Jan. 17.
YesTerpay's telegrams told us of a number of things which Germany, having ratified the Peace Treaty, must do in the next fortnight or three weeks. It would be more to the pain' if they told us what she had already done. Mr. Winston Churchill has recently assured us that during the past year she has on the whole behaved very fairly. But in hard fact we have heard little more than that her consignments of coal to France were short in quantity and poor in quality; that she has managed to keep going an army of a million men; and that, having stolen 322,000 head of cattle from Belgium, she is making a terrible fuss about having to pay back 90,000. These thoughts acquire new significance from an article in the December 'Fortnightly' by Mr. Julius M. Price, the well-known war correspondent and artist, called The Rehabilitation of From what I have seen, (he writes) both within and without the Allied area of occupation, I am convinced that in a very short space of time Germany will arise, phoenix-like, from the ashes of her past commercial greatness and again occupy her former place among the big industrial nations of the world. There is to my mind not a shadow of a doubt that she is rapidly getting over the economic ravages caus-od by the war; in fact, what she has already accomplished in this direction makes her neighbours appear in comparison almost to be marking time—and this applies more particularly to England.
Mr. Price's duties compelled him to visit many important industrial centres, and as he travelled everywhere by car he saw far more than if he had gone by train. ''Everywhere I went I was deeply impressed by the spectacle of a people working with feverish energy and the evident determination to make up for the lost time of the past five years. On all sides was abundant evidence of the great trade campaign the Germans are preparing." Germany indeed Mr. Price thinks, is very far from being crushed or even unduly humiliated. She does not make a song and dance about her vitality, but it is clearly there. The innumerable factory chimneys which are so conspicuous a feature of the landscape directly one crosses. the Germany frontier were all sending forth clouds of smoke.
Every village and every town I motored through appeared to have some local industry that calls for a factory, and all of these, so far as I could judge from outward apbearances, were hardy at work, and there was an atmosphere of wellbeing which was positively discon-carting when one recalled how the Germans have been whining over the misery and dearth of everything brought about by the blockade. It has not, apparently, taken long to et over some at least of its more immediate effects. Of slackness 1 saw no sign anywhere. One experienced the feeling of being in a veritable hive of industry."
Prices were high and taxation heavy, but there appeared no sign of want, and cinemas, theatres and restaurants were crowded. The British army of occupation has brought enormous prosperity, Mr. Price says, to the shopkeeper, for the mark. is so low in value that, even though prices are double and treble what they were before the war, they appear absurdly low to men paid in sterling.
"Surely never in the existence of Zeiss or Goetz have so many cameras, photographic lanterns and binoculars been sold as are being disposed of to-day at prices that must still represent a good profit to the shopkeepers, whilst Solingen razors and scissors are in ever-increasing demand. In an important shop in the Hohe Strasse, the Bond Street of Cologne, I saw brand-new bicycles with free wheel and rubber tyres for 240 marks, which represented exactly £2!
The Germans certainly realize the benefit which this deprecia~ tion of the mark brings to the'
Allies and feel bitter about it.
But they also realize what an advantage it will give them. in competing with British manufacturers in England when they can begin- exporting to that country. The rehabilitation of Ger-nian would, therefore," says Mr. Price, ''spell the doom. of the profiteer far more effectively than any ephemeral legislation, and for that reason, if for no other, would to my mind, not be an unmixed evi Unless all promises made during the war are to be ''as pi file before the wind', Britain going to protect herself against "dumping" of this sort.and indeed we have lately published details of the Government's Anti-
Dumping Bill. But tariffs are an imperfect shield against an energetic industrial competitor, the wealth of Great Britain built up in prewar days, with tariffs against her all the world over, sufficiently proves. If British manufacturers, shopkeepers and purveyors generally have to bring down their prices through competition from without, there is an ample margin between their present selling prices and their wage bill on which they can do so. We need not be pessimistic over the British Empire's industrial future. We have, through the war, for one thing, recovered control of supplies of raw material which we had supinely allowed to slip into German hands, and which must give us an inestimable advantage. But the world is a big place (though in some ways so small) and there are abundant fields to which the German may turn both to buy and sell and to exploit—Russia for example. And the political revival of Germany, even if we can regard her commercial rehabilitation with equanimity, is something that. must not be underestimated. Germany has been let down very lightly under the Peace Treaty, of that there can be no question. Even in the occupied areas, Mr. Price tells us that the people quite evidently do not feel crushed or even unduly humiliated. Still less so
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.