GERMAN VANDALISM.

Hawera & Normanby Star, Volume LXVIII, Issue LXVIII, 23 September 1914, Page 4

GERMAN VANDALISM.

History supplies few if a^ny parallels to the inhumanity and the vandalism perpetrated by the Germans in their present, war against all that is best in the civilisation of the world. The Caliph Omar, who burnt the great library of Alexandria, was a babe in comparison with them. Much of the so-called literature which he destroyed was likely enough mere literary litter which the world is better without, though, of course, this is not said positively, but merely presumptively, by the way. But no such hypothesis is permissible in connection with what the Germans have done at Malines, Termonde, Louvain and other classic cities in Belgium, where some of the loveliest and greatest products of human genius, in the form of paintings, tapestry, and buildings have been burned to ashes or battered to dust. It is well said by Mr Asquith, the British Prime Minister, that German culture has thus been branded on the brow. And at the . time he . spoke the incomparable Cathedral of Bheims had not been razed to the ground, as it has been since by the Germans. Nothing can extenuate such barbarism, for though human genius will probably go on producing beauty to the end, it may never again find itself \at those points of spiritual insight and craftmanship which enabled :it to produce such marvels in architecture as the Cathedral of Rheims, built in the 13th and 14th centuries, and ever since famous, honored, arid protected as one of the finest Gothic structures in all Europe. Those who destroy such buildings commit sacrilege against the human spirit for 'all time, for they diriiinisk the stock of things which minister in a paramount degree to its sense of beauty. Such a crime does indeed brand its perpetrators on their brows for ever. .