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Aviation History
1918
1918 - 1397.PDF
Germanyus ay- V By the time these lines appear in print we sjjall ^ in the midst of the General ctjon> at which the country is askedto give a mandate to the new Government for the conclusion of a satisfactory peace. Yet, at the . moment of writing/we still have no definite assurance that Germany is to be made to pay the cost of the War, so far as it can be ascertained. The Prime Minister has sent to the Press a statement of his policy, which in most of its essentials is a good state- ment, but on the question of making Germany pay he is distinctly non-committal. He tells the country that : " All the European Allies have accepted the principle that the Central Powers must pay the cost of the war up to the limit of their capacity." That will not do at all, unless we are told at the same time how the " limit of capacity " is going to be arrived at and on what basis it is to be assessed. As a matter of fact, there is no limit to the capacity of the Central Powers to pay up to the full the costs of the War. It is self-evident that what they cannot pay in ten years they can pay in fifty, or a hundred or even two hundred years. We need waste no sympathy on the future generations of the Huns. We have authority for the dictum that the sins of the fathers shall be visited on the children, even to the third and fourth generation. Moreover, it amounts to this : that if the sins of the present generation of Huns are not visited on their children, they will have to be paid for by our own, and while we agree that the process of Nature which exacts retribution from generations unborn, is unjust it is nevertheless inevitable as the stars in their courses, and when it comes to the choice of visiting the consequences of the War on our own posterity or that of the Hun, we maintain that the choice can only fall one way. There is no room for forgiveness or magnanimity here. There is only one limit, and that is the amount the War has cost. We must keep right in front of us the fact that it was Germany who willed the War, and thus gambled with the fates—War was the last thing in the world that was desired by a single one of the Entente Powers. Now, apart from the colossal sums which the War has directly cost us, we have lost enormously in stoppage of trade. How much we do not know, and can never know. That is all wealth that is not recoverable by way of indemnity. Moreover, and this is an argument that we do not remember to have seen advanced before, as a direct consequence of the War the pur- chasing power of the pound sterling has fallen to something like eight shillings. This means that, in consequence if Germany's lust of world power, every single man, woman and child in the country is paying a War tax of twelve shillings in the pound before any question of direct taxation falls to be considered. Over and above that the standard rate of income-tax is six shillings in the pound, with the strong prospect that it will be increased in the very near future unless Germany is made to pay. And yet there are those who talk about letting Germany down lightly, and others who fear that if the indemnity is made too heavy we shall drive the Huns to desperation. For our own part, we have no patience with -the former, and the arguments of the latter leave us cold. All we are concerned with is that Germany, like any other criminal, should be made to pay the penalty of her crimes and that the consequences of the latter should not fall upon the heads of those who were the innocent victims of her criminality. DECEMBER 12, 1918 Then, we are not at all comfortable about the matter of the punishment of the arch-criminals. The Prime Minister has assured us that a body of jurists has been consulted, and that these have unanimously come to the conclusion that the Kaiser and his accomplices in the making of this War ought to be tried by an international court. But where are the assurances that these men will be so tried and, if found guilty, will be adequately punished ? Surely, it would have been just as easy to be definite as to be nebulous, especially as it is so abundantly clear that the country will be satisfied with nothing less than a full and impartial trial and as full and impartial punishment of the men—crowned heads or commoners—who brought the untold miserj^ upon the world of the greatest as well as the most insensate war in all history. " FLIGHT " has no politics, but the interests of the Empire are as close to those who conduct it as to any, and, as we took occasion to say last week, these are times in which no organ of wide pirculation can sit silent and allow these great issues to go by default. We feel that we should be failing in our duty at this important period of our history did we not join our voice to those that are so justly and properly calling for the punishment of Germany herself and for that of the men who were at the head of her destinies during the fateful days of 1914. Railways Arr Routes In a letter to the Daily Mail Sir Charles Wakefield makes an excellently prac-t ^ca^ series of suggestions for utilising our great main railways as aerial routes. There is nothing new in the suggestion itself, inasmuch as main lines of railway are among the air pilot's best guides, but what Sir Charles does is to-put forward a concrete scheme for rendering these lines permanently useful as such. Not the least merit of the idea is its simplicity. He suggests that, for example, the London and North-Western should be marked by a great white limestone square at intervals of one or two miles; the Great Northern might be .distinguished by a circle ; the Midland by a triangle ;' the Great Western by a cross, and so on. Important branch lines could be indicated by the primary sign of the main line to which they act as feeders, with the addition of a line, for' example. Properly carried out, such a scheme would constitute a simple aerial guide for pilots, which could be learnt in an hour and used in conjunction with an ordinary railway map. As Sir Charles himself points out, the railways give us at once the direct route from one town to another, and there is sufficient ground everywhere along these lines on which to place the signs at intervals. The .cost of maintenance would be very small, while that of their installation would by no means be great. The idea is so excellent that there is really nothing to be said about it: Its merits are so self-evident as to require no elaboration, and it seems to us Jjwt the only question that can possibly arise is that of exactly who is to find the money for installing such distinguishing marks. To our way of thinking, it is the affair of the Air Ministry, and the latter should undertake it at the public charge. We shall have *to maintain a large Air Force after peace, and service machines will require these signs as much as any, but even apart from that it seems to us that aerial routes are as much the concern of the State as roads and ocean highways. 1398
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