Evening Post. TUESDAY SEPTEMBER, 25, 1917. "NOT UNDERSTOOD!"

Evening Post, Volume XCIV, Issue 74, 25 September 1917, Page 6

Evening Post. TUESDAY SEPTEMBER, 25, 1917. "NOT UNDERSTOOD!"

■After pointing out that the real fathers of the conspiracy against the peace and honour of Germany had long since fallen '^victims to the wild storms of dissatisfaction at the development of their work," the Munchner Neueste Nacbrichteii was grieved and puzzled to find BethmannHollweg added to the casualty list. Lord Grey and the other anti-German conspirators had been swept away by the failure of their military plans, but no such explanation was possible in^the case of the German statesman, for, as everybody knows, Germany has been going stronger than ever during the last six months; "the military position of Germany, even at the end of the third year of war, is so strong and sure that of a truth it provided no reason for arraigning the leading statesman." It is lamentable indeed that German politics has not been distinguished by the calm which the even tenor of her three years of military triumphs would have justified, and that the late Chancellor has fallen a 'blameless victim to this unac-1 countable unrest. "It would have given us a feeling of pride," the Munchner Neueste Nachrichten naively proceeded, " if the man who was called to proclaim the purity of our conscience on the first day of war had also been able on the first day of negotiations, as the spokesman of victorious right, to hurl in the faces of our enemies their guilt for the world-disaster." We should all have been glad to see the statesman who began the war by tearing up " a scrap of paper" retaining office until he had superintended the signing of that other scrap of paper, backed on this occasion by something more solid than German honour, for which a beaten Germany will have to provide at the end of the war. But, though this signal illustration of poetical justice is not to be, we may at least rejoice that the traditions of piety and virtue which Bethmann-Hollweg so admirably maintained and. embellished are finding an equally brilliant exponent in his successor. In unction, in righteousness, in the disinterested passion for peace, in the deprecation of racial hatreds, in an almost abject humility, the most momentous document yet issued to the world by the new Chancellor will stand comparison with the noblest effort of his predecessor. The virtuous and peaceful ideals which through good report and evil report Germany has during the last thirty years, and especially during the last three, consistently pursued have never been more beautifully expounded than, in the reply to the Papal Note. " Righteousness and peace have kissed each other" in this masterpiece of the Teutonic imagination, and they have done so with a smack which all the world can hear. The millennium has surely been brought appreciably nearer by this edifying display. Does it not reveal to us, through the battle-smoke and the poison gas and all the other horrors of war, some glimpses of that earthly Utopia which the poet saw in his dream, that beatific vision in which ". . . the war-drum throbbed no longer, and the battle-flags were furl'd, ■"In the Parliament of Man, the Federation of the World"? A fleeting glimpse or two, it may be, but nothing that we can mistake for an abiding reality. For, as it takes at least -two to make a war, so it takes at least two to make peace, and the same mini"mum is required for the conversion which is the prelude to peace. The German evangel is admirable, but it finds nothing but stony ground in the hard hearts of the Allies. " Of whom the world was not worthy " will be the verdict of the historian upon the preacher in the Wilhelmstrasse whose noble piety was beyond the reach of his hearers. Admirabry as the war has developed the moral .sense of Germany, ife effect upon her enemies seems on the whole to have been deplorable. The French .people had a reputation ' for politeness before the war, but how completely war has robbed them of that virtue, is proved by their reception of this tender outpouring of brotherly love, from Berlin. " The general tenor of the comment in French newspapers is," according to a Paris message, " that the enemy's rfeply to the Pope is devoid of sense, and contains no distinct or concrete indications of any sort." "No terms are possible," said the Rhenisch Westfaelische Zeitiuig a few weeks ago, " with the virulent avarice of Englishmen and the fury of the French." The organ of the Krnpps might reasonably now accuse the French of something worse than the fury for which they have always been famous in time of war. From their evil associations with Britain they -have evidently caught something of her stolid brutality. "Devoid of sense" is a brutal comment indeed on all the gushing piety of Germany's reply to the Pope. Britain, however, does not seem to have lost any of her normal brutality by infecting her neighbour, British yfucial

opinion is reported to be indifferent, but, of course, this may be the result of the. cunning for which "perfidious Albion" enjoys an even higher reputation in Berlin than for cold brutality. "Vague and hypocritical" is said to be the verdict of the British newspapers on the. German Note, and instead of being stirred by its eloquence, they profess to find the most notable feature of the Note in the omission of any reference to the restoration and restitution of the invaded countries. Seeing that Germany did not begin the war—the Note is quite clear on that point—any such reference would have been quite superfluous. It -was Belgium and Servia that began it, and "the moral force of justice" with which Germany desires to " replace the might of arms " clearly demands that as these little countries have made their beds so they must lie on them. As might have been expected, comment in the United States sounds the lowest depth of. all. The national taste for humour runs riot over the Note in a most cheerful and irreverent fashion. The New York Sun' rewrites it "as Wilhelm would if deprived of his ability for lying," and the Tribune observes that " the devil quotes Holy Writ when it suits his purpose." It is grievous that the 'Kaiser and his Chancellor should be so cruelly misunderstood, but they must look to Hindenburg and not to pious Peace Notes for a remedy.