"FACE TO FACE WITH KAISERISM."

Taranaki Daily News, 4 June 1918, Page 6

"FACE TO FACE WITH KAISERISM."

AFTER THE WAR. I (By J. AV. Gerard, formerly American Ambassador in Berlin.) No one but a fortune-teller or professional seer dares to predict the condition of the world after this war. Only mere sugge;iiions can be thrown out, shadows of prophecy as to what may come. AA'ill the tide of emigration turn ironi Europe and United States toother countries, or will people of German birth and descent leave America to return to the Fatherland after the war? I made it my business after I had learned German to talk to many of the J plain people in Berlin and elsewhere to get their views. I found that the common soldiers, especially those representing the class of skilled workingmen in the industrial centres, where almost unanimous in saying that after the war and at the first opportunity they intended to leave Germany, to turn from a country capable of perpetrating this calamity on the world, a country where they had been subject not alone to military service but to a cruel and oppressive caste system of discipline. I be> lieve that Germany will enact laws against emigration and that there will be zone;; of espionage on all German frontiers designed to watch and keep back such Germans as may seek to escape to other countries. In Austria even more stringent laws will be necessary to keep the unmarriedmales from leaving. I know the" experts of the United States Government believe at leastthree millions of Slovaks, Greeks, etc., will leave America after the war, taking with them the money they have earned for investment in new opportunities in the Old Country. AVith this view I cannot agree. The soil of the European continent is too poor, wages too small, hours too long, and distaste for the military caste systems too great to tempt those who have tasted the equality and the freedom of America. Why to-day an ordinary coalminer in Pennsylvania can earn 5000 dollars (£1000) a year, a greater sum than the pay of a 'Prussian or Austrian general! Why should this miner go back to insult and slavery?

THE GERMAN WORKMAN. German employers will never be able to grind down their workmen as before tlie war. The men who have fought in tlie trenches will return with a new feeling of independence, a new spirit of revolt against the caste prejudices, n disinclination to do the same work in the same hours and for the same wages. Jly tailor in Berlin told me that several of his men who had returned after being discharged from the Army because of some physical disability or wounds took an entirely different attitude, and that one of them, for example, had said to him:—"Do not think that I liave come back to work as before. I have the Iron Cross, I have helped to save Germany. I am a hero, and I do not propose again to be your industrial slave.'' That is the new spirit which after the war will animate the deceived, hitherto down-trodden lower classes of Germany. In our own country, the balance of j political power may be held by the soldiers who are enlisted in the war and who, like the G. A. R.'s after the Civil War, may doubtless organize not only for protection but for political purposes. And this great restless body of returned troops, veterans of wars beyond the seas, may change our whole foreign policy in ways of which we do not dream. We shall be a more warlike nation, less patient to bear insult, more ready for war, unless this war ends all wars.

The war after the war, in trade and commerce, may be long and bitter. The rivers of Germany are lined with ships of seven or eight thousand tons, many of them built or completed since the war, and Germany designs as her first play in this commercial war to seize the carrying trade of the world. The German exporter has lost his trade for years. Alliances have already been made great industries, such as the dyestuff industry, in preparation for a sudden and sustained attack upon that new industry in America. Prices will be cut to far below the cost of production in order that the. new industry in America fighting single handed against the single head German trust may be driven from the field. The German Government will take a practical hand in this contest, and only the combination erection of a tariff wall of defence can prevent the Americans, if each fight single handed and for his own ends, from falling before the united, efficient, and bitter assault of German trade rivals.

