The uppermost feeling at the moment and on the spot was one of impatience at being merely a listening spectator, not a combatant. Only on returning westwards and seeing fresh reserves of sturdy humanity rushing towards the shambles in huge motor lorries, did reflection overcome* the lingering thrill of the distant strife, and the question arises :;.-

sistently, 'Why? Why?' Little by little, the question transformed itself into a hard resolve, into a determination not consciously formed but elementary, like hunger or thirst —'Kever again! Never again shall the fiends in human shape that let loose this orgy of wickedness upon the world be permitted to hold mankind to ransom, and to measure the liberties of their superiors in civilisation by the might of their own scientific savagery and organised lust of wealth and power!' Hard upon the 'Why?' with its attendant resolve, followed the 'How?': and before a clear notion ap to ways and means could delineate itself in the mind came an angry wish that every minister and diplomatist, politician and publicist, whose voice may be heard or whose influence be 1 felt in the determination of peace, should see what we had seen, hear what we had 'icard, feel what we had felt. A period of compulsory presence on or near a battlefield, of salutary exposure to shell-Are, of obligate y visits to ruined towns and villages, ought indeed to be an indispensable qualification for every man who aspires or may chance to be in a position to influence conditions of peace. The war caught us unprepared. Shall 'peace, which some of our political wiseacres aver will come, as a thief in the night, find us also unprepared? We need to look and think ahead and to mobilise foi peace. It behoves every serious student of national and international affairs to make up his mind, while still under stress of war, as to the kind of Europe he would wish to see rebuilt upon the ruins of the Europe of 1914; and, having taken counsel of his fellows, to assist in formulating so sound a, peace doctrine and in securing for it so large and solid a support of public opinion that no maudlin statesman or cynical diplomatist will dare to betray its fundamental postulates. Let it not be said that peace conditions ought not to be conceived in a war spirit. The peace we shall need to impose upon the enemy should be no ordinary peace. It cannot be a pact concluded, with honorable give and take, between two parties of belligerents who have learned to respect each other. It should be the kind of peace which a strong chief of frontier police dictates to marauding tribesmen. This war has been as an earthquake laying bare the foundations of European e ; vilisation and revealing tlie national character of the sharers in the fray. These characters are not likely to change within a calculable future. The nature of the German people, as we have learned to know it during this war, i 3 its real nature. As long as the Germans were weak and divided against themselves, their brutality and greed concerned chiefly themselves. But, with national unification and the direction of the national will by an ambitious dynasty, they became a peri! to mankind. It is against the revival of Uiis peril in an active form that the Allied peoples must compel their Governments to guard. The British Empire, which will hare suffered less than any of the Allies during the struggle, is in duty bound to exert its whole power to make peace permanent. In its navy it weilds a weapon that can ensure the adoption of whatever terms the Allies may formulate. It can decline to raise the blockade of Germany or to recognise the German flag on the high seas until Germany has made full reparation for the wrong she has done. The method of ensuring the adoption of the necessary peace terms is, however, a matter of less immediate importance than the discussion of what those terms shall be; and, in the drafting of those terms, the chief aim to be pursued is the creation of a Europe so constituted that German attempts to dominate it by force of amis or economically shall henceforth be hopeless."