THE ESSAYIST.

Hawera & Normanby Star, Volume XLVI, Issue XLVI, 25 April 1914, Page 9

THE ESSAYIST.

WHAT THE NIGHT TRAIN TO BERLIN SHOWS.

Hare is a clever article by Mr F. W. j Wile, the Berlin correspondent of tiie j Daily Mail, which shows the rexnarkj uhls -significance of tho- night train to Berlin. It shows iio-r great world movements may hs happening under our very noses without anybody realising what they mean —not even ths scaremongers. "If I had a mandate to lay the foundation of a treaty of peace and goodwill between Great Britain and Germany, I should not choose for a back- ; ground Mr Carnegie's mirrored temple of brotherly love at The Hague, or stately Westminster Hall, or the historic Congress Room of the Imperial Chancellor's palace," says Mr Wile. "I should put my friendship plenipotentiaries in ths Flushing train at Victoria at 8.35 some fine evening, or at 1.5 at Fricdriehstrasse in Berlin in the afternoon. I should require them to take note of what was going on around and about them, for my case for an Anglo-German entente would rest primarily in what is[done and said in ths Flushing trr.in '%&?-y and night SGS days of the aYeragpHyeav. "Tile Flushing trainff brought me back to Berlin from Lcmdon a day or two ago. It was full of- familiar faces —the sort I have encojjjntered on the journey twice or thricd|pt year for a decade or more. A couat would have shown that there,, was almost an equal number of English Germans aboard. There was the atmosphere which proclaims the business man about nearly every one of them.

"These are serious men. They unlimbsr the trappings of their calling long before the lights of London have faded away and the coast is approached. Watch them closely, and you will see them scanning contracts drawn up in the city or in Liverpool or Manchester, or poring over correspondence about contracts to bs signed in Cologne or Dusseldorf, Hamburg or Ber-lin—Anglo-German contracts comprehending mr-rks by the. million and pounds sterling by the hundred thousand ; Anglo-German correspondence, with mutual goodwill, confidence, and toleration, with give-and-take as its basis; and correspondence, unless I miss my guess, almost exclusively in English, for our German friends scorn their own language when dealing with us.

"I see by the hotel label on the bulging Gladstone bag of yonder man from Breslau that he has been in Bradford, doubtless on a great' worsted mission bent. His girthy compatriot, by the same token, has been tarrying an Leeds and Sheffield. I recognise a famous London musical-comedy magnate in the far corner of the saloon smoker, en route to Berlin to buy the latest German operetta.! I see my friend of the tteutsehe Bank hurrying back from London for fresh instructions on the Bagdad railway negotiations. I overhear the merry chatter of three keen-eyed young English engineers on their way to Chemnitz to install British-made textile machinery. On the rain-soaked pier at Folkestone, where the Ivonigin Wilhelmina waits impatiently in the midnight mist to transport this nightly cargo of busy men to the Continent, I find myself brushing shoulders with an old acquaintance from Hamburg, an emissary of Herr Ballin, fresh from a Transatlantic conference at Liverpool.

"While the rumble of the anchor- I chain overhead and the raucous embarkation of half a thousand sacks of royal mail bursting with missives of Anglo - German business banish thoughts of slumber, I have time for musing on the psychology of the Flushing train. "What is the significance of this ceaseless human tide flowing between England and Germany? "Are these men of Berlin and London, Manchester and Leipzig, Breslau and Birmingham messengers of war cr harbingers of peace? Have I ever seen them flying at one another's throat as they crossed the monotonous lowlands of Western Prussia? Do they ever gro.v red in the face with passion over Dreadnoughts and invasion? Have they ever worried their prosaic business heads over the control cf K-oweit or "more room in the sun' ? Can they, after all, be men of flesh p,nd blood that they refuse to excite themselves about the irreconcilable antagonisms between their respective fatherlands? What manner of patriots these, whose consuming ideal is merely the solidification and amplification of the already colossal commercial ties uniting Great Britain and Germany? —Straight for an Entente.— "The Konigin Wilhelmina's sleepy passengers are tenderly sifted through the Dutch Customs now, and at the unromantic hour of 4 a.m. I find myself transhipped into the Berlin section of the Flushing train. My soliloquy of the short night before is destined to be answered sooner than I dreamed, for my compartment-eom-(panion is a man who knows why England and Germany must be friends. It is as if Herr Hermann Hecht, president of the German Exporters' League, had booked by the Flushing train by my own design. We had met before. What had taken him to London this time? He goes every six weeks. He is on the board of an English company which owns a great shop in Buenos Aires. His own firm has ties of long-standing with every industry of importance in Great Britain. Let him speak. I recognise, from what he says, that it is the voice of i Business Germany talking: ■'' 'England and Germany are mak- , ing straight for an entente, almost

without knowing it. It may never La a formal, parchment pact, but an understanding will come simply beeauseit has to. It is as inevitable as time itself. It is crystallising rvom hour to hour. International politics nowa-days—Anglo-German relations in particular—concern cemmyrce almost exclusively. " 'We are rivals, cf course, and will continue rivals, but we shall remain friends, too. Ci;r interests are as common, as identical, as if we were partners in the same firm. German competition with EiM-lnrd in the world's markets was never sharper than to-day. Was British export trade ever greater? " 'Destroy Germany, and England annihilatacs her richest customer, the mainspring o f her golden oversea business. Destroy England, and Germany wipes out the market which is the lifeblood of her own bounding prosperity. " 'Let a British battle-cruiser sink ■a Bremen freighter with a cargo "made in Germany," and she will send to Davy Jones's locker goods insured, in 60 par cent of cases, with Lloyd's. They will quite likely be British-owned goods, too, paid for by buyer* in Toronto, Capetown, or Melbourne before shipment. " and Germany have another thing in common which ought to banish, thoughts of hostility and league them even closer together. Do either of us adequately appreciate the ! portent of increasing concentration of capital in the United States and its latent designs on the still undeveloped natural resources of the worldwater, power for instance. What people in the world, too, get on together so well as Englishmen and Germans? We come to know one another m days, where Frenchmen and Germans require weeks. It is the spirit of the Flushing train that has made us friends, and will keep us friends.' "I do not identify myself with all of Herr Hecht's reasoning, but it set me to. thinking, all the same. Board ths Flushing trai n one day) aU(J gee liow it affects you."