The Southland Times. PUBLISHED EVERY MORNING. Luceo Non Uro. FRIDAY, JANUARY 26, 1917. ENEMY AS SLAVE-OWNER.

Southland Times, Issue 17933, 26 January 1917, Page 4

The Southland Times. PUBLISHED EVERY MORNING. Luceo Non Uro. FRIDAY, JANUARY 26, 1917. ENEMY AS SLAVE-OWNER.

If anything could convince President Wilson of the futility of treating Germany as an honest and scrupulous foe, it should be the methods she is now adopting to fill the gaps in her depleted armies. Germany has apparently reached the stage predicted by military critics when her own population is insufficient to maintain her armies at full strength, to make munitions, and to gather her harvests. Hitherto students of the war regarded the reaching of this stage as the beginning of the end. As soon as her reserves were exhausted Germany would no longer be able to resist the increasing pressure on all sides, she would be compelled to retire upon shorter and ever shorter lines, and the war would steadily progress to its inevitable conclusion. But the critics had not fathomed the full depth of German perfidy. Who, three years ago, would have predicted the enslavement of the non-combatant inhabitants of occupied territories? Yet now it is an accomplished fact and Germany justifies it on the ground of military necessity. The German view is brutally simple. It is necessary that she should prevail, and she admits no law, no scruple, no plea of humanity or right which conflicts with this object. So when her own man-power gives out she turns to the territories she has occupied and has at her mercy. Here are hundreds of thousands of French, Belgians, Poles, capable of bearing arms and working in the factories and fields. By the

i laws of war they are protected from . compulsion to light for the enemy, or ’ to work for him, and they are secured in their property and belongings. Law I and right are meaningless terms in the | face of German necessity, so these I French and Belgians are torn from their homes, forcibly deported, and compelled to work in order that Ger--1 mans may he released to fight And the Poles are to he enlisted in the German army by a fraudulent pretence. The Chicago Daily News publishes a cablegram describing the scenes which an American business man has just witnessed in Belgium: ‘'Naturally, the scenes attending tills forcible removal of fathers and sons wring the hardest of hearts. I saw one long train of cattle trucks loaded with prospective deportees. Many had resisted, only to feel a German bayonet. Women and children had fought for their menfolk with desperate fierceness; clothes were tattered. eyes streaming, voices screaming and shouting until they were hoarse Generally, with as little brutality as possible, hut always effectually, the Kaiser's soldiers crushed all opposition. Houses were searched by arm'd men from cellars to roofs. No discrimination was made between employed and unemployed. Only one object was plainly in view—-to obtain the largest possible number of throne hands. When the train was loaded j women and children were standing

about in a huge crowd. Suddenly they ran on the line in front of the locomotive, threw themselves on the rails and clung there, shutting their eyes and uttering loud lamentations. Detachments of soldiers prised them loose with bayonets and forced them to clear the track, when the train moved off towards the German frontier.” The same thing is apparently ba|>peniug in Poland, for the Journal de Geneve reported that an acute stage had been reached "in the dispute between the German Governor and the municipality of Warsaw relative to the former s attempt to deport Polish workmen to Germany to work in the munition factories. The system is apparently to be generally applied throughout the occupied territories, and it amounts to the literal enslavement of innocent people whose protection was guaranteed by agreement among the nations. The system is a natural development of Germany’s horrible theory that in war there is no limit to the methods that may be employed. And this is the nation which Mr Wilson proposes that civilised Powers should treat as an equal, and that should be asked to join in a League for the maintenance of peace and for securing that future wars should be fought on rules that would mitigate the horrors of war as far as possible. It would suit Germany splendidly, to embraefe Mr Wilson’s idea at the present mdment, and just so soon as the time was opportune she would drop the pretence and the world would again be plunged in a war the methods and weapons of which would be still more horrible and devilish. The picture of German militarism has never been over-painted by the belligerents, and it is strange if the neutral world cannot see that its interest in the issue of the war is as great as ours., and that they should support the Allies in their “grim resolution,” to quote Mr Lloyd George, “to rid the world everlastingly of the menace of the Prussian military caste and to save Europe from an unspeakable despotism.”