The New Zealand Tablet THURSDAY, JULY 11, 1918. CHAOS

New Zealand Tablet, 11 July 1918, Page 25

The New Zealand Tablet THURSDAY, JULY 11, 1918. CHAOS

11

HEN a plain, unadorned, noonday devil possessed the Gadarene swine they rushed headlong to destruction, and nothing more was seen of them. The seven super-devils of the Seven Deadly Sins have captured our capitalistic Governments, body and soul; and as there is complete evidence that the possessed are pleased, and that no efforts will be made through prayer or fasting to drive out the demons, many people are watching anxiously for the catastrophe. It seems bound to come. To borrow a metaphor from Chesterton : our Cabinet Ministers are like so many men who, having got to the tops of greasy poles, are now afraid to come down. When they do come down, or when they are shaken down, they will fall, not into the sea to drown like the swine, but into the jaws of the monster, Demos, whom they have driven mad by their militarism, by their blundering, by their heartless profiteering, by their secret plotting and playing with the lives of men, by their breaches of faith and broken pledges. For the present they hide their heads like ostriches and lull themselves to a sense of false security. They have a venal press, which is concerned with suppressing whatever truth they find unpleasant, and publishing whatever lies they find necessary to prolong their existence. But the one thing that cannot be killed is the truth; and the one thing that cannot live is a lie. * The democracy of England has been in the past so short-sighted as to allow the daily press to fall completely into the hands of the capitalists; the few weekly papers that voice the claims of the people are overwhelmed by the raucous tones of the controlled dailies. Nevertheless the union of the poor is becoming a reality. We are told that the establishment of republican societies all over England is well on the way; we are also told that were it not for the menace of the great German thrust which tumbled the Carsonite General Gough off his high horse and shook England to her foundations the democracy would have spoken, and would have been heard before now. An Italian paper, // Tempo, tells us how the Russian revolution was engineered by certain diplomats who fancied that the Czar was not heart and soul with the Allies. But the revolution went further than its patrons expected, and it was found that stopping a high explosive in the middle of its trajectory was child's play compared with stopping a revolution at the most desirable point. Our press tells us from time to time that the democratic movement in Germany is on the point of hamstringing the Kaiser and ending the war; and from the German press, which is at least as well informed

in such matters, we know that the people there are certainly struggling towards the light; and, moreover, that their power is being recognised more and more as days go by. The Frankfort Volkstimme says: "Necessity may overcome the revolutionary will of the Russians; maybe they will accept with rage in their hearts whatever the conqueror's might may enforce on them. But the German people, the laboring and struggling millions, demand of the Reichstag that it shall secure the simple and sincere execution of the ideas which were expressed in the Reichstag resolutions of July 19, 1917, and in the answer to the Pope as being the will of the German people's representatives, and of the German people. It is a great and important task to crush the great pan-German 'Vaterland' will. But it is greater and more important to secure the people's peace against the diplomatists' peace, with its stealthy, veiled annexations. The people are embittered against the pan-German manoeuvres; they are dissatisfied, and will become embittered, against a Reichstag that will not do its duty. After more than three years' restraint the dissatisfaction of the people can no longer be held in by censorship and state of siege. The storm is gathering. . . . If these storm portents are unheeded the storm may break overnight. . . . It is becoming more and more evident that the people will not take all that is given to it, and that the embitterment over the Jingo cries will at last break' out in an elemental manner." Whether printed in a German or in a Russian paper such sentiments express the general discontent of the people of every country engaged in the war. There is little in these words of the Volkstimme that has not been said in the English. Parliament and shouted from the housetops by English labor orators. For the present the autocrats have the upper hand. They have the money and the big' guns. But the lesson of history is that ideas beat big guns in the end. * How will the end come ? For it must end somehow. The oppression of the Russian serfs ended in bloodshed and flame. How will the dragooning of the German workers end? and the inhuman barbarism of the English Government in Ireland, with its total disregard for the will of the people and for pledges and promises? and the secret plotting against the Pope and the shameless lying that tried to bolster up that scandalous episode? The Northclift'es and the Reventlows and the Carsons and the Kaisers will yet come to learn that the mob was never made by God to minister to the pleasures and the whims of the rich. If ideas conquer, if the principles of Christian charity and brotherhood overthrow the prepotence of the tyrants all the world over, if there is ever to be a lasting peace and a freedom from Kaiserdom and Carsonism and the oppression of capitalist Governments, it will be a gloomy reckoning day for the men who now hold the reins of government in the various countries of the world. So far it would seem that the writing on the wall is not read in high places. Belshazzar is drunk with power. But the only hope of the world lies in the fact that ideas prevail and that moral force is more than armies in the end. Whatever history may record as to the facts of the war itself, one thing it is sure to record: that the war freed the democracy of the world from the tyranny and feudalism under which it groaned hopelessly for centuries.