BOMBASTIC WAR LOAN PROSPECTUS

Evening Post, Volume XC, Issue 110, 5 November 1915, Page 4

BOMBASTIC WAR LOAN PROSPECTUS

PLENTY OF BREAD AND MEAT.

Adopting the tactics of a company promoter with doubtful shares to sell, the German Government is now engaged in a campaign to popularise the third £500,000,000 war loan, writes Frederic William Wile, late Berlin correspondent of the London Daily Mail to that journal. A sort of national prospectus has been supplied to the press with a view to convincing the public, especially small investors, that there is no security in the world so gilt-edged as the new 5 per cent. Hun obligations. These are some of the facts and figures adduced :— The enemy's plan to starve Germany of food and rawstuffs has failed.

Natural production and ir.amifacturiug organisation have been so regulated that there will be adequate supplies for a long time to come.

A- harvest yield of about 10,000,000 tons of rye, 4,000,000 tons of wheat, 3,000,000 tons of barley, 4,0C0,000 tons of potatoes, to which there need to be added very considerable quantities of sugar-beets, vegetables, and plants used as food, has shown itself sufficient to nourish a population of 67,030,000 souls, plus 1,500,000 prisoners of war, from one harvest to another. We could, indeed, feed two or three times as many prisoners without suffering ourselves. We begin the new harvest year with considerable quantities of flour. Bread rations for the working classes ccrald be increased, and potato supplies are so big that important quantities have beisi spared for starch f?.ctories and distilleries. -Hie excellent condition of. the cattle industry (a. supply of 20,000,000 bullocks and over 21,000,000 pigs) guarantees the meat requirements of our people. The prospectus goes on to explain that the war has had no injurious effects on the steel and iron industry, the backbone of German economic life. The production of pigiron is said to have doubled since the beginning of the war and to be more than equal again to the average' monthly production of England before the war. Germany and her allies, unlike their enemies, have been, able to keep themselves fully supplied with guns and other munitions from their own resources. •Unemployment, thanks to "war industry," has decreased from month to month. The Imperial Bank's £?old reserve (now £120,000,000) has increased during the war by £1,500,000 a week. How " normal" Germany's domestic trade has remained is evidenced by the' fact that the freight income of the Prussian State Railways since December, 1914, has been 90 per cent, of peace revenue, and passenger revenue 80 per cent. In the coal trade production ranged between 70 per cent, of normal in Rhineland-Westphalia and 133 per cent, in the "briquette" regions of Central Germany. In Upper Silesia coal production was within 2J per cent, of normal output.