NO MORE GERMAN GOODS.

Auckland Star, Volume XLVI, Issue 309, 29 December 1915, Page 8

NO MORE GERMAN GOODS.

AFTER BEATING HIS ARMS BAN HIS TRADE. CLOSE THE DOOR. EMPIRE SELF;CONTAINED. (By ROBERT BLATCHFORD.) No; I should not like to be a German, nor on the German side. Even the weakness and vacillation of our Government cannot save Germany. Germany is an atavist. She is lighting against evolution. She has raised up aginst her the unconquerable spirit of human civilisation. Men fight against her as against a plague. She is an atavist, and must be granted neither peace nor quarter. The British do not hate their enemies. They are not good haters. But they feel about the Germans as they feci about the germs of cholera. They must be driven out, or we must die.

Of course I am speaking thus of the British people, not of the bench of Weary Willies who are supposed to govern the country. The BiitTsh nation will wake up finally because they will have to wake up. The Government will follo.v pretending to lead. Like the Duke of Plaza Toro, they will " lead their regiments from behind; they will find it less exciting." Tlie country is waking. The real purpose of the war, the real issue at stake, are perfectly understood by millions. RE-ARMING THE HUNS. As Sir Oliver Lodge puts it in his book, "On the War and After": "Death is preferable to German rule of the kind we should experience if conquered, and if the dormant national bate, fostered by lies and now fanned into a blaze, were set free on the vanquished. What has been done in Belgium would be done in England, and more also. Humanity cannot afford to forego the gain to he derived from a struggle such as this; nor can it run the risk of having such an awful conflict ever repeated."

" Such an awful conflict ever repeated," that also has to be taken to heart. Not only must we win, and win decisively, but, having won, we must take steps to make sure that such an awful conflict can never be repeated. A friend of mine was at a public meeting a few days ago, and heard an Englishman declare that after the war be should continue to get his potash from Germany. He could not, he said, get all he needed in England. Now, to fight Germany, to squander blood and gold in a desperate struggle with her, and then to afford her means to build up wcatih again and repeat her murderous attacks on peaceable neighbours, that so,ems to mc to be too quixotically foolish, even for Englishmen. SHUT THE DOOR TIGHT. There has got to be a fight, and it will be a long and a hard fight to keep Germans and German trade out of the United Kingdom and the rest of the Empire after the war. I know quite well that the advocates of this sano and patriotic policy will meet with an opposition as bitter as when they advised preparation for war; and the opposition will come from the samp people. We shall find ourselves confronted with .ill . the musty old Yrec Trade, Radical and Nonconformist shibboleths. We shall be called Protectionists. "We shall hear all the slop about forgiving our enemies, and keeping an open door to .the world.

I do not want to forgive my enemies, nor to keep an open door to the German

spy and the German blackleg and the German knave. I want to keep the 1 door shut tight and to keep the un-1 speakable Hun outside it. Tlie proper answer to the Briton who cannot find potash in England is that ho has got to find it in England or in France, in Russia or in America, or he has got to do without it. There is nothing we need that cannot be produced in our own Empire or in the countries of our Allies. I mention this matter because I can guess what opposition it will raise, and because I think the sooner we begin to educate the public the better. We do not want Germany to prepare for an-, other war through our trade, nor do we want spies, pirates, baby-killers, and poisoners of wells in our midst.