GERMAN STATE BLACKMAIL.

Wairarapa Daily Times, Volume 46, Issue 14128, 28 May 1920, Page 3

GERMAN STATE BLACKMAIL.

NO LOAN, NO TELEPHONE. The cost of German telephones is to be raised by 100 per cent,, so that a telephone in large towns will cost, SOO marks instead of 180 before the war (says the Berlin correspondent of the London Scorning Post). Moreover, every person who has a telephone in his house or place of business is to be compelled to lend the Post Office 1000 marks. The Government considers that an ordinary loan in the present state of the money market would not have much prospect of success it has decided on a forced loan. The Government will pay interest on the loan, and will refund the money thus advanced when the subscriber gives up the telephone. Although the German Post Office has gradually increased its charges, it cannot pay its way, owing mainly, it states, to ‘the much higher wages paid to employees and the enormously enhanced cost of raw material. The deficit for the past year is estimated at about 2,500,000,000 marks, and in the hope of reducing this deficit to one milliard in the coming financial year, the Post Office purposes to double practically all postal dues. The Post Office proposes to make a change which will be severely felt by residents of large towns, namely, to abolish the cheaper rates for local letters. Unless the Reichstag vetoes the proposal, which it is hardly likely to do, an inland letter posted to any address in Germany will from April 1 cost. 30 pfennigs for 20 grammes—that is, six times thi> cost of a local letter and three times the cost of an ordinary letter before the w r ar. Letters weighing more than 20 and less than 250 grammes are to cose 50 .pfennigs. A cor.-, responding increase is made in the rate for printed matter, newspapers, and parcels. Railway fares and goods rates were also doubled on March 1, and yet the State railways are rim at an enormous loss. Pares have been raised fopr times in the last two years, in order to keep pace with the successive increases of wages, so that third-class fares are now 500 per cent., and first and second class fares between 600 and 650 per cent, higher than at the outbreak of war.