SOLVING THE GERMAN PROBLEM

Evening Star, Issue 23497, 10 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 fnan, ; 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. ... “ To-day they and' of Europe find themselves face to face with a phenomenon previously unknown in the history of the world—a modern nation whose rulers have" organised the whole of its life, every element in R which is orgauisable 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 corollaryof economic self-suf-ficiency, 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.