GERMANY'S FALL.

Hawera & Normanby Star, Volume LXVIII, Issue LXVIII, 2 December 1914, Page 5

GERMANY'S FALL.

EVIL COUNSELS AND THE

CONSEQUENCES

Occasionally for ma the fog in the ' Tsorth Sea lifts, and through the let- j ters of a young officer on a battleship ' I get a glimpse of how Britannia is ruling the waves The precise position of !■;;.• s■• trident remains scrupulously .shrouded —at ' first even the name was removed from ' the ship's letter-paper—but the ' glimpse is enough to reveal the groatness and madness of mankind. It is life at its acme of strain and exaltation—life joyously ready to pass ' on the instant into death, as some un-. seen mS Q ' s s^ck or some crafty' torpedo strike. Everybody sleeps in his clothes, and hair i'he ni Snt net at all. The great ship is bared oj all save .necessities. My young friend's spa*> wardrobe, with all his miscellany of superfluous possessions, the q-.ieer garnered treasure of the years, comes economically home. Why, indeed, sink more capital with the ship than is absolutely inevitable? Now and again the tension of this terrible vigilance is relieved, if only i by a change in tension. One seeks ; death instead of waiting for it. There ! is a grapple with a German cruiser, ■ and those not at the guns trCvvi cheerfully, on deck to w^!eh the match with that wonderful Britislf love of ' They compare the cann.onading, note vdth jiyejy interest tli? scores made by the rival shells. Once the rift in the fogs shows the re- i turn of a raiding flotilla, scarred with j glorious battle, and the other vessels of the fleet are dressed to salute ' its triumph; the bands are playing ' "Rule Britannia"; the crews are cheering and singing.

But none of these peeps has left on me so ineffaceable an impression as the picture of my young friend reading—reading at every break in his £r:m watches—and reading not the detective stories that unbent Bismarck, but "Paradise Lost." For the first time he has had leisure to read that sonorous epic straight throiigh, and, unlike Dr. Johnson, who questioned if anyone ever wished it longer, he revels insatiatiably in the Miltonic splendours. GERMANY'S FUNDAMENTAL MISTAKE. Despite the Admiralty decree, you see, he has been xinable to regard his books as dispensable—they must sink or float with him. And so, in the midst cf this waste of white waters and hissing shrapnel, he has found for hlmselr a quiet Paradise or beautiful words and visionary magnificence, and it exists for him out of relation to the tense and tragic actual. And yet what could be apter reading than

this epic:—

"Of man's first disobedience and the

fruit Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste Brought death into the world -and ail our woe?"

The very first incident, indeed, recorded after Paradise was lost is a murder, and this fratricidal strife of Cain and Abel has repeated itself in every generation and given to the. phrase "the brotherhood of nuui" a sinister significance. But never in all the long history of blood-lust have so many millions of brothers stood embattled, • ready to spike one another's bowels with steel, or shatter their faces with devilish explosives, as in this twentieth century of th:s Christian era.

Now, whatever, be the rights or wrongs of war, one thing seems clear. The weapons are wrong. There is a horrible expression, "food for powder" —you will rind it in all languages that are really civilised. Tt implies. that the masses are so coarse in texture, are carcases so gross and sub-human, that their best use is to be thrown to the gun—a providential fire screen for the finer classes.

Democracy will in due time take rote of this conception.

But in its rude way the phrase shadows forth a truth—the truth that, for all who have passed beyond the pnimal stage, the war of tooth' and claw is antiquated.

It seems futile to have evolved from the brute if our brain-power only makes -us bigger brutes. "The man behind the gun"—a sixteen-irich gun, that hurls a ton of explosive metal for thirteen ■ miles—is a wilder and more monstrous beast than ever appeared even in the antediluvian epoch.

That he should not be kept safely stuffed in a museuiri is an intolerable anachronism. A -world in which with one movement of his paw he can kill off a whole congregation of Milton worshippers is a world which should have been 3iipped in the >iebula.

WHERE THE GERMAN CONQUERED.

After a civilised fashion the AngloGerman contest has long been raging, and the German has been winning all along the line. His patience, his industry, his nice study of his customers, has everywhere swept the Englishman aside. B*3fore his music the Briton fell—in worship; his drama invaded us triumphantly. Why was Germany not content with this victorious campaign, with this campaign worthy of human beings? German influence, German Kultur —it is spread by peace, not by the sword. To German universities shoals of Russian • students flocked as to shrines, humble feudatories of German scholarship, Ger nan thoroughness.

To the barbarous regions, where an Ovid might still lament his exile, they carried ba<?k German methods, the cult of German science. And to me,, on my illiterate island, little German cities, a Munich, a Dresden, where the theatre was classic and inexpenssive, and the opera a fo,rm of art and not a social display, loomed like models of civilisation.

"Why must Germany challenge the world on the. lower plane of brute matter? It is only the inferior peoples that need the sword! The Turks h«ve

•had to rule with a rod of iron--; they had no right but might, no gi/tl for the world. Such races must a.-1 sert themselves in fire and write their' edicts in blood. But fire burns down I and blood dries up and fades", ami i the only durable influence is the power cf the spirit. Fatal perversity of Germany— to have misunderstood her own greatness! Proud in her pseudo-philosophy, she has repeated "man's first dis- '■ obedience "—she has listened to the; lower promptings of the serpent. \ There will never be a paradise again \ till he bends his ear to a truer phil-i I osopher than Nietzsche, to a prince; of peace— Till one greater man j Restore us and regain th> blissful' seat." j —Isaac Zangwill, in the New Tort' American. !