MANAWATU DAILY TIMES. FRIDAY, OCTOBER 26, 1917. "I WILL REPAY."

Manawatu Times, Volume XL, Issue 1372904, 26 October 1917, Page 4

MANAWATU DAILY TIMES. FRIDAY, OCTOBER 26, 1917. "I WILL REPAY."

Germany gives the world no breathing space. Her crimes multiply with the passing of the days. The sinking of a dozen neutral merchantmen in sheer wantonness is among the least of them. Germany’s sea. record is of the pit and outer darkness. She has defiantly sent to their doom more harmless and innocent seamen than have lost their lives through storm and tcpipest in a generation. For these crimes the German people are in part responsible. They have not only not protested against, but they have approved them. Mr Havelock Wilson, the secretary of the National Sailors and Firemen’s Union, has told the story. Speaking at a conference, of Allied and neutral seamen, he said; —

Some would say the German nation is not responsible for the atrocities of its forces. I have evidence that it is responsible. Two years ago I called the attention of the organised labour of Germany to the atrocities

on the sea. They appointed a Commission to inquire into my charges, and the report was that they were quite justified, because we had blockaded the German ports. So I charge not only the naval and military part of Germany with the responsibility of these crimes, but the whole German nation.

Of what the mercantile seamen have done fur the salvation of the Empire we know though only in part; and of what they intend to do when the war is over we have heard. These splendid fellows are not going to take with out reprisal the barbarous usage to which they and theirs have been pitilessly subjected. If our politicians, who have never uttered a word of reproof against the Huns of the Seas, imagine that all is going to be fair sailing for German seamen after the war, they are woefully mistaken. “We shall," said Mr Wilson, “insist as

part of the peace terms that an International Commission be established, before which every commander of a 11boat, every member of a crew, and everyone in authority connected with the U-boat campaign will be put on trial, and if found guilty of murder will be awarded the punishment due to murder.” From the secretary of the Seamen’s Union to the Ford Chancellor of England may seem a far cry; but in these clays of trial and test, the two are united not alone by a common bond of sympathy, but a common ideal. “When we dictated terms of, peace,” said Lord Finlay at the Navy League luncheon, “the crews of the German submarines and those in high places who gave them their orders should be treated as pirates.” It is not within our power to recall to life the countless victims of Germany’s sea crimes, but it is within onr compass to mete ■out righteous judgment against their murderers; for. it is these monstrous doings which, more so than most other forms of systematic devilry, have set tlio world against Germany.”