VIRULENT ANGLOPHOBIA IN GERMANY.

Hawera & Normanby Star, Volume XLII, Issue 7377, 1 February 1902, Page 3 (Supplement)

VIRULENT ANGLOPHOBIA IN GERMANY.

INCREDIBLE TEUTONIC CREDULITY. Tlie cool-headed Englishman regards with! a pitying contempt the insane Anglophobia "which has led the whole German nation from professor to peasant to foam at the mouth with rage over Mr Chamberlain's innocent and inoffensive speech at Edinburgh. The .outburst of hysterical raving is only partly due to

"Boeritis." Its main cause is a deeprooted hatred of England, for which there is no real reason, but with which we shall have to reckon in future in shaping our foreign policy. j Common interests and a common des- ' cent ought to ensure an alliance of J hearts between English and Germans, but the recent outburst would warn us not to expect friendship from the German people, however correct the attitude of German officialdom. The attitude best calculated to make an impression upon our Teutonic cousins is one? of courteous indifference. A little polite cold shoulder would act 'as a judicious reminder to Germans when they have sobered down a little that England's friendship and aid is not entirely valueless, even though 1 she has a "hireling army of mercenaries;," and that self-interest — to seek for no higher motive — should lead Germans to avoid incurring the hostility of England.

If the Germans have for the time being lost their head, there is no reason why we should do so too, as we were somewhat inclined to do on the occasion of the famous telegram to Krnger. A cool survey of the situation may help us to realise how widespread German rancour is just now. On 25 th October Mr Chamberlain spoke at Edinburgh. Dealing with the charge against the Government of undue leniency he said: "I think that the time is coming when measures of greater severity may be necessary, and if that time comes, we can find precedents for anything that we may do in the action of those nations who now criticise our 'barbarity' and 'cruelty,' but whose example in Poland, in Caucasus, in Algeria, in Tonquin, 'in Bosnia, and in the Franco-German War we have never even approached."

This sentence, misreported, of course, led to all the trouble in Germany. Russia and France remained comparatively unmoved, although if the German army of sacro-sanet conscripts was slandered, so also were the armies of those nations. Any sensible person reading the speech would see that so far from .attacking the German army Mr Chamberlain heia up its severity in IS7O as a precedent which we should be justified in ourselves adopting. And that all through has been the line adopted by the patriotic critics of the Government. Had we from the first followed Germany's example of stern but strict and perfectly proper severity, we should have brought the war to a speedier conclusion, and saved thousands of lives. So in 'the long run severity would have been the truest mercy. Any specific examples of German severity in the war of IS7O that have been cited in the English press have been culled not from gutter-rags, ready to print stories of brutalities, on the face of them lies, but from the Germans' own official histories. But apparently even cultured Germans, carried away by their hatred of England, saw in Mr Chamberlain's words only an insult to the "honour of the German Army." The mere comparison of our army of "mercenaries" with the citizen army of Germany, with its "imperishable idealism," was considered an .insult, the fact that the officers and a large proportion of the noncoms, in the German army are also "mercenaries" being quite overlooked. Anyhow, the Germans never istopped to think. There were demonstrations all over the country, all but a few journals added fuel to the flames. Chamberlain was denounced as a very Mephistopheles of crime. The King was represented in caricatures as j taking a "bath of blood" in preparation for his coronation. The German universities joined in the demonstrations, the professors showing quite as great a lack of reason as the students. The German veterans protested against the supposed foul and wanton aspersions assumed to "have been cast upon them and their dead comrades. The German women met in Leipzig, and protested against "the murder of Boer women and children." But most hysterical of all were the Lutheran clergy of the Rhineland, 680 of whom signed a religious protest against Mr Chamberlain's comparison of the German heroes in 1870 with ".the craven bands of mercenaries who have, according to reliable information (!) placed women and- old men in front of their ranks in battle, in order to save themselves from the bullets of the Boer."

Cartoons of this supposed incident, by the way, appear in all the German shop windows. The "Kolnisohe Zeitung," one of the few papers which! can be anti-British and yet show something like fairplay to England, tells its countrymen that such credu-

• * unworthy of educated and enlightened men, and warns them against a proceeding calculated to create a state of feeling both in England and Germany that "will assume the form of a conflagration which cannot be extinguished."

Although Mr Chamberlain was both indiscreet and wrong in referring to "the so-called agitation in Germany as evidently artificial," England will neither pour oil on the troubled waves nor petroleum on the rash fierce blaze of passion. The cold water of common-sense will be her contribution, and there will be no demonstration on our part, if Count Yon Bulow, in answering the inevitable interpellation when the Diet meets, endeavours to soothfe German susceptibilities. Already owing to the calm attitude of the English press the storm is subsiding. Why do the Germans hate us is a

question the English ask themselves now with some astonishment. We can understand the Germans sjTnpathising with the Boers. Popular sympathy is always with the small nation, and not with the large. We can understand that subsidised lies about us have been spread broadcast over Europe. We can understand that, as the "Voissiche Zeitung" points out, "'"what Sir H. Campbell-Bannerman and others think and say concerning Mr Chamberlain's policy, we Germans may also think and say." Pro-Boer utterances have a good deal • to do with German hostility. But we cannot understand how sensible and learned Germans who grow hot with anger at the slightest aspersion on their army can apparently believe and repeat freelj' charges of hideous and incredible cruelty against British statesmen and soldiers.

The Germans should know us better than any nation. We are among their best customers, they do business with us freely, and the Germans who settle in our Empire find under the barbarous Briton such liberty and fair play that they themselves become naturalised British subjects, and the next generation is thoroughly British in sentiment and sympathies. That is really where the rub comes in. Envy and jealousy are at the bottom of the hostility to us. Germany has been growing so fast that she wishes not only for a European but for an over-sea empire. But we have the best "place in the sun," in the form of happy prosperous colonies, which welcome the German, and his tradte, and whose inhabitants make him one of themselves. In the Boer war Germans hoped to see the downfall pf England and the severance of her colonies; they have seen to their surprise an Empire one and indivisible, the colonies hastening to take their place in the fore front of battle. On the top of that bitter disappointment has come a period of trade depression. Now to the daughter nations of Australia and Canada we are adding South Africa, and Germanjr with her ambitions for a worldwide Empire is sore at our success. That, in a nutshell, I believe to be the true cause of German hatred. And when the Boers who have fought with such persistence against us accept the inevitable, and fight with equal persistence for us, as there are signs that they will do before long, Germans will find their cup of disappointment full to the brim. But in the long run German business instincts will prevail over mere sentimentalism, however acute, and Germans will realise that the best way of- getting even with perfidious Albion is not to quarrel with their best customer, but to try and cut her out in her own markets, and in the carrying trade of the world. We have pulled the South African chestnuts out of the fire, and the Germans will eat a large proportion of them.