Our authorities have actually admitted that from November 7th to January 7th, 49 more alien enemies have gone to live on the East Coast of Scotland and on the South Coast of England! And Mr. McKenna has permitted them to do so!
Surely by the official assurances of safety an attempt has been made to lull us to sleep—and we are now being slowly lulled into the hands of the enemy!
In these same areas were 2,190 women alien enemies on November 25th, as compared with 2,303 at the present time.
The figures show that there has been a decrease of 106 in the neighbourhood of the Yorkshire raid. But there has been an increase of 22 on the South Coast, and of 27 on the East Coast of Scotland.
Under whose authority, one may surely ask, have 49 alien enemies been permitted to settle on the Scotch and South Coasts?
With these 27,000 alien enemies free to move five miles in each direction from any area in which they may be living, and power to make longer journeys if they can get a permit—not a very difficult thing to do—the Home Office is adding to the danger by encouraging a movement for the release of some of the 15,000 alien enemies interned originally because they were held to be dangerous. The Chief Constables who are being asked to certify such as might be released, may, I quite think with the Evening News, be pardoned for giving a liberal interpretation of the request.
Surely every sane man must agree with the opinion expressed by the same outspoken journal, namely, that with some 35,000 Germans and Austrians, registered and naturalised, moving freely in our midst, a Government which permits that freedom is taking risks which it ought not to take. The German Government, in their wisdom, are not guilty of such folly. Every British subject, even those who have lived there for forty years, and can hardly speak their mother-tongue, is interned.
Why, if a naturalised German is known to be an enemy of the country of his adoption—be he waiter or financier—should any tenderness be displayed towards him?
He is an enemy, and whatever Lord Haldane or Mr. McKenna may say, he must be treated as such. I write only as an Englishman fighting for his own land.
I repeat that I have no party politics, but only the stern resolve that we must win this war, and that all who lean to the enemy in any manner whatever must go, and be swept with their fine houses, their wives and their social surroundings into oblivion.