SOLVING THE GERMAN PROBLEM

Ellesmere Guardian, Volume LXI, Issue 15, 23 February 1940, Page 3

SOLVING THE GERMAN PROBLEM

"There is no real solution of the German problem except through the political education of the German people—an education which will make them, man for man the political equals of their politically more intelligent neighbours—a slow process, and a process that is not likely to be accomplished except at the cost of much effort and suffering. There is much that the more fortunate Great Powers, the United States, Great Britain and, France, might have done, both before and since the Great War, to promote that process of education . . . Today they and the rest of Europe

find themselves face to face with a

phenomenon previously unknown in history of the world—a modern '" nation whose rulers have organised the whole of its life, every element in it which is organisable at all— political, economic, social, and intellectual, on a military basis, a basis which assumes a chronic condition of war. Never since the days of ancient Sparta has a nation ■been so systematically militarised. , It may, of course,, be that militarism, carries within it its own antidote and that this system, with its corollary of economic self-suffi-ciency, will collapse by its own weight. But in the meantime it is there before our eyes, powerful, aggressive, and menacing, deliberately conceived for the purpose of overthrowing the world order to which history and geography have accustomed us, and inaugurating a new one in the name of dynamic justice."—Sir Alfred Zimmern.