DOMINATION OR DOWNFALL

Otago Daily Times, Issue 23858, 12 July 1939, Page 6

DOMINATION OR DOWNFALL

I have been looking, sadly, at a dusty article on “Germany and the Prussian Spirit," which I wrote in the crisis of August, 1914, says Srq, Edward Grigg, M.P., in a recent article. It's main burden was the baffling contrast between the German Empire then challenging the world in arms and that other Gcr-

many of music, poetry, philosophy, true scholarship, and almost childlike simplicity of mind which is even more completely submerged today. than it was then. A weak and ineffectual Germany, it is true, that Germany of dreams; and yet an indestructible one, as Nora Wain, the American Quakeress, has shown in her account of four years’ recent residence in Germany. “ Reaching for the Stars.” Voltaire’s saying that while France ruled the land and Britain the sea, Germany ruled the

clouds is as true to-day as it was more than a century and a-half ago. There is something visionary in the spirit of the German race which sweeps even its military realists off their feet; and so for them it is always “Weltmacht Oder Niedergang”—world domination or downfall and decay. It was so in 1914. It is once again in 1939.