THE MAD DOG OFEURDPE

Hawera & Normanby Star, Volume LXIX, Issue LXIX, 20 May 1915, Page 3

THE MAD DOG OFEURDPE

"THE KAISER/: OUGHT #6 «EE - HANGED." p , The criminals, who compassed the destruction of the Lusitania and her living-freight cafe little ior 'the world's opinion. They sit at ease, pat each other on the " back, and I gloat. We have exhausted the vocabulary of re-, probation and find it inadequate; what remains to us? Nothing immediate. But there is some small "comfort in saying' to oneself—as, personally, I do say, seven times a day— "The Kaiser ought,to hanged." And hanged he assuredly would be if the British got him 2ust now. He would be'tried by'a common jury, sentenced as 'a common murderer,' handed over to the common hangman. Nothing of his high-mightiness'would avail to' save him —his royal and imperial name as little as his military great coat, his epaulettes, his spiked helmet, and his .waxed moustache. Stripped of theatrical unrealities the Hohenzollern is simply a man and a criminal —Kaiser Bill, the blood-brother of Bill Sykes. Or of this of that royal villain on the stage or "off, if royalty be preferred. What about Macbeth 'f The Kaiser, who knows his Shakespeare, would sea at onco that Macbeth has points. Not in the legions Of .horrid hell can come a devil damn'd" , In evils to top Macbeth. Take the latest Lusitania item: One of the Luskania's lifeboats, floating bottom uo and containing the bodies of four" women and two children, has been picked up off the Fastaet.

These and a thousand other hapless innocents are as truly and really the Kaiser's victims as they would be if strangled by his own imperial hands. And the Kaiser ought' to be hanged.. The "mad dog or Europe" must be chained, say some j that is the object of the war. He must be muzzled, say others adding a precaution! But the sane thing, to do with.a read dog,'the one and only thing indeed, is to shoot him. In the present case for what other purpose-are we after him with a gun?- The mad dog of Europe is Germany —strictly, perhaps, Prussia, and the object of the war is to shoot the animal, or, dropping metaphor, to put Prussia as a military power out of action. - Prevision of this fate impending explains the aggravated frenzy of recent weeks —the piracies, the poisonings, the wholesale" murders. What has the war brought Germany but loss upon loss? Of men by the million, of wealth beyond count. Of German colonies Samoa has gone, New Guinea has gone, Kiau-Chau has gone. Togoland has gone, East Africa and South-West Africa are going; nothing will be left. Five million tons of merchant shipping swept from the .seas; five-antJ-forty battleships and as many cruisers cowering like rats in a hole'j never able to show a nose —and this the tenth month of the war. The Germans are not in Paris, though they set out to get there: they are not in Calais, they are not in Warsaw. They are in Beljrium and North-East France, but under notice to quit and .with no hope of staying. Their case is that of a

nation under siege, closed in, stewing in its <nvn grease.' Put these things together, and yon need no wizard to explain a German frenzy fit. The dog has seen the gun.—"Civis," in the Otago Daily Times.