THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. SATURDAY, OCTOBER 24, 1908. GREAT BRITAIN AND GERMANY.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXI, Issue 3026, 24 October 1908, Page 4

THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. SATURDAY, OCTOBER 24, 1908. GREAT BRITAIN AND GERMANY.

The Berlin correspondent of the London "Daily Telegraph" attaches considerable importance to a lengthy treatise on the relations between Great Britain and Germany which appears in the newspaper "Kreuzzeitung." This paper is the organ of the Old Conservatives; that is to say, of the Prussian nobility, the men who really rule in Germany, and it does not. fill five columns with a political disquisition unless it means something. The article is an admission that the British standpoint on the sea-power question is justified, and that Germany's recent naval policy has been somewhat impetuous; together with a proposal that in future the British fleet shoulJ be altogether left out of the question, and France be taken as the standard

for German shipbuilding. "Let the English," says the writer, "build ships as many and as big as they like; that may remain a matter of indifference tu us. On the other hand, we must see that our coasts and harbours remain impregnable, which we can do at comparatively small expense, even in the colonies." It is further urged that the twoPower land standard is as essential to Germany as the two-Power sea standard is to Great Britain, and that she should, therefore, concentrate her strength in the first place on the army. As proof of the disproportionate results obtained by naval expenditure, it is pointed out that for the cost of three battleships annually five army corps could be maintained. The "Telegraph's" correspondent adds that the fact that the article protests that Germany can never make her armament a subject of international agreement does not for a moment conceal its real trend.