DR. STRESEMANN

Dominion, Volume 19, Issue 95, 16 January 1926, Page 19

DR. STRESEMANN

STRONG MAN OF GERMANY A SUPREME REALIST Of the foreign statesmen associated with the Locarno Treaty, signed iu London, the dominating personality is Dr. Gustav Stresemann, Germany s ‘•foreign Minister. His political career is almost as paradoxical as that oi Mussolini, the one-time Socialist. An annexationist during the war, Dr. Sbesemann was one of the first Germans to realise that, having lost the war, Germany must accept the consequences (writes Leonard Spray in the London “Dailv Chronicle’”). Known in 1917 as "Ludendorff’s Young Man,” he publicly rebuked Ludendorff for mixing politics with the conduct of strategy. Leadei of the Parliamentary .Party representing the great industrialists, he denounced and fought those magnates when thev tried to subordinate the interests ol me State to those of private commerce. Advocate, when the French invaded the Ruhr, of passive resistance, he took office as Chancellor—the equivalent of the Premiership iu this coun-try—-at th.-, very moment when the surrender of that weapon was inevitable, because the -mrrency had collapsed and social chaos was only avoided by submission. An .wowed. Monarch■st, tie fought the Monarchists when rheir actions imperilled the Republic. After alj, it is often the most, stupid people wno are the most "consistent.” And the key to Dr. Stre.semann’s bewildering record—bewildering if that record is superficially regarded—is that tic is a supreme realist, with the courage and optimism of the man who is prepared in the light of later knowledge, to admit past errors, .to face facts as he finds them, and, if he be a leader of mhen, to compel other men, too, to face those facts. Dr. Stresemann’s outlook, and policy have always been governed by the light atiead. He is no traditionalist —"let the dead past bury its dead.” He was the first of Germany’s Conservative leaders to say to the people, “We must realise that we have lost the war. We have for years deceived ourselves as to the consequences of a lost war; we now see those consequences in all their terribleness before us.”

Those words required courage for their public utterance. They- '■ were spoken at a moment when the speaker had his back to the wall; when, faced with a Reichstag in revolt against his demand for dictatorial powers, he compelled its surrender bv going straight to the President and obtaining authority for its dismissal.

Not even his bitterest opponents have denied to Dr. Stresemann the quality' of coirrage. Though reared in Conservatism, his career has been a continual challenge to the obscurantist forces through which that career was advanced from ; ts beginnings in the study of history and political, economy to its apotheosis in the Chancellorship of the Reich.

It. required courage to tell Germany that it must abandon for ever any dream of recovering Alsace or Lorraine. and that was whet the Lutb.erStresemann Government did when if initiated the negotiations that triumphantlv culminated in the Locarno Treatv. For that initiation G-rman.’’ deserves everlasting credit, of which the largest personal share is due to Dr. Stresemann