THE H.B. TRIBUNE SATURDAY, OCT. 29th, 1916. THE PRUSSIAN LEPER.

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume VI, Issue 268, 28 October 1916, Page 4

THE H.B. TRIBUNE SATURDAY, OCT. 29th, 1916. THE PRUSSIAN LEPER.

Germax? is surely compiling for herself such a record of inhumanin as has never yet been written against humanity. She has exhibited such a concentration of demoniac malignancy that we are tempted to think that the whole nation is possessed by some unclean spirit, which this war may be designed to cast out. And yet we know 7 that students of the German literature of the last half century, or more, declare that this malevolence and indifference to the sufferings of others are the logical outcome of the teachings of her leading human intelligences, to whom her people have been bidden, and have learned through generations, to listen without demur. The tale that is told in our cables to-day of the treatment of her prisoners, and of the diabolical purposes to which have been put the discoveries o e medical science—sought so long and earnestly as a means for the amelioration of the ills that flesh is heir to —might, earlier in the war, have shocked our sensibilities. But so long has already become the list of Germany’s proved enormities, that our consciences have become numbed to any further sensation of surprise. Neither the cruelties now disclosed, nor the intent with which they have been practised, can now suffice to provoke astonishment that a people capable of them should be allowed to cumber this fair earth, and represent themselves as at once the apostles and the disciples of a Kultur which should entirely inherit it. In truth, it almost comes to be beyond our capacity for faith in the future of the erring humanity which we ashamedly share with them to hope that even the Tierce furnace o‘ this Great War can purge them of this national characteristic which they cherish as something that elevates them above and beyond what they consider the pitiful and contemptible weaknesses and softnesse.. of the rest of civilised mankind. It may well be doubted whether even ostracism from the community ot nations is likely 7 to arouse in. them any sense of their own unworthiness to share in it, so deep has becomctheir conviction that theirs is the onlv successful way to assert the racial surperiority which has becomethe object of their most enthusiastic and reverential worship. It only remains, however, for us of the British race to give this process a lengthy and complete trial, and to refuse anything in the way of at least social companionship, until some evidences of regeneration manifest themselves. This determination is not one of vindictiveness, but of self-preserva-tion from a contamination that can only pollute and defile. There can b-j no accusation of pharisaism in this, and it is entirely consistent with s, full acknowledgment of our own many shortcomings. It is merely the natural instinct of a fairly wholesome human intelligence to avoid contact with a mental and , moral leper. That such a deteri mination is steadily growing in strength is merely a hopeful omen cF much needed improvement on our own pare.

In a southern contemporary there have been brought before us some extracts from the “New York Tribune” which show that at least this American journal has some appreIciation of the slowly crystallising i public opinion of the British people (towards Germany as the war has disclosed her to us, and of the l almost unconscious mental processes .that have brought it about. It I quotes the statement of an Ameri--1 can, ivho had since the war opened /spent much time in both Britain 'and Germany, that ‘•'the British i hatred of the German is a far more ( impressive and fearsome thing than I the German hatred of Britain—aud la more lasting thing.” It is not racial, nor made to order, or the 'creature of mere impulse manifest- : ing itself in “Hymns <>f Hate.” It .is silent and of slow but enduring ! growth. W hen the war began, the j “Tribune” says, a Briton had only a confused opinion of “Fritz”; he I was puzzled rather than bitter ; his i opinions, so far as he had any, were [wholly plastic. “Even when the [first British troops had been well- . nigh exterminated, when the reports [ of German atrocities, murders, burnI ings, and unspeakable abuse of | women and children were general, ’ the average Englishman held his ipeace.” He was sceptical at first; j lie could not quite realise or be- | licve the German to be as he is. But [the time came when the truth had to be faced by England, and, we are told, “if you should settle on the date of the first German gas attack, the first one at Ypres, you would not be far from the date when the Englishman actually made up his mind about this German; and about that time, too, the Englishmantaking him by the million —went to war.” After that came the deluge; but still the growth of the English loathing of the German was slow—“amazingly” slow, the “Tribune” says, ft came, not through official or journalistic activity, or professorial eloquence, or through anything but the working of private individual feelings, and to-day “the German is for the Englishman the rnan who abuses women and children on land and murders them on ■Water. He is the man who brutally maltreats British wounded and prisoners. He. is the author of the Zeppelin raids, and he is the criminal who. uses the submarine for assassination, not for war. Above all, and this is comprehensive, he is not a ‘clean’ fighter; he doesn’t ‘play the game’ ; he recognises no rules of humanity, of law, of sport. Wherefore the Englishman hates him, not as a nation primarily; there is nothing of this, but as an individual; it is a personal matter between the individual Briton and the German, and being such it cannot be settled by a Government or disposed of by i/tieaty of peace.” The Germans, our New York contemporary concludes, have so acted that the consequences of their actions “will not be abolished by a treaty of peace, will not be liquidated by victory or settled by indemnity.”’