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.
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Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXII, Issue 3174, 27 April 1909, Page 4
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462THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. TUESDAY, APRIL 27, 1909. BRITAIN AND GERMANY. Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXII, Issue 3174, 27 April 1909, Page 4
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