THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS. SATURDAY, OCTOBER 21, 1916. PAN-GERMAN PEACE TERMS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LIII, Issue 16366, 21 October 1916, Page 6

THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS. SATURDAY, OCTOBER 21, 1916. PAN-GERMAN PEACE TERMS.

The peace terms demanded by the Pan-German Association at Hamburg are interesting as displaying the attitude of mind which supplied the motive-p vwer for Germany's deliberate preparations and unprovoked attack. The Pan-German movement was developed from a crude and barbaric sense of the military superiority of Prussianised Germany and grew in popularity as the German people became accustomed to military domination and estranged from the democratic tendencies of modern civilisation. Men and nations must always have hopes, beliefs and ideals; the Pan-German movement supplied a hope, a belief and an' ideal which gradually supplied to degenerate Germany the place of the faith in humanity which Prussian drill-masters had trampled underfoot. Its hope was for worlddominion, its belief that the " German" was the super-man, its ideal that might was the only right. To the Pan-German the whole world with all its kingdoms, nations, empires, states and principalities was ripe for the chosen and superior race to master, to plunder and to exploit. Liberty was meaningless, democracy a delusion, international goodwill a mere pretence to the Pan-German, who, having lost his own liberty, betrayed his own democracy and found it profitable to cut the throats of his neighbours, devoted himself with enthusiasm to the task of extending the lordship of the Kaiser over all the nations of the earth. The Pan-German philosophy would in any other country have been classed as " freak" and " fad" and have been laughed out of the arena of practical politics. But the German has little sense of proportion ; he is wanting in the savings-grace of humour ; he never laughs at himself. It must be confessed that the renegade Englishman, Houston Chamberlain, has become one. of the authorities of Pan-Germanism, bub it may be pleaded that it was only in Germany that a Houston Chamberlain could have become a celebrity. Pan-Germanism taught that every European of genius throughout the ages owed that genius to some . Germanic inheritance, that there was no merit in any nation other than that introduced by some Germanic strain, that every virile nation could therefore be happily incorporated in the German Empire, and that no others mattered in the least. By this process of reasoning, so characteristically German, it was demonstrated that Plato and Newton, Apelles and Michael Angelo, Alexander and Cromwell, Boticelli and Turner, Columbus, Lincoln, Washington and Captain Cook, were as German in their genius as Guttenberg and Wagner. Naturally, the clear springs were still in the Fatheri land. Inevitably, it was where the j German still existed pure and undented that true German "kultur" must have its centre. Obviously, inferior races encumbered the earth unless they could be made to serve the German super-man. Practically, the Germans must be ready with their superior strength and superior discipline and superior training to teach Europe and the world that they were coming into their own, might being right and the goods of this world belonging to the strong who could seize them. This was the remarkable doctrine promulgated as Pan-Germanism and reflected in every German saying or doing during the past generation.

As Pan-Germanism was the motive-power which drove Germany to war so Pan-Germanism has been the inciting spirit of every atrocity, and is the mainspring of the strenuous resistance which Germany is making and will make to Allied progress. Such as it is it has been preached and taught and accepted throughout the German world as a truth and a religion. When PanGermanism is generally felt in Germany to be false we may expect to see the Central Powers collapse, but though there is evidence that many of the German people are awakening from its hypnotic spell its devotees still exercise a dominating influence and have so far been able to prevent definite knowledge of the situation from being disseminated in Germany. The peace terms they demand are intended to impress the Allies and neutrals, but particularly to impress the German multitude. They can only impress us as corroborative of the fact that Germany went to war for booty and for booty alone; the Allies intend to rid themselves of this Pan-German menace for all time and are not concerned with enemy pretensions. Neutrals, however, may be persuaded that preposterous demands from Germans mean that Germany is triumphant; while Germans themselves may be encouraged by the renewal of demands for territory and indemnity, which responsible political parties in Germany have carefully refrained from mentioning during recent months.