GERMANY'S SHIP DEBT.
HOW CAN IT BE PAID. In the London Daily Mail, Richard Thirkell writes: From the beginning of the war down to the end of October the mercantile navies of the world, British, Allied and neutral, suffered a loss of 15,025,962 gross tons, and out of this total 7,034,004 tons were British. The figures do not represent exclusively war losses. When the Admiralty issued tile weekly returns of ships sunk the figures included only those lost through mine or submarine, but since the first publication of sinkings in terms of tonnage "losses by enemy action and marine risk has been the formula, and the public has no means of differentiating between the two. The figures quoted above, therefore, include wrecks, fonnderings. vessels detained in enemy ports at tHe outbreak of war, those destroyed by the Emden and other raiders, and so forth.
The- precise amount of Germany's tonnage debt to civilisation may never be known, though a nation which deliberately adopted the unspeakable policy of sinking without trace could have no cause of i-omplaint if every case in which the smallest doubt existed were automatically put down to her '•credit." It must be remembered, too, that many of the socalled "marine risks" (such as steaming in convoy, without lights, and with the bulk of the normal aids to navigation removed from the coasts) would never have had to be faced but for the submarine menace.
At the very lowest estimate, however, at least eighty per cent, of these losses have been brought about by German submarines and mines, inhumanly and illegally employed. This means, in round figures, that the Huns' debt to Britain is 7,200,000 tons, and to the rest of the world 4,800,000 tons—a total of 12,000,000 tons.
Can Germany liquidate that debt on a (6n-for-ton basis? To do so at once is, of course, out of the question, for the debt represents more than two tons for every one that Germany possessed in the summer of 1914. According to an official estimate, the Huns now have some ;i,'.']o,ooo tons of shipping, including !t50,000 tons built during the war. Every ton of this that is serviceable should be handed over to the Allies as one of the conditions of peace. Possibly some 2,000,000 tons would be obtained in this way—still leaving a debt of five times that amount to be paid off. And how? Well, if if is to be paid in kind there is only one way, and that is by means of a levy on the output of Hun built 414,000 gross tons of merchantmen, and they also completed 102,500 displacement tons of warships, apart from submarines.
Allowing for the check that will tertainly be placed upon warship construction in Germany, that nation is clearly capable of turning out half a million tons of merchant shipping a year. Is there any reason why 00 per cent., or even more, of that output should not be handed over year by year until the tonnage debt is paid off?
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Taranaki Daily News, 22 March 1919, Page 7
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502GERMANY'S SHIP DEBT. Taranaki Daily News, 22 March 1919, Page 7
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