PEACE TERMS ACCEPTED.

Taranaki Herald, Volume LXVII, Issue 16468, 21 June 1919, Page 3

PEACE TERMS ACCEPTED.

BY GERMAN ASSEMBLY.

c ANOTHER STAGE TOWARDS THE END. PEACE LIKELY TO BE SIGNED, (Press Association Extraordinary.) (Received June 21, 8.40 a.m.) WEIMAR, June 20. The German National Assembly has accepted peace. RESIGNATION OF SCHEIDEMANN. NEW CABINET BEING FORMED. (Received via Vancouver, June 21, 8.45 a.m.) PARIS, June 20. The Scheidemann Government has resigned. Peace is believed 9 Ts^.m!—Unofficial advices indicate that the majority of the German' National Assembly is ready to sign peace. Herr JNoske is forming a new Cabinet. ■=■ . * CHANCE OF TONE. OF THE GERMAN PREBS. (Received June 21, 9 a.m.) LONDON, June 20. There is an active concentration of Allied troops on the Rhine and the Germans are withdrawing war material from the points immediately threatened. . „ ++l ' „+ The tone of the German press is veering towards a settlement. Although the majority of the Government is against signing and eome suggest.a,plebiscite the people are increasingly m favour oi peace. GERMANY'S LAST SQUEAL. THE OLD STYLE OF PROTEST. (Received June 21, 9 a.m.) NEW TORE, June 16 (delayed). In the last of her counter proposals Germany maintains that the Allies have forsaken a peace of justice to which they pledged themselves in.the armistice negotiations; instead they have concluded a peace qf might. Germany protests against the proposed terms individually and collectively, asks for oral negotiations, and declares that Germany expects justice based on equality and reciprocity. If the Allied terms were accepted'it would mean the complete enslavement of the German people and the betrayal of the world's cherished hopes of peace. Germany declares that fh'e right of self-determination is violated throughout the treaty.

GERMAN NATIONAL ASSEMBLY. A CORRESPONDENT’S REPORT. In the old days, when Weimar was only the German Stratford-on-Avon, the theatre was the centre of local society (writes Mr. .George Young, the Daily News’ special correspondent). The first thing you did on arrival was to present yourself and a box of cigars to the old gentleman in the box-otfice and get a seat for the season, from which you could survey from a respectful distance the social lights on the stage and the serene luminaries in the Grand Ducal box. But nowadays, when the stage of the Weimar Theatre has become the seat of Government, it is as har'd ho get a ticket for a session of the Assembly as it used to be for the Selamlik of Abdul Hamid. Incidentally, Germany is today much more like Turkey than its old, well-fed-up, well-fitted-out self. Dingy soldiers everywhere, dirt, decay, and deprivation everywhere, listlessness and laissez-faire on the surface, with unrest and upheaval below. sleepy backwater of Thuringia has become a whirlpool of revolution, and Weimar is now ringed in by a region of revolutionary strikes that threaten it from three sides. Only yesterday a scouting party of Spartacists was arrested at the station. But once inside the theatre things are not so different from the old time. The young ladies from the • pensions can still “sehwarmen” for the debonnaire premier Scheidemann or the distingue Brockdorffe-Rantzau, or “sehauern” at handsome Koenen, the satnrning Tribune of Halle, or at Merges, the hunchback tailor of Brunswick. Independents both, and personalities, these two. Koenen appears as “Bernard Shaw” in my recent account of the occupation of Halle. Merges, a Queed, who looks like a Quilp, is greatly feared by the burgers of Brunswick. They lately expressed their opinion of the rule of his “Rat” or Board on these lines, pasted to the mounted statue of Duke William of pious and still immortal memory, ob. 1884. Good old Bill, if you’ll get down, Merges shall give you back your crown, When you’re on the Board, of course, We’ll put the tailor on your horse. WORDS WITHOUT WISDOM. , Unfortunately, though the burgen-

BRITISH AND FRENCH TROOPS. READY FOR THE WORD. . * LONDON, June 19. The concentration of British /md French troops, so as to be ready to march into Germany, has been completed. The artillery are moving across the Rhine daily.—Aus.-N.Z. Cable Assn. [Berlin is 300 miles east of Cologne.] TEXT OF THE TREATY. A LENGTHY DOCUMENT. (Received) June 21, 9.20 a.m.) LONDON, June 20. The newspapers have received the full text of the treaty, which occupies 209 foolscap pages, and includes 440 articles. A LAST DENIAL. BY THE GERMAN PRESS. (Received June 21, 9.20 a.m.) NEW YORK, June 20. The German press denies that the National Assembly has decided to sign peace. The Exchange Telegraph Agency asserts that the signing or the treaty is certain. SIGNALISED AT WANGANUI. Per Press Association. WANGANUI, June 21. The receipt of the news that Germany had decided tp sign the peace treaty was signalised by ringing the main firebell. Otherwise there was no enthusiasm displayed her*.

stand can. be stimulated locally into repartee, even into reprisals in burger strikes, it does not get enough opposition in the National Assembly to rouse its plethoric majority there to any activity or even animation. Personally, I find a Weimar “Full Session’’ about as entertaining and enlightening as was Weimar grand opers. A stout elderly gentleman stands in a sort of pulpit on the stag© and reads steadily and stolidly through a pile of typewritten recitative. The Independents who go m sometimes for bravura and even gag a little sometimes, are now nearly always away on tour in tho provinces. So the assembly can continue daily from three to six digesting a pleasantly conservatice Constitution and a pleasing liberal lunch. For Weimar is an oasis of peace and plenty in a land swept by famine and fighting. No doubt it was good policy in one way to transfer tbe Constituent Assembly to Weimar. An Assembly whose vitality is that of an elderly politician after a contested election and whose voice is that of a tired lawyer talking in his sleep could not make itself heard, still less felt, in Berlin to-day. Whether its work will be worth anything anyway depends on how slow tilings move. They could easily move too fast for the pace of the AssemblyBut at least as Dr. Preuse said to, Ime of'the constitution —‘ ‘it will not be 11K the way of anything better.’’ One thing is certain, that the Assembly rests for its sanction, even for its survival, on the Government, not the Government on the Assembly. Parliamentary government on party lines will have been tried, and found wanting. TWO PICTURES. • As I sit listening to a deputy in the Tribune reading a treatise on Constitution niceties as to federation and free-state-rights, I,think of t ho previous afternoon, when 1 was listening to a street orator, in Halle shouting very nasty and unconstitutional tirades about food and freedom to an armed party of soldiers and workmen about to attack the Government troops. And then, again, I think of an afternoon in the Weimar Theatre a quarter of a century ago. A prominent member of the stock company of these days was an old horse blind of one eye—was always led on with his blind side to the footlights. On this occasion he got turned round, and realised for the first time what a fool thej’d made of him for years—-and the rest was chaos and tho curtain. The Constituent Assembly is discussing tbe Constitutional future of Germany, but the fate of Germany is not being decided there. The struggle between revolution and repression cannot bo fought out between the stalls and the stage of the Weimar Theatre, but in the arena of the great towns where the Government speaks with minenferer and machine-guns, and the opposition obstruct with barricades. Already the pressure of the general strikes has restored to the order ■of the day revolutionary proposals for socialising property and for sanctioning the council system that the Constitution makers had ruled out as unprecedented. A coalition can be made progressive ana productive; but it takes a minenwerfer to do it.