IF GERMANY HAD WON.

Taranaki Daily News, 4 February 1922, Page 11

IF GERMANY HAD WON.

MR. PAGE’S VIVID LETTERS. “THE BRITISH OUTLAST ANYBODY IN WAR.” A further instalment of the interesting letters written from London during the war by the late Mr. Walter H. Page, then American Ambassador to Great Britain has been published in the World’s Work. The letters, variously addressed to President Wilson, Colonel House and members of his family, exhibit Mr. Page’s constant friendliness to Britain and his prescient fears for the safety of the United States—“if Germany should win.” To Colonel House he wrote on September 22, 1914:

“The danger, of course, as all the world is beginning to fear, is that the Kaiser, after a local victory—especially if he should take Paris—will propose peace in time, as he will hope, to save his throne, his dynasty, his system. That will be a dangerous day. The horror of war will have a tendency to make many persons in the countries of the Allies accept it. AU the peacefolk in the wo will say ‘Accept it!’ But if he and bin ..rone and his dynasty and his system be saved, in twenty-five years the whole job must be done over again.” Mr. Page tells Colonel House that he had had a conversation with Viscount (then Sir Edward) Grey on that day in which the Foreign Secretary said: “If sheer brute force conquers Europe, the United States will be the only country where life wiU be worth living; and in time you will have to fight against it, too, if it conquer Europe. On that, Mr. Page records his own opinion : “The whole world is bound to be changed as a result of this war. If Germany should win, our Monroe doctrine would be shot in two, and we should have to get ‘out of the sun.’ The military party is a party of conquest—absolutely.” How long would the war last? • “A soldier—a man in the War Office—told me today (September 22, 1914) that Lord Kitchener had just told him that the war may last for several years. That, I confess, retms to mb very iznprobab’e, and (what is of more importance) it is not the notion held by most men whose judgment I respect.”

But the British, he continues, are now “going about the business of war as if they knew they would continue it indefinitely.” “The grim efficiency of their work even in small details,” he says, ‘ was illustrated to-day by the Government’s informing us that a German handyman whom the German Ambassador left at his Embassy (placed under the charge of the American Ambassador) with the English Government’s consent is a spy—that he sends verbal messages to Germany by women who are permitted to go home, and they have found letters written by him sewed in some of these women’s undergarments!” Regarding another spy incident, he observes: “The English were slow in getting into full action, but now they never miss a trick, little or big. “The other day a commercial telegram was sent (or started) by Mr. Bryan for some bank or trading concern, in the United States, managed by Germans, to some correspondent of their’s in Germany. It contained the wards, ‘Where is Harry?’ The censor here stopped it. It was brought to me with the explanation that ‘Harry’ is one of the most notorious of German spies—whom they would like to catch.” After barely six weeks of the war, Mr. Page reached this conclusion: “The Germane have far more than their match in resources and in shrewdness—and character. As the bloody drama unfolds itself the hollow pretence and essential barbarity of Prussian militarism become plainer and plainer; there is no doubt' of that. And so does the invincibility of this race. . .

“It isn’t an accident (in a letter to President Wilson, undated) that these people own a fifth of the world. Utterly unwarlike, they outlast anybody else when war comes. You don’t get a sense of fighting here—only of endurance and high resolve. Fighting is a sort of incident in the struggle to keep their world from German domination.”

Another letter to Colonel House on October 11, 1914, opens with: “There is absolutely nothing to write. It is war, war, war all the tune. ... Every aspect of it gets on your nerves. I can’t keep from wondering how the world will seem after it is over—Germany'(that is, Prussia and its system) cut out like a cancer; England owning still more of the Earth; Belgium—all the men dead; France bankrupt; Russia admitted to the Society of Nations; the British Empire entering on a new lease of life; no great navy but one; no great army but the Russian; nearly all the Governments in Europe bankrupt; Germany gone from the sea —in ten years it will be difficult *to recall clearly Europe of the last ten years. And the future of the world more than ever in our hands!” A postscript appended to this letter is of extraordinary interest in the light of the Washington Conference. “Oh, well, the world'has got to choose whether it will have English or German domination in Europe; that’s the single big question at issue. For my part I’ll risk the English and, then make a fresh start to outstrip them in the spread of well-being; in the elevation of mankind of all classes; in the broadening of democracy and democratic rule (which is the sheet anchor of all men’s hopes) ; in the spread of human feeling and action; in the growth of human kindness; in the tender treatment of women ami children and the old; in literature; in art; in the abatement of suffering; in great changes in economic conditions which discourage poverty; and in science, which gives us new leases on life and new tools and wider visions. These are our world tasks, with England as our friendly rival and helper. God bless us.”