Starving Germany.
Starving Germany.—(Lord Courtney in Manchester “Guardian”)—“The attempt of England to starve Germany is a violation of the Declaration of London and a brutal offense against humanity. For these two reasons—if not for many others—it is a dishonorable proceeding.” (Dispatch of March 21, 1915.)
The silent policy of starving people into subjection is eloquently shown in the history of Ireland, of India, of the South African republics and of the Central Powers, and, strangely, the one country that has achieved this distinction is England.
We said that the blockade of Germany was “illegal, ineffective and indefensible,” but Sir Robert Cecil about the same time declared that England and the United States had an understanding, and he boasted that “we have our hands at the throat of Germany” and scorned the suggestion to relax a grip that meant the starvation of women, children and the aged. Germany was told to give up her U-boat sinking of merchant ships and answered that she had no other weapon to make England take her grip off the German throat, and when she was forced to surrender, the full magnitude of the policy of starving non-combatants was revealed. The picture is presented in the uncolored official statements of unprejudiced observers. The Stockholm “Tidningen” of March 29, 1919:
The Swedish Red Cross delegates sent to Germany in order to make arrangements for getting over to Sweden underfed German children have now returned to Stockholm. The first transport will contain 500 Berlin children.
The delegates describe the want in Germany as appalling. During the revolution days nothing at all could be got for the babies in some places except hot water, and many died, but this was nothing unusual in Berlin. The children were underfed, feeble and rachitic everywhere. Often children four or five years old were unable to walk. In many places the schools had had to be closed because of the general want. Tuberculosis has increased by 60 per cent. Because of this older children than at first proposed must be sent to Sweden.... There are also negotiations going on regarding children from the other famishing countries. The German Government has promised to transport the Belgian children free of charge from Belgium to Sassnitz.
The interest in Sweden for the war children is immense. One thousand five hundred invitations have already been made from single peasants’ homes, and about £3,000 has been collected, mostly in small contributions from the poorer classes. Thus willingness to sacrifice is great, but, of course, much more money is still needed.
Henry Nevison, an eminent journalist, recently presented in the London “Daily News” a tragic description of what he saw in the hospitals of Cologne: “Although I have seen many horrible things,” he writes, “I have seen nothing so pitiful as these rows of babies, feverish from want of food, exhausted by privations to the point that their little limbs were slender wands, their expressions hopeless and their eyes full of pain.”—“The Nation.”
Prof. Johansson, of the Neutral Commission, who visited Germany in January, reports: “About 1,600,000 people were killed in the war, but almost half this number, or rather 700,000, fell victims to the food shortage produced by the blockade. The population has decreased in an unprecedented degree by reasonof the declining birth-rate. At the present moment Germany has 4,000,000 fewer children than in normal pre-war times.”—“Dagens Nyheter,” Stockholm, Lib., March 30, 1919.
Dr. Rubner writes in the “German Medical Weekly” on the effects of the blockade. He gives the figures of deaths of army and civil population since 1914 as: