HUN DISCONTENT.

Wanganui Herald, Volume LIII, Issue 15975, 18 November 1919, Page 8

HUN DISCONTENT.

( j i !i; PAN-GERMAN PROPAGANDA. * A isi-OV ivAISERDOM. (From Charles Tower.) a BERLIN, September 15. I have been watching the demonstrations round the Bismarck statue and listening to the florid speeches of the loyalists—that is, the Hohenzollern faction as distinguished from the South-German royalists. The latter’s programme is less public, but their intrigues are possibly more dangerous. The speeches were dull, except one which admitted that “old Kaiserdom” could not be restored in its old shape. It will have to be a “genuinely German, liberal Kaiserdom,” a popular suggestion to judge from the cheers and an onslaught upon a spectator who disapproved. The demonstrators are beginning to be regarded much as the Parisian royalists. In any .case, the Hohenzollernites are more numerous in Berlin than elsewhere, and I am not sure that even Berliners who shrug their shoulders at a Hohenzollern restoration entirely disapprove. The demonstrations concentrate a little limelight on a capital which is threatened with the fate of Palmyra—a city of trees and sand. The. Pan-German programme, restated this week, is “our old Germany bit by bit out of the hand of the spoilers.” It incorporates German Irredentism and gives it a focus, though of itself German Irredentism is much under than Pan-Germanism. There are, for example, Irredentists who do npt believe in recovery by force; many conceive of a successful manipulation of the League of Nations until it is “ripened” to the extent of demanding restorations. There are also the Commercialists, the “work is our salvation” band, who believe that the lost provinces and lost markets can bo ro-won by peaceful penetration. It was their doctrine that Dr. Bang, a well-named apostle of violence, tried to denounce at the league meeting on Monday. “The English are by no means a nation of shopkeepers, as is always asserted. No Englishman believes the rot that ‘the flag follows trade.’ He knows that trade follows the flag.” SPADE-WORK IN THE SOUTH. But the maw of Pan-Germanism is wide, and, as the Frankfort Gazette points out, its most dangerous trick is that of concealing Pan-German aspirations under a mantle of demands appealing to Germans. By degrees they succeed (but never before so well as in 1917-18) in creating the impression that the league is the only support of real German aspirations. Then comes the next step, in which they urge that to oppose the Pan-German League is to oppose all those national aspirations which they have tried to monopolise.

In other words, there is a growing discontent with the Socialist Republic of Ebert and Noske. Will it crystallise into a Spartacist-Bolshevist experiment, or, the only apparent alternative, an attempt at a Monarchist restoration in the north or south? The Prussian Pan-Germans hope to lead a revolution in the north; but the spadework is being done by others south of the Main.