GERMANY AND RUSSIA.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 849, 8 June 1888, Page 10

GERMANY AND RUSSIA.

Respecting the growing hostility between Russia and Germany, The Times, of April 3, writes as follows :—-“ Another item lias been added to the great score that will some day have to be settled between Germany and Russia. The highest Russian court of law has decided that the vast Wittgenstein estates are not to pass, as by the ordinary laws of testamentary succession they would have passed, to Prince HLohenlohe, the eminent man who is at present Statthalter of Alsace-Lorraine. The estates in question occupy more than 630,000 acres—almost 1000 square miles—in Lithuania, in and about the province of Vilna. "They belonged to the late Prince Peter of SaynWittgenstein, who recently died without children,leaving the bulkof his propertyto the Princess Hohenlohe, a daughter of Prince Louis of Sayn-Wittgenstein,and wife of the btatthalter. But two obstacles prevented the quiet devolution of the property. It had been mortgaged to a Russian bank, and Prince Wittgenstein had failed to pay the interest; and Prince Hohenlohe and his wife were foreigners. The first difficulty lisd led to a foreclosure on the part of the, bunk; the second brought the-new inheritors of the property into collision with the ukase of March 14, 1887, by which tho prebent enlightened Russian Government forbade foreigners either to own or to occupy land in Poland and Lithuania. The Court at Vilna decided both point 3 against Prince Hohenlohe, who, it may be remembered, went himself to St Petersburg some months age to press his claim. The hostile decision, welearn this morning from our Vienna correspondent, has been confirmed by the Court of Appeal, and tho Prince has now the satisfaction of seeing an estate as large as an English county pass out of his possession, in obedience to an act of policy so retrograde that it may fairly be called barbarous. For the mortgage question is really subordinate. What has really been at issue has been the question of the right of foreigners to hold or to succeed to land iu Russia, and this has now been decided against the foreigners. Russia thus takes a lower place than China in the order of nations, ,for China at least has treaty ports where * foreign devils ’ may buy land and build factories. In Poland and Lithuania there is to be nothing of the sort. Foreign enterprise, foreign capital are to be banished; the lands of Prince Wittgenstein, according to the complacent comment of the Russian papers, are to be parcelled out among Russian proprietors, and the thousands of German laborers, workmen, and farmers who have been engaged there are to be turned adrift. We need make no further comment upon this transaction, except to say that it is but one out of many which serve to account fmr the growing animosity toward Russia which exists in Germany, and which no considerations of high policy can restrain. Taken together with the steady anti-German measures now being adopted by the authorities in the Baltic provinces of Russia, such a step as the ukase of March, 1887, can be interpreted in no other way than as an act of hostility

directed against the German neighbors -of the Russian Empire.