The New Zealand Herald. AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS WEDNESDAY, JULY 21. 1915. PEACE AND NO PEACE.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LII, Issue 15975, 21 July 1915, Page 6

The New Zealand Herald. AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS WEDNESDAY, JULY 21. 1915. PEACE AND NO PEACE.

Thk persistent rumours of a possible peace being concluded at a comparatively early date have their source in Germany, which has now everything to gain by a cessation of hostilities if it can thereby secure a return to the international positions as they were a year ago. There is absolutely no possibility of any other peace being attained as long as the Austro-German armies are able to hold their own and the Kaiser rules unchallenged in Berlin. To treat the rumours seriously, to assume that Germany desires a permanent peace, to imagine that tho necessity for grievous and enormous sacrifices is passing by. is t-> play into the hands of an utterly unscrupulous and vindictive enemy. Germany has failed in her present attempt to dominate the world and to supplant our democratic civilisation, with its ideals and its progress, by the " kultur" which is a brutal and pagan denial of the rights and liberties hateful to Prussian tyranny. Her people may not know that she has failed but Iter rulers know it ; having failed they naturally seek to avoid complete disaster and to secure such a compromise as will leave them in a position to renew the war upon a more favourable occasion.

Germany has placed herself outside of all moral law and has severed herself from the international understanding which was gradually makI ing of Western Civilisation a confederation of peaceful and humane states. She has not only revived all the infamies and horrors of savage and barbaric warfare, but she has also brought to the service of her deliberately designed " frightfulness" the sciences and the appliances of civilised men. She has not only torn up treaties and broken her most solemn agreements, but she has also thrown all honour to the winds in her abuse of the facilities freely accorded by civilised nations to aliens and foreigners. There is nothing which the German will not do to secure the triumph of his " kultur ;'' every villainy which aids to that end is to him a virtue, every wrong a right, every crime justifiable. By Belgium and by the Lusitania. by the murder of prisoners and the slaughter of civilians, by poisonous gas and treacherous ways, by fomented strikes and circulated lies, we know the German who would rule the world. As long as we imagine Germany to be bound by the code which binds Christian countries or the, German to be measured by the standards with which we measure ourselves, we fail to grasp the meaning of " kultur" and must constantly fall victims to German tricks and German devices.

Germany undoubtedly wants peace if peace is the only alternative to the destruction of her military power, to the emancipation from Prussian tyranny of the thirty million non-Germans who in Germany and Austria now swell the AustroGerman armies, to the collapse of the amazing delusion which makes every brutal German conceive himself a " superman" and gives to the Kaiser a deadly sword wherewith to kill and to slay. Belgium is a hostage. A desperate effort is being made to make of Poland another hostage. Very possibly Germany would give these hostages back to have her colonies back, and would make a peace which would be no peace but an armed truce. Still more possibly, if any responsive inclination were visible in any Allied country Germany would seek to persuade another of the Allies to make a separate peace and generally to fill the Allies with mutual distrust and suspicion. At present, very little Austro-German territory has been invaded, the, war is being fought in Allied countries, considerable Allied areas are firmly held by German invaders, the Dardanelles 's unopened. Is it conceivable that under such circumstances the selfsatisfied German nation feels that

'• kultur" is doomed or thai, its Prussian rulers are repentantly ready to abandon a policy of aggression that has grown and prospered for two hundred years? A permanent peaee must be signed at Berlin and Vienna, not. at "Warsaw or in Brussels.