The Evening Star TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 21, 1915.

Evening Star, Issue 15914, 21 September 1915, Page 4

The Evening Star TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 21, 1915.

That most convenient “correspondent,”

whom British statesmen "The Coming love to utilise, has again Storm.” been made by the Min-

ister of Munitions to serve as the medium for the publication of an important pronouncement on the great question of the hour. Mr Lloyd George, it should not be necessary to state, puts, as we anticipated he would, the political situation of “ the gravest magnitude,” the dynamiting of the Cabinet, the alleged differences of opinion, and the taking of sides by Ministers, in their proper order of value. And this, we learn, is no value at all. These splits and factions have no existence outside the imaginations of the “creatures” who give them birth. The whole poisonous gas cloud of libel and assumption disappears before the strong blast of indignant scorn that issues from the Minister’s pen. Whether Mr Lloyd George will be as successful in “relent“lessly stamping out these creatures as “ soon as they are seen crawling along the "floor” is another question, but one that need not immediately give rise to serious concern. The papers and persons whom he had in his mind’s eye, like the fabled Proteus, take on many outward shapes, and have the power of evading personal punishment.' The important point is that they exist, that they are known, and, that by the nature of their work they can be detected and estimated at their true value. What, at this most momentous period in our Imperial history, are more serious even than the despicable attitude taken by a. section of British newspapers and pohtidans are the admonitions and warnings with which Mr George’s communication is over-full. “I withdraw no“tiring that I have said regarding the “seriousness of the position. ... I

“have been pointing out for months the “dangers of the present war. ... I

“have not written without having a war“rant in facts, known both to the enemy “and to ns—facts which I thought would “already have sobered the most fatuous “optimist.” And then, as though these were not sufficient to aronse the country to the recognition of its danger and the imperative nature of the call that has come to each one of us, the Miniver closes with the words: “'there are those who are “abusing me because of my daring to call “attention to the coming storm before it “ overwhelms the land, and because of my “striving to induce my fellow-countaymen “to prepare in time for its onslaught.” These, we think, and not his exposure of the contemptible intrigues that are being provoked and promoted by domestic treasonmongers, are the words to which we should do well to give most heed.

Mr Lloyd George writes of “ the coming storm,” and “before it overwhelms the land,” and that “ these facts are known both to us and to the enemy,” and that ho only writes and speaks and works in older that his fellow-countrymen may “prepare in time for the onslaught,” We repeat that these are serious words, and that wo should be inviting disaster did we let them pass by unheeded. They aro the more serious that they are made at the end. and not at the beginning of more than thirteen months of almost ceaseless slaughter. The Minister does not speak in the past tense. The peril on which he writes and warns and beseeches is a coming peril, and the onslaught is not an onslaught from which we have escaped, but one to. meet which we must prepare. Like ourselves, like all Britons who regard the outlook rationally, the Minister takes a hopeful view, bub that view is only justified and will only be realised conditionally upon the men and women of the Empire putting asidd every thought of self and consecrating themselves unitedly and harmoniously to the attainment of the desired goal. Meanwhile the enemy are reprinting and publishing Mr Lloyd George’s words. Cliaracteristically they see and read into them chiefly a British admission of German successes, and are wrathfully indignant with what the ‘ Frankfurt Zeitung ’ calls the shamefulness of Mr George’s declaration that the Germanio powers possess an overwhelming superiority in equipment when the fact was and is that the Allies have the resources of England, France, Russia, and the whole .world at their disposal. There is little that is new and nothing that is true about accusations of this kind; they aro .part and parcel of that bag of tricks with which tho German has played his infamous game of wholesale slaughter, outrage, and destruction. _ The charge against Germany is not that the Allies have not the means wherewith to provide themselves with a military equipment that will be overwhelmingly superior to her own, bub that she silently and deliberately in the secrecy of her council Chambers, her factories, her arsenals, her depots prepared for tho most foul, most infamous, and most pitiless murder of her neighbors, and that, too, under the guise of profuse professions of friendship, known in the history of the race. Germany prepared for her onslaught; the rest of Europe was not prepared to meet her on equal terms, and tho rankness of her offence is not that she for a time has been able to show superiority in but that she had smiled an^_

Pinilfid, and plotted and plotted, and then, lika the beast of prey that she was, sprang upon Belgium and Northern France to murder them in their sleep. How well Germany was prepared for war on the material side all the world knows. Every day adds to the terrible indictment against her. Take, for example, such an incident as that made known by the Italian Ministry of Public Works, The B,s. Bayern left Hamburg for East Africa in the' fourth week of July • last year, and was Interned at Naples on the outbreak of the war. Recently her cargo was unloaded. It included 100,000 rifies, 500,000 military revolvers, 200,0 CX) boxes of ammunition, four. biplanes, two aeroplane hangars, and 1,000 bombs for aeroplanes, 14 field guns, with a supply column, two wireless stations, complete with dynamos, masts, and apparatus, and a great amount of barbed wire and iron posts. Roar and shriek as she may, lie as shamelessly and as often as she will, nothing that the Germany of this generation can do can free her from the judgment of mankind. She stands before the world, as yet erect and unrepentant, the slayer and spoiler of everything that is of good repute, the arch-enemy of the race. Therefore she 'must be destroyed. It is to the accomplishment of this task that Mr Lloyd George invites his countrymen. This and nothing more.