"CLEARING OUT THE RUNS. "
(To THE Mares or THS SPECTATOR:1
Sea,—The Prime Minister, Mr. Boner Law, and our very latest Lord Chancellor have each in their several styles declared it to be the policy of the new Government to repatriate all the Germans who are resident in Great Britain; and one may be very sure that the "stunt hunting" Press will do what it can to bold them to this pledge. May I therefore briefly point out some of the consequences that must follow if any such pro- gramme of repatriation is seriously attempted?
The first consequence will be that the British wives and the British children of these men must either accompany them to Germany or be left in Great Britain without any means of support. For every married German that we repatriate we shall be exiling from three to five British subjects, or else driving them into the workhouse or reducing them to the scarcely lees horrible alternative of dependence upon private charity. I wonder whether people realize that in many cases where the German husband and the German father has been repatriated during the war, their British-horn wives and children, having really no choice in the matter, have elected to follow them. I wonder, too, if people can imagine the feel- ings with which they regard their native country which has thus cast them off, or the sort of life and reception they have encountered in Germany, or their pitiful appeals to the British authorities to be allowed to return to England. For, remem- ber, these women and children—the British wives and the British sons and daughters of Germane—are invariably as British in speech and outlook as in birth and upbringing, hardly any of them speak a single word of German, and not one of them, it may safely be said, had any desire whatever to transplant themselves, least of all at such a time as this, to Germany, or would have dreamed of doing so if the British Government had not suddenly confronted them with the dilemma of banishment abroad or starvation at home.
Is it possible to conceive a more foolish or unjust policy than thief I am not sure that even the adjectives " ineane " and " inhuman" would be too strong to apply to it. Yet the Government propose to apply it without any exceptions or discriminations whatever. The mere fact that fifty or sixty years ago a man was born in Germany is henceforth to be held a valid reason why he should at ones be repatriated. No matter how long he may have lived here, or what his record may have been, or whether he has had British-born eons serving in the British Army, he is to be eent back to Germany—a land he may never have set foot in for a quarter of a century or more and with which all his personal ties may long ago have been severed. I am not, however, eo much concerned with his fate and its righteousness, or otherwise, as with the fact that many thousands of British women and children are involved in it. To inflict upon them bhe choice between exile in Germany and penury and desolation in Great Britain is a proceeding so monstrous that I am confident our people will not
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