Who Goes Next?

Manawatu Times, Volume XL, Issue 1372833, 6 August 1917, Page 3

Who Goes Next?

WAVE OF REVOLUTION. KAISER'S TURN COMING. (Will the great Time Spirit next weigh> the Kaiser and his people and find them to be wanting.) This great possibilty is interestingly discussed by Mr Richard Jennings in the Sunday Pictorial." "In the last dreadful week of expectation, before England entered the war, Sir Edward Grey warned the late Austrian Emperor that war might well lead him and his kind, and the whole of Europe with them, to a state of things 'like that prevailing in 1884' — the year of Revolution < verywhere," he says.

"Already the prophe< \ begins to realise itself. Already it seems that 1917 may be, like IS4B, a yeai of Revolution.

"In 1848 the movement began in France, and swept eastward; as, too, the spirit of the greater Revolution of 1789 was carried eastward by the French Republican armies. In 1917 the movement begins in the East. "Will it sweep westward in turn? Next on its path if it does so, it finds Germany. It finds the Kaiser with all that he represents.

But it finds the German people also

"And what a difference, in all that matters, between the drilled and forceworshipping Germans of to-day and the Russian, with his essentially democratic manners! "In Russia the rule of the bureaucracy has stood for incompetence and failure in great wars. In Germany the rule of Prussia has sttood for iron efficiency and success in great wars. "In Russia strength comes from below. At the top confusion has often ruled, with changing policies, for years. "In Prussia, or Prussia-ridden Germany, strength comes from above. Before that strength came confusion ruled below. 'Particularism' in Germany went with 'Liberalism.' And with 'Liberalism, went division. 'ln Russia Liberalism has, with reservations, meant new life for Russia after wars. New life for the serf after the Crimean War. New life for the peasant after the Russo-Japanese War. In Russia the story is—failure of the rulers has led to reform for the ruled. "Failure—is is the sovereign word for Russia. Russia makes herself out of failure. And now—now that failure, partial or complete, begins to creep like a shadow over Germany? Will it produce the same effect upon her as it does upon the Russians'? "The Kaiser and his worshippers, we may be sure, have Sir Edward Grey's hint in mind. May Emperor Carl or Austria have remembered it, too, when he talked over peace, immediate peace, with the Kaiser a few months ago. And Tsar Ferdinand, tin' pseudo-Bzau-tine poser? And Tino, over there, a petty Kaiser in Greece? Does the wind sweeping westward, a wind out of the East, blow rather cold at this moment upon them? Perhaps the answer rests with (hatgreatest of generals at the moment — General Food. Food and food contribution appear to have been the immediate cause of the revolution in Russia. Food and food failure may cause even the most lavish of modern peoples in Germany, too, to revolt against the dance led by Gott Moloch over the corpse-scattered fields of gradually-dying Europe.