WOMEN IN INDUSTRY. The war has brought new power and new responsibility to women. Armed with the franchise thev will demaad not only equal rights but equal pay. In Great Britain alone, before the war, there were no fewer than 500,000 women workers where now over five million carry the burden even of the war industries of the country. Uuless the war ends with a victory so decisive for the Allies that an era of universal peace shall dawn for the world, each nation will constitute itself an armed camp, fearing always that the German, with his lust for war and conquest, will again terrorise the world by a sudden assault. And a necessary sequence of this preparation for war will be the desire of each nation to be self-sufficient to produce within itself those materials indispensabe for the waging of war. Capital will be wasted because each nation will store up quantities of these materials necessary to war which it is compelled to import from other countries. For instance, Germany will always carry great stocks of grain and fats, of copper and cotton and wool, all of the materials for the lack of which she suffered during the present war. In my first book I touched on the change in the industrial system that will be brought about by the socialized buying and selling introduced first by Germany, and which must be copied by the other nations if tliey desire to compete on equal terms with that country. In Germany for several years after the war at least, and perhaps as a permanent regulation, the purchase of all luxuries outside of Germany will he forbidden because of the desire to keep German gold and credits at home. THE CHEAPEST MARKET. Germans have even stated to me that they do not fear in a trade war any preirdioe created against them in other "o'mtries' by. their actions during this ' war. They saw that a man alwavji will

buy where he can buy the cheapest, and that however much a merchant may hate tho Germans after the war, if he can buy the goods he wants for his use from Germany at a cheaper rate than anywhere else, he will forget his prejudices in the interest of his pocketbook.

This is a question which each reader will have to solve for himself. Personally, I believe that in England, in France, and in America, too, if the war should last a long time, the prejudice against German trickery and brutality in war will become so great that many a merchant will prefer to lose a little money rather than deaf with German sellers. However, the appeal of the pocket-book is always so earnest and so insistent that the Germans may. be right in the view that financial considerations will weigh down the balance as against the prejudice engendered in this struggle. And if there comes a change of Government in Germany, if the Hohenzollerns 110 longer control, or I if in a liberalized Germany the Ministers are responsible to a popular Parliament, then the commercial prejudice certainly will not last long. The boycott of Germany for 50 years suggested by the American Chamber of Commerce is a most powerful weapon. And why, if wara are to continue j after this one, should we contribute to German trade profits, and consequently ] to German preparations for another , war? The nations of the Allies must j reckon, too, with the bitter, bitter hate felt for them by the whole German people—and only one who has been in Germany since the war can realise its intensity.

GERMAN BARBARITIES. One great factor in forcing a change of Government will be the desire of the individual German after the war to say that the Government of his country existing then is not the Government that ordered the shooting of Edith Cavell, the enslavement of the women and girls of Northern France, the deportation of the Belgian work-ing-men, the horrors of the prison camps, the burning of Louvain, and all the other countless barbarities and cruelties ordered by the German military commanders. Imagine after this war in some distant Island, perhaps a Frenchman, an Englishman, an American, a Portuguese an Italian all seated at the dining table of a little hotel. A German comes in and seeks to join them. Will he be treated on an equality? Will he be taken into their society? Or will he be treated as a leper and a pariah? The German will wish to be in a position to say:—"Why, gentlemen, I was against all these cruelties. I was against the sinking of the Lusitania, and the murder of its women and children. I was against the starving of Poland and the slaughter of the Armenians and the crucifixion of prisoners, and we, Germans, have thrown out the Government that was responsible fol these horrors." Stronger than any other consideration will be the desire of the German to repudiate these acts which have made the Germany of today a Cain among the nations—an outcast branded with the mark of shame. TRUST. Just as to-day it is not isolated armies, but whole peoples in arms, that are opposed, so in the war of commerce after the war not single producers and exporters, corporations, or individuals, but whole nations, will meet in tha markets of the world. Germany has favoured trusts—controlling prices and unfair competition—and we shall encounter in buying and in selling the whole German nation ranked behind their Central Buying Company in buying and their Kartels in selling. Isolated firms and individuals cannot on our side cope with such an offensive —but we are hampered in effectiveness by the so-called Sherman law—a law from which England is free. Great changes are coining in the social -structure of the world. We are on the threshold of a great readjustment. Whatever else our entrance into the war may accomplish, let us hope that it will have made of us a nation with the throb of a single patriotism and the steady pulse of an energetio efficiency that shall not merely seek in honest nvalry to compete with other