“SECOND PUNIC WAR”

Wairarapa Times-Age, 11 December 1941, Page 6

“SECOND PUNIC WAR”

LIGHT ON GERMAN OUTLOOK. Though not a very violent participant in the controversy about Germany’s “black record,” writes “Janus” in the “Spectator,” I have always felt ’that a strong case could be made against her consistent policy for the past eighty years at least. A passage I happen to have come on in the last few days in Dr. H. A. L. Fisher’s “An Unfinished Autobiography” has some bearing on that, in the picture it gives of Germany not indeed eighty, but just over fifty, years ago. “One day in the late autumn of 1890,” he writes, “a fellow-member of the Historische Verein .(at Gottingen) explained to mewith the utmost friendliness that Germany regarded Britain as her eternal enemy and predestined victim. We Britons had won an Empire by good fortune when Germany was asleep, and we should lose it inevitably now that Germany was fully awake. Britain was Carthage. Germany was Rome. Even if the first Punic war was not successful there would be other Punic wars to follow. Germany aspired to rule the world. Britain stood in her way. The stage was set for a great, an inexorable, struggle. ’’This, says Dr. Fisher expressly, .was a general, nbt an individual, view. That is a depressing assurance.