DECADENCE IN GERMANY.

King Country Chronicle, Volume XVIII, Issue 1857, 4 September 1923, Page 2

DECADENCE IN GERMANY.

OFFICIALS - ASK FOR BRIBES. - In Germany now bribery is so common that it is accepted as a matter of course. Hundreds of officials do not merely accept bribes; they ask for them. This statement is made in “Current History” by Mr S. Miles Bouton, who was correspondent of the Associated Press in Europe from 1911 to 1919, and is now living in Germany again to study present conditions. Mr Bouton says that the German Socialist party is carrying on a campaign against x-eligion, though officially it professes to recognise that “religion is a private affair.” The churches are losing members by thousands, and children are encouraged to be “confirmed” in a Socialist service. Atheism is encouraged by books and spoken teaching, and the Socialist-ruled Diets of Saxony and Thuringia have given decisions that have affected the schools in a similar way.

The prevailing bribery, says Mr Bouton, is due in part to official salaries being out of proportion to the cost of living; but men and women to whom their religion is real do not sell their honour, no matter how great their need. Moral laxity is showing in other ways. Triumphant pornography sets its stamp on most theatres, and on a very great part of the contemporary literature. Sexual morals are lax. Business morals have suffered greatly. A great part of the country’s youth insists on its right to “live one’s self out,” and the claim is allowed. Brandy and cigarettes were forced on children at a party, and a business man consulted Mr Boulton on the best place at which to buy a cigarette case for his godson on his fourteenth birthday. The Berlin papers' reported recently that crimes had so increased that for the first time on record all the cells at the police presidency were occupied, and prisoners had to await vacancies.

An open battle against religion is carried on by a third of the population, though no people ever needed more the strengthening bond of a common religious faith. A further powerful disintegrating factor is that the better bourgeois classes are turning towards mysticism and the “black arts” in general. A Leipsic bookseller lists 34 books on these subjects published by him in 1922. The same situation prevails generally. The Leipsic list includes five books on occultism, six on clairvoyance, two on palmistry, the complete works of Paracelsus, a work on Nostradamus, and one on Cagliostro. The State Library has a long waiting list of applicants for books along these lines.

While the Ruhr invasion has made patriots of tens of thousands of Germans who had scoffed at patriotism, the internal enemies are even stronger than the invaders.