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THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS WEDNESDAY, APRIL 26, 1916. THE COST OF DEFEAT.

The cost of ultimate victory is ever present in the public mind, stamped upon, it by loving memories of the fallen, by constant sympathy for the sick and wounded, by anxious thoughts for the men at the front and for the many thousands who have still to march away. The commemoration of Anzac has necessarily emphasised this national comprehension of the heavy price we have already paid and of the heavier price still to be paid before the war is over and peace is restored. This cost can never be underrated and underestimated, for countless millions of money and. uncounted thousands of precious lives compel unceasing consideration from the practical calculations of the economic brain and from the profounderst emotions of the human heart. • Our sense of the bitter cost of ultimate victory is thus instinctive and inevitable, to shrewd men, to tender women, to the thrifty as to the loving, to the citizen as to the statesman. Yet far stronger in us, when we exercise these very faculties and feelings intelligently and humanly, must be our sense of the still greater and more bitter cost of ultimate defeat. It is because defeat would be so vile a thing, so incalculably costly, so intolerably degrading, that no loyal citizen of New Zealand hesitates to pay the utmost price of complete and unquestionable victory.

If any were in doubt as to tho fate of the world and the plight of New Zealand should the German realise his dream of " worlddominion" they would have no delusions left after reading the indictment of " German Atrocities," presented after official investigation by Professor J. H. Morgan, the late Home Office Commissioner with the British Expeditionary Force. Here we have no incoherent tale of horror compiled from wild rumour and credulous report, but explicit and corroborated statement, unanswered and unanswerable, detailing the practices of the German soldiery, the methods of German officialdom, the attitude of the German populace, and the inculcations of the German authorities, in the treatment of all those whom the fortunes of this planned and intended war had placed at their mercy. Taking the lesson to New Zealand, we may point out that it is common knowledge that these islands are greatly desired by the German Bureau of Colonisation—now under the direction of Dr. Solf, once of Samoa— as an ideal possession. Had Germany the opportunity, whether by this war or another, she would certainly occupy and retain this Dominion. What German occupation would mean to us may be learned from the fate of every region where the German has entered as a conqueror. How Belgium and East- j ern France have agonised under the unspeakable " frightfulness" of German invaders is again set out by Professor Morgan, who also gives chapter and verse from official documents that expose their atrocious treatment- of British, French, and Russian military prisoners. Then is no infamy conceivable by the lowest of savages which has not been commonly inflicted by these self-styled "supermen" upon the heloless and the defenceless, upoa little children as upon women, upon wounded soldiers as upon unresisting civilians. The cost of defeat, the price of a German-made peace, is that these horrors and these infamies will be inflicted, sooner or later, upon New Zealand. For if we cannot shatter Prussian militarism now, when can we shatter it If we shrink from waging a righteous war in these days of the Great Alliance, what hope have we if the

Empire is broken and the Alliance fails!

It is gradually being brought home to the civilised nations, as Professor Morgan points out, that these German atrocities, these constant and consistent exhibitions of the most appalling inhumanity, are neither more nor less than sinister manifestations of the German national character as it has evolved under the pretentious German " Kultur" The Germans have dragged us back to the ages when the vanquished had no rights, when the conquered were decimated and enslaved, when there was no law and no honour between nations, when treaties were meaningless and pity unknown. " Every tender feeling that their enemy has become", a hostage for his tractability, because it can be violated if he is contumacious. His churches can be profaned, his priestß murdered, his boys driven into'exile, his womanhood handed over to the lust of a licentious soldiery, and his home destroyed. If his troops defeat one in the field, the civilian population can be made to pay for .it with '-heir lives, so that eventually he may be disarmed not by defeat, but by horror. His own humanity will be his undoing. Not fear, but anguish, will bring him to his knees. This is the German doctrine, secreted in the pages of many a German manual, and now published to the world in the German Proclamations and the evil deeds which they both excuse and provoke. This it is which has made the German nation, in the words otLord Rosebery, ' the enemy of the human race,' and has made the very name of this bestial and servile people to stink in the nostrils of mankind!" Thus Professor Morgan! And if his language is strong and his words unqualified, let us remember that his British heart burns within him because of the horrors he has investigated and the organised fere city of which he knows. Not by mincing words nor by shuffling with unpleasant truths can the nations that dwell beyond the war-zone be made to understand •that great as must be the price of victory, the. cost of defeat would be incalculably and inconceivably more.

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Permanent link to this item

https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/NZH19160426.2.30

Bibliographic details

New Zealand Herald, Volume LIII, Issue 16213, 26 April 1916, Page 6

Word Count
940

THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS WEDNESDAY, APRIL 26, 1916. THE COST OF DEFEAT. New Zealand Herald, Volume LIII, Issue 16213, 26 April 1916, Page 6

THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS WEDNESDAY, APRIL 26, 1916. THE COST OF DEFEAT. New Zealand Herald, Volume LIII, Issue 16213, 26 April 1916, Page 6