WHEN PEACE IS NO PEACE.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LII, Issue 16098, 11 December 1915, Page 1 (Supplement)

WHEN PEACE IS NO PEACE.

BY TOHTO'GA.

Ik these days we have war and know it. Germany is doing her worst to destroy reedom in the world, to frighten the timid and to overpower the brave, while the Allies a-e gradually doing their best to destroy this German aggression and to end once and for all time the danger that tlireatens civilisation firom the schemes of the Prussian. This war which we have on our hands » lastly and terrible, tilling millions of homes with anxiety and anguish, drowning whole nations in horror, creating hatreds and animosities that may last for generations, devouring, annihilating and destroying, straining nerve and breaking hearts to a most monstrous degree. Yet worse than all the agonies and sacrifices and horrors of this war that Prussianised Germany has forced upon us would be a peace that left the great issue undecided, for such a peace would simply commit the world to frenzied preparation for a renewal of the strife when the Germans were ready to strike at us again. Peace is no peace when it is nothing more nor less than an armed truce which an unscrupulous nation will break the very moment it conceives that it has scrupulous nations at a fatal disadvantage. As long as the British nations did not quite realise the plotting and planning of Germany we were loathe to devote ourselves to defensive preparation and were actually divided upon the desirability of keeping up the Navy. We could never be thus deluded again. We know that as long as Prussian militarism is unbroken, as long as " kultur ; ' is the religion of martial Germany, so long is any peaceable nation like an unguarded flock of sheep about which hungry wolves creep and prowl. If peace came to-morrow, leaving Germany still unconquered. the first step of every British Parliament would T>e to enact conscription, and strain every energy in making ready for the inevitable recommencement of the death struggle. Instead of directing our thoughts towards peaceful industry and social progress and international goodwill we should concentrate our thoughts upon preparations for meeting the German half-way when he came at us again. We should not beat our swords into pruning hooks, but should continue to forge swords and great guns, and to make higher and hirfier explosives. We should take no risks with the fall of Belgium to warn us and the rapacity of Germany unmasked to every eye. For forty years and more Germany deliberately and calculatingly made herself ready to fall upon civilisation like a trained wolf-pack as for twenty years before that Prussia had made ready for the string of victorious wars which gave Germany into her hands. We ought to have fought Prussia and Austria when they attacked little Denmark. We ought to have stood by the French in 1870 when they rid themselves of Napoleon the Little and sought aid throughout Europe to prevent their being plundered and dismembered without just cause. We failed to act as we should have acted, because we did not understand the aims and ambitions of Prussia, but we understand at last, taught by the hardest of hard lessons. Is anybody foolish enough to imagine that Prussia and Germany can again deceive us, or that wa shall ever breathe easily while the Hohenzollerns hold the military strength of a hundred million Germans and Austrians in their hands? If the Allies were silly enough to let the Kaiser have peace should we merely disband our armies and turn again to our domestic affairs and our democratic interests? Should we not become military in sheer desperation, plunging headlong into a renewed race of armaments in which Germany would set the pace, and in which all the world would take part? We should have no option. Yve should know that if we hesitated or faltered our doom would scon be sealed, that in five or ten years, fifteen at most, Germany would renew the struggle, would make no more mistakes, and that we should not find again the stars in their courses fighting for our military unreadiness as they have fought for us through all the seeming' uncertainties of this present war. Supposing we made peace now, a peace that would be no peace, what won Id result? Mothers might keep for a while the grown sons who now must, go to speak with the Raiser in Europe, but the toddling boys would only grow up for the battlefield, and might have to fight within sight of our own flaming cities and to die in the dreadful knowledge that the ravagers of Belgium were within our own gates. A peace that is no peace might save to the Empire a-quarter of a million lives, to New Zealand it might preserve ten thousand men who otherwise may die in setting the world free for ever from the Kaiser; but such a peace within a very few years would certainly cost the Empire millions of men, New Zealand hundreds of thousands of men, even if it did not coat in addition our liberties, our independence, and our hope of progress. Wt, need be under no delusion about this. The war must be fought to a finish, whatever the cost, or it will be renewed and finished a little later to our greater sorrow and at greater sacrifice. Peace! We might as well talk of peace with typhoid as with German "kultur." Like a cancer upon the face of Europe has been the Prussian system that grew by autocratic conquest on the shores of the Baltic and has spread across all Germany and infected as with a virus almost every man of German birth and blood. Possibly tbis system is the only one for which "the European is fitted ; possibly it is a mere dream that democracy is ordained and liberty divine ard progress attainable by mutual kindliness, forbearance, and goodwill ; possibly it is false that truth and chivalry, honour, and honesty, and word-keeping have place among nations possibly it is a delusion that the Christ who died for the good of others is the prototype of that which is highest and noblest and most eternal in bimanity. If German " kultur" is right, a'! these other ideals of ours are wrongdead is justice and mercy, fallen . is loving kindness, doomed is the hope that in the centuries to come the strong will be brother to the weak, and sense of duty bind society to mutual and loyal service. Prussia and Germany have brought back into the world the satanic creed that Might alone is Right, and that the individual must be mastered from cradle to grave by souldestroying authority. How can there be | peace " between this "kultur" and our ! democracies? We must draw the teeth p' ! this Prussian " kultur," or we murt all become slave to the Kaiser of the period, whose methods we see in Belgium, and whose throne is set up in Berlin. The peace which so many have suffered to bring nearer, which loyal New Zealanders go steadily to make, which has been planted in trench and grave and battlefield, and watered with the blood ! of men and the tears of women, is a i peace worth having, a peace for all time- { Before that peace is ours, the Kaiser must ! call in vain for more armies, must see hie ! martial strength melt like snow in I spring, must read repentence in the eyes of mourning German multitudes, and b« I taught that Right is Might as soon as I free nations dare to suffer and be strong i How long that peace will take to win | no man knows, but that it will be wor in the end if we only do our duty nc I man can doubt.