GERMANY AND STABILITY

Te Aroha News, Volume XLI, Issue 6544, 15 November 1924, Page 2

GERMANY AND STABILITY

The result of the British elections is to promise a period of stability of government. The people at Home would indeed now be in enjoyment of that period if Mr Stanley Baldwin had not sacrificed his majority wani only twelve months ago. The Conservative leader is fortunate in having a second opportunity presented to him so soon and it is not to be supposed that he will again disregard the value of the policy of “tranquility” ;o which his predecessor was pledged. A problem of the hour that is common ;o European statesmen is that of procuring stability of government. It is vexing Germany just as it has vexed Great Britain. The Reichstag which was elected in May last has already gone the way of its many predecessors. The Chancellor, Dr. Marx, has been obliged to appeal to the country owing to the failure of his efforts to give the Government a more representative character with a view to the ensurement for it of a reliable majority. The Democrats, and probably the other parties of the Left, the .Socialists and the Communists, refused to agree to the inclusion in the Government of four Nationalist members, and Dr. Marx was consequently deprived of a great measure of his support. The degree of Nationalist support that was given to the Dawes reparations scheme, which assured its ratification in the Reichstag, was governed by the stipulation that the Nationalists should be represented in the Cabinet. The People’s Party, which is largely Representative of the great industrialists, and is led by Dr. Streseman, agSfeed to this course, and the Centre, under Dr. Marx, somewhat reluctantly did likewise. But the parties in this arrangement have had their calculations upset by the Republican fear of Monarchist influence. The election campaign promises to be fraught with much bitterness. It has been predicted that the appeal to the electors will show a revulsion of opinion from Nationalism on the one hand and from Communism on the other hand. Whether it will be so or not depends upon the extent to which the German people have recovered their sanity. The Nationalists are, as usual, making more noise than any other party—amongst other things, impudently claiming sore sort of kinship with the British Conservatives —and the Junker press is surpassing itself in the violence of its language. The election manifesto of the Nationalists, signed by General Ludendorff, demands the cancellation of the Dawes scheme, and expresses in grandiloquent terms the sentiments characteristic of the party. The framers of the manifesto have apparently not been concerned to make it harmonise with the recent policy of the Nationalist leaders which had been taken as a basis of combined action. The outlook for progress in the adjustment of affairs as between the Allies and Germany would be sombre were the views of the german Nationalists actually in the ascendant. But the tactics of this party should serve to consolidate the strong foi'ces of Republicanism in Germany to an extent that will be helpful to the Government.