THE OTAGO DAILY TIMES MONDAY, AUGUST 7, 1016. THE WRITING ON THE WALL.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 16766, 7 August 1916, Page 4

THE OTAGO DAILY TIMES MONDAY, AUGUST 7, 1016. THE WRITING ON THE WALL.

A French writer lias, on the second anniversary of the outbreak of the war, sounded again a note which will continue to awaken a strongly responsive echo in the reflections of the Allied peoples. He cries " Down with the Ilohenzollerns." He pictures the Kaiser as the master assassin and the real author of this jiredatory war launched by Germany. That is not to suggest that the Kaiser and the military caste have dragooned' the German people into- war. Their culpability would be no less great for having led them into it, deluded in the belief that they are the chosen people of the world. There is no occasion to attempt to determine closely what is the exact measure of the Kaiser's own personal responsibility for the great outrage that lias been committed against the peace of Europe. The point is whether or not the Allies can contemplate the idea of a peace that will still leave such a figure as the Kaiser holding unpunished the stage upon which he has effectually completed self-revelation and that will leave the House of Hohenzollern still standing. If in the countries of the Allies there is one German name that more than any other has become synonymous with all that is calculated to excite indignation and execration, it is the name of Hohenzollern. Long before the war the Kaiser, with his bombast, arrogance, theatrical swagger, and insistence on his divine prerogative, presented a spectacle that was calculated to excite derision outside of Germany. If the world did not tlisn take him quite seriously, regarding him as the victim of his own mental inflation, it has had less reason than ever to doubt that the German took him seriously enough and were quite satisfied with their Imperial mouthpiece. And if it should be suggested that the Kaiser's own days of mischiefmaking cannot hold much threat for the future, it must be remembered that the Crown Prince has shown himself to be a very apt pupil of such a father. We have learned to our cost what was to be expected of an Empire under a House of Hohenzollern. If this objectionable stock be one of the curses that must be lifted from the Germany of the future before she can be considered fit to enter again the comity of the nations, we can only hope devoutly that it will be utterly cast down, and with it those predatory instincts that have so persistently survived. Whatever part the Kaiser directly played in causing the present conflagration, we can no longer doubt that for years past he has been the most prominent inflammatory agent in the German Empire. He has been the " war lord " par excellence. He has loved only too well to rattle the sabre. He has preached eternally the gospel of iron obedience. Only in such a land as Germany would the Kaiser's absurd yet highly dangerous pretensions and utterances have been taken very much as a matter of course. The German political system centres authority so much in the head of the State that there is 110 German freedom of speech and thought such as exists in Britain or other countries the constitution of which is more liberal than that with which the Germans have been content. Competent observers have pointed out that the seeming paradox of modern Germany has been the utter divorce of sane and intelligent opinion from the machine which runs it. Thus Mr Austin Harrison remarks: "If wo consider that every second man in Germany has an order, a title, a ribbon, is a servant of the State, is necessarily a soldier, and is consequently so bound socially and professionally to the integument of the State administration, vamped of all power of political criticism, protest, or initiative, we get an idea of the remarkable singleness of power wielded by authority, which thus arrogates to itse. 1 ' not only the rights of administrative function, but absolutely dominates the national design." The same author's analysis of the position of the Kaiser as " absolute war lord " is very much to the point. The Kaiser is able to dictate because, acting with and under him, the entire organisation of State and municipality, of province and district, with all power of office, privilege, or position, is vested in services whose motto is " implicit obedience." The ramifications of

the system at the head of which is the .Sovereign are innumerable. They touch the national life at every point. Education is under the tin all, and must reflect the Imperial conception of the destiny of the Fatherland. It would be difficult to ■exaggerate the importance as a national factor in Germany of the circumstance that the military caste taker* precedence of all ethers. The intluence of the military and bureaucratic spirit is all-pervading. "Through all forms of civic life," writes Air Harrison, " Germans are held in servility, in disciplinarian control under the drill ol the pystem which constitutes the greatest organisation of masonry that the world has ever known. . . . The gigantic official world of Germany takts its politics from the army, while the army takes its from the Emperor, who so exercises an autocracy greater than any • Czar of Russia or Sultan of Turkey: in very truth, the monarch of all he surveys." The last source to search for evidence of any idea that the Hohenzollerns have been inspired with the idea that they are less the arbiters than the instruments of the will of their people would be the Kaiser's own speeches. The Kaiser's flamboyant utterances, Ins references to his divine minion, and his claims to steer his course with Tleaven as his ally are sufficient testimony to the obsession of the Hohenzollerns for domination. Perhaps by the ,ime the war is ended the Germans will not be blind to the fact that the fall of such a house—a dynasty so dangerously antipathetic to democracy—would be a blessing to themselves.