THE BRITISH SPIRIT

Hawera & Normanby Star, Volume LXXIV, Issue LXXIV, 1 April 1918, Page 4

THE BRITISH SPIRIT

It is a good thing in these times (said the Westminster Gazette a few weeks ago, and its remarks apply with still more force to-day) to go back to the beginnings. We went into this war knowing full well,that we were weighing in on the weaker side. We did so with the instinctive feeling that we should be disgraced if w e stood aside, also, let us own, with the practical certainty that we should be the next meal if the Germans devoured our friends in Europe. The sam e instinct and the same necessity brought the Americans in two years later. With all the difficulties and dangers now displayed to us, we have not a moment's regret or a thought of looking backward. We know now much more clearly than we knew at the beginning what the German tyranny is. how formidable and merciless, how fatal to all. that we value in the free and civilised "life. There may be a few men in Germany, men of the modernist spirit, who se e the folly of their dream of conquest, and who look with alarm to the gulf which will be fixed between them and the rest of the world, and the blight which will fall on their hopes of economic progress, if they persist in it. But the" ruling class is apparently infatuated with its ideas of brute force; it talks of its irresistible might, its "smashing blows, the plunder it is going to take, the indemnities it is going to exact from a world which it will keep in servitude, till they are paid. When the Reichstag passed its resolution for a "peace without annexations/ we asked whether the German Government was willing to evacuate Belgium and restore its independence, and after four months we have had no intelligible word in answer. That being so, we can do nothing but harden our hearts and gird up our loins for the fight to the finish. It Germany had conquered all Europe and we and the Americans had to fight her alone with our sea-power and our economic weapons we should still hold on and beat her in the end. While we command the sea she will not get the supplies on which her industry depends, and by which alone her population can recover, and with this immense weapon in our hands, we are confident of the future.

Influential dairying concerns in the Auckland district have just sent to America representatives to obtain infor. mation with respect to dried milk manufacture, says the Wellington Post. It •■ is proposed to convert the factories ot three large Waikato companies into j dried milk works, and an endeavor will be mad.j to meet an anticipated return or 2 S 6d per pound for butter-fat. The New Zealand Dairy Association is erectmg at Matangi, Waikato, a factory to' cost £50,000 to deal with a supply of 30,000 to 35,000 gallons daily.