The Goldfield news and weekly tribune. [volume] (Goldfield, Nev.) 1911-1947, 1919-05-10
oNE RELATED WHINE FROM GERMANY

mn. No. v,.l Nation is different. 1t protests against
the Germans being compelled to pay SSo'OVVOoUvO mroush
q nar;od of thirty wears, or at the rate OF SoSoVoopV u
: -. Mn interest To do this. the Nation says, would rob
GERMANY Of any shadow of economic self-determinauon ana
put 100000 people to work as slaves % inc a"0' 'x
America. It is neither moral nor economic.
We are afraid that the Nation, whose editor Is nimseI a
German by birth, has forgotten to look at the otner soe OF
the picture. Germany has stolen billions OF donars worm
of goods, materials Of all kinds, machinery ~, nae" s
was portable and had value. Would 1T be UNJUST 70 ~
Germany TO replace those stolen goods or to pay TOT hem!
Germany took all the fine cattle and the Dig Deleiah
horses, and all the other live stock. Would IL De "sonS "
ask Germany to return such livestock or to pay o ~ why
svmnatbize with a bandit who is asked to return the gooos ne
has stolen, and is it not more merciful to permit MIN pa!
for what he has stolen, with no other ~punishments added!
Thieves are often compelled not only TO repay u 7" y
Jail for punishment for their wrong doing.
And that is not all. Germany wantonly destroyed ml-
lions of dollars worth of goods and industries; nay Dlniohs
is a better sum to state. What they could not steal they de-
stroyed. They flooded the mines so that it will take years
to get the water out of them, involving the lifting, 1t $ esh-
mated, of 100000 cubic yards of water.
They went far into the ground to blow up mines, de-
stroving even the tmbers so as to make them cave in and
make it almost impossible to restore them. Shafts that had
steel Innings i'm them that could not be burned they blew up
with dynamite. These things are not hearsay and they are
not mere evil spoken of an enemy; they are things set forth
in the reports of engineers.
Is it wrong to make a people pay for such wanton de-
struction? If it shall be said that paying almost a billion
dollars a year will enslave the Germans for twenty-five
years, was it wrong to destroy works and industries that can
mot be restored in less than twenty years, perhaps? What
was 1T that Germany had III store LOT rance liz DeiHiuH
and England except economic poverty and to make them
slaves to Germany?
The New York Nation ought to be ashamed of itself for
appearing as such a defender of Germany against the just
DEGREES that are about to be placed against it. Let us not
think more of those who did these things so wantonly-at
least let us not think more of them than we do of the ones
who through four years suffered all the hardships and cru
elites that invaders could impose upon them and who will
have to spend a generation in undoing what was done
through those years.
And in all this we are not considering, for we cannot
consider, what the Germans did to the people of Belgium
and France, to the women whom they enslaved and the girls
they prostituted, and to the children they permitted to starve.
These are things that cannot be paid for in money, and so it
is no use considering them. But in the face of all thes1I
things why whine with the Germans and cease to sympathiZe~
with the Belgians and the French and the Serbians?