Thank you for correcting the text in this article. Your corrections improve Papers Past searches for everyone. See the latest corrections.

This article contains searchable text which was automatically generated and may contain errors. Join the community and correct any errors you spot to help us improve Papers Past.

Article image
Article image
Article image
Article image
Article image
Article image

THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. TUESDAY, APRIL 27, 1909. BRITAIN AND GERMANY.

Although international politics display in heroic proportion that tendency to make queer badfellows which is proverbially ascribed to poverty, they would excel their own eccentricity if by any ugly mischance Germany and Great Britain came to blnws, so many and so ancient are the ties between the two nations, so seldom have they disagreed, so often have they stood together in those life and death crises that indiaaolubly bind individuals together, and iu a better ordered world would similarly bind peoples. The British nation is the product of a blend that stil 1 works. That, indeed, is a prime source of the greatness it has won through successive glorious generations, for only the strongest fare forth anu conquer, and the Britisher is the product of centuries of fusion by conquerors. But among the nation's fountain heads Germany stands memoralised by the very name of England, bestowed in memory of "Engleland"—the land of "the freenecked man whose long hair floated over a neck that had never bent to a ord," where modern political government originated, and where alone in Europe the victorious Romans were beaten back. And as far as that goes, as the Danes and Normans had always been free men, it has been well said that we have every reason to be proud of our ancestry. Whether by chance or because interest or kinship kept them in unison, Germans and English have generally been found together in the greater stresses of tha intervening centuries. Halfway through the eighteenth century England joined Austria in the "war of succession" against Prussia and her allies — among them France, strangely enough—but that was one of the rarest instances. Down to the present these peoples have bfcen allies with a consistency that callous history has seldom if ever allowed to be equalled. That friendship found its climax in the Napoleonic wars. How England and Prussia co-operated then, after Prussia had been humiliated to the dust in her terribly mistaken cultivation of the ruthless conqueror's favour; how between them they brought Napoleon down*

England supplying men, money, and the great soldier who counted for as much as both; ard how there began for Germany then that onward movement which has . solidified into a mighty empire the peoples that a century ago were a rabble of nearly three hundred independent Powers, kings, princes, free towns, Electors, and ecclesiastical sovereignties—is all history. And in that record English influence is deeply veined. If the British people owe their origin in great part to Germany, they can well claim to have repaid the obligation over and over again, for without English help, given at great sacrifice of life and money, Germany could never have been what she is to-day.

Permanent link to this item
Hononga pūmau ki tēnei tūemi

https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/WAG19090427.2.7

Bibliographic details
Ngā taipitopito pukapuka

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXII, Issue 3174, 27 April 1909, Page 4

Word count
Tapeke kupu
462

THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. TUESDAY, APRIL 27, 1909. BRITAIN AND GERMANY. Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXII, Issue 3174, 27 April 1909, Page 4

THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. TUESDAY, APRIL 27, 1909. BRITAIN AND GERMANY. Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXII, Issue 3174, 27 April 1909, Page 4

Help

Log in or create a Papers Past website account

Use your Papers Past website account to correct newspaper text.

By creating and using this account you agree to our terms of use.

Log in with RealMe®

If you’ve used a RealMe login somewhere else, you can use it here too. If you don’t already have a username and password, just click Log in and you can choose to create one.


Log in again to continue your work

Your session has expired.

Log in again with RealMe®


Alert