“BRITISH HYPOCRISY.”

Taranaki Herald, Volume LXVII, Issue 16464, 17 June 1919, Page 3

“BRITISH HYPOCRISY.”

THE IMPUDENT HUN. Hungry the Hun may be, but brazen, impudent, and defiant he remains to the last. If anyone thinks that he is receiving in any spirit of contrition or gratitude the 370,000 tons of food a month which the Allies have allotted to Germany, a leading article in the Hamburg Nachrichten will dissipate such a notion. Hamburg being the centre of the defunct shipping trade, its chief newspaper is furious over the idea that food has been secured only at the cost of surrendering the German Merchant Marine. Britain is to send the Huns at once 135,000 tons of pork, beans, rice, fats, and cereals, yet Hamburg echoes today with as ferocious abuse of this country as in the joyous days when U-boats were “choking the life out of John Bull.”

Under the heading of “The Shipping Blackmail,” the Nachrichten says:— “The Entente sorely needs the still remaining German ships for transport purposes, so ways and means had to be invented for wresting them from our possession. The plan adopted was to inaugurate, in the usual English style, a vast speech-making campaign. Lloyd George and Churchill, as the best talkers, opened the ball," and the press joined in. Germany was starving, and England must once more save civilisation. The object of this campaign, of course, was to convince chicken-livered people in Germany that England, after all, was uot so wicked and had a soft heart for Germany. Those among us who will never learn were duly impressed by this newest revelation of British hypocrisy. But those of us who know England, at once read these speeches and utterances in the right light—namely, as the overtures to some new and unheard of blackmail. . . . “The German people, which is supposed to have became a self-govern-ing community, has a right to know exactly in what circumstances our delegates at Spa succumbed to the shameless, criminal demands of the English Admiral Hope. The Allies need onr ships more tnan they need daily bread. If our delegates had stood firm and sent the Allied delegates away from Spa with their demands unfulfilled they w'ould very soon havo come to their senses—for vital domestic reasons of their own—and altered their blackmailing proposals. “If it turns out that we have given way completely then we shall have lost our merchant fleet for years, can build no new ships, and will have on our hands thousands of breadless, unemployed seamen and dockyard workers to be added to the already enormous army of worklcss and work-sby people. “Famine in Germany, which with a shipment of 370,000 tons of food a month is simply mocked at by toe Allies, will then become perpetual.”