CURRENT TOPICS.

Taranaki Daily News, 28 February 1918, Page 4

CURRENT TOPICS.

POTENTIAL WEALTH OF SOUTH RUSSIA. The South Russian fields, skirting the north shore of the Black Sen, produce more than three-fifths of all the iron ruined in the Russian Empire, and seventcnths of the coal. Poland, especially the portions adjacent to the German frontier, contains part of the rich mineral reaion, of which Silesia is the heart. It is therefore apparent that, with the territories already occupied and those which the enemy is endeavoring to control by peaceful agreement, the Central •Powers have their hands upon all th& chief mining country of .the Russian dominions. Incidentally it may be added that the South Russian mining industries have, since their foundation~in 1800, been largely developed by French and Beljran capital. Germany cannot live without food; but she cannot prosper without coal and iron. Still more important to the Gernfen war party, she cannot fight without them. The'great bulk of Germany's, iron as is now well known, has come, not from purely German territory, but from Lorraine; and it is notorious that one of the enemy's aims in the West is to secure possession of the extremely rich basin of Nancy, Longwy, and Briey, in French Lorraine,' one of the most valuable of the French iron districts, and in fact one of the principal iron-producing districts of the world. There are special chemical features about the Lorraine ores which give them a special value "to the German war industries, and these ma> or may not characterise the Russian deposits. It is true that, in peace-time output, the French Lorraine output has been more than double that of South Russia. But, if we consider the two districts from this point of view, it becomes evident that the acquisition of a good working control over the Ukraine with its mines and in addition its vast food-producng capabilites and its largo pop-Htion, might be regarded as compensating to a large degree for the disappointment if Germany should fail in her plan for keeping the Lorraine region. Ukraine, once under the domination of the Central Powers, becomes a great potential source of that kind of weatlth which r peculiarly desired by a military nation. South Russia is, in short, one of tho chief mineral reservoirs of Europe.