IN BERLIN

Feilding Star, Volume XIV, Issue 3629, 9 November 1918, Page 1

IN BERLIN

CRIME, DEPRAVITY, AND TERROR.

ROYAL OUT-OF-WORKS FIGHT FOR THRONES.

Berlin, as pictured by its own newspapers in September, would I appear to bo a terrible place to live j in just now. One half the popula- j tion is given over to terror and I panic, and tho other half to the j worst and most degraded forms of vice and debauchery. The poor are starving because uncontrolled and uncontrollable profiteers will sell their goods to none but the rich, who lead a life of riotous and reckless dissipation; and tho professional criminal classes are reaping almost as rich a harvest as the cannon kings.

UTTER DEPRAVITY. Government Cr. Beckmann completes the picture in the Berlin Kreuz Zoitung:—

"Tho longer tho war continues the louder grow the complaints on all sides about the depravity of our young people of both sexes. Nothing makes sucH a profoundly sad impression on our wounded, our war cripples, and our war widows, as on all those who have remained at home, as the riotous excesses of an unruly proletarian youth. _STot an open spaco, not a public garden in any of our great industrial centres is safe against their destructive rage. Flowers and plants are torn up, domestic animals tortured, the fruit trees of neighbours wantonly damaged, brickbat battles are fought in the streets, pas-sers-by are insulted and attacked, and the property of citizens of the State and the community is destroyed with a fury like that of the vandals of old. From early morning until the last thing at night the streets are rendered hideous by a savage clamour of shouting and cursing. On Sundays in particular the popular summer resorts and the railways have been rendered utterly impossible to decent people by the presence of troops of rowdy hobbledehoys and their equally objectionable female companions, whose language is so horrible that it makes all respectable persons shudder."

DOWN-AT-HEEL PRINCES. The indecent competition among the Idle princelets of Germany for the new thrones which Germany is seeking to dispose- continues to excite the scorn of the saner German newspapers. Thus the Madgeburg Zeitung says:—

"It will be better if henceforth we take no more notice of these scandals. The competition among the princely houses had better be concealed from the public attention, otherwise the monarchic idea will be more injured in this country than it can be benefited in the border States which are to be blessed with the new rulers. The monarchic idea is not only injured by the competition among the princely Houses, but also by the circumstance that no other visible result has up to now been achieved by the stupendous sacrifice of German blood than a feverish anxiety to create a thronelet here and there for German princes out of employment. England, too, has superfluous princes, Italy also, but who has ever heard of an English or Italian prince being suddenly called on to stand as father and protector of a foreign country ? England's policy seeks to win nations to her side, but the German mid-dle-class Press cranes its neck after vacant thrones on which some out-at-elbow German prince may be seated—as though Bulgaria and Albania did not constitute a sufficient warning both to the princes and for Germany."