CONDITION OF GERMANY.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LX, Issue 18317, 6 February 1923, Page 9

CONDITION OF GERMANY.

STRIKING ILLUSTRATIONS.

Those who have followed" the collapse of the mark must realise to. some extent

its disastrous effect upon those Germans who are dependent upon savings, pensions or fixed incomes; but some concrete examples may possibly help such realisation, writes a correspondent of the London Spectator. Within the last.month;l have received letters from two German friends;

One, an old man, in reply >to'my inquiry as to how persons with" fixed incomes can manage, says that his ). income, formerly equivalent to about £4000 a year* is now worth only a few pounds (capital and income taxes would already have.; reduced it), but he is still able to earn something professionally; otherwise he hardly knows how he could live. The many, mostly of the educated classes, who are no longer able to work and were living on their savings, "have to turn for support," he says, "to their ' fellow-men, and :if these fail them, .they slowly die of hunger, or take their lives. . . . How long is this to last?" ■... . :■;."-. •"'■ '. '.• ■ ;' I

The other was resident in England before the war. Property of his in Britain was sold for £544, which sum was taken by the British Government under the Treaty of Versailles and credited to the German Government, who are in turn to compensate him. They are giving him, as preliminary compensation, half the amount in marks, but at the old rate, which means only 5600, sufficient, as he says, to buy. 31b. of butter! Though on the people bo far are bearing: their calamity with restraint, due perhaps in part to its being the middle rather .than the working class who suffer most, food riots have already begun, • and he reports that "in the main business street of Cologne not a single shop window remained unbroken. . . .A few miles from where we live the farms were looted in a wholesale fashion, and in one case all

the cattle were killed, on the spot and the meat' carried 'away. Despair everywhere, suicides quite a common feature, I wish we could have one glimpse of light in this darkness."