BIG REFORMS DUE IN GERMANY

"Whatever may be one's views about the underlying causes of the war," said Professor Kuno Francke at a lecture in Emerson D. last evening under the auspices of the Deutscher Verein, "only ignorance or hatred can deny that the German people engaged in this war, have presented a spectacle of consummate devotion and self-surrender in waging it. With its very outbreak, all petty class prejudices, all sectional jealousies, all sectarian rivalry, and all industrial antagonisms seem to have been swept away. In a supreme moment, the whole nation actually felt as one.

"What is the outlook which this extraordinary exhibition of a common nation will open for Germany's future? In answering, I take it for granted that the war will not end with Germany's political and economic destruction.

"After the war, the old party struggles will reawaken, the old class interests will reassert themselves, perhaps more vigorously than before. What may confidently be hoped for is that this party struggle will not have the same violence and bitterness as before.

Great Armaments to Remain.

"Perhaps no German institution seems so little in need of improvement as the Germany army. The army is the principal training school of national manhood and public devotion. It will remain so, for unfortunately there is little hope that after the war there will be less need of military preparedness. Whatever is the outcome of the present conflict, it will leave for many years to come a vast accumulation of hatred, jealousy and mutual fear among all European nations. Germany, as the main butt of all these fears and hatreds, will agree to a reduc- tion of armament only if she receives adequate pledges that disarmament will not be used as a weapon to cripple her permanently.

Parliamentary Reform Assured.

"The second change of vital importance which is soon to be brought about affects the relation between the government and parliament. The inevitable demand of a genuine coalition ministry will, I am confident, be fulfilled after the end of the war.

"And then there will come a revision of the electoral laws and regulations, both with regard to the Reichstag and the legislatures of the individual states.

"Like all German political parties and social classes, the churches also, particularly the Catholic and Protestant, have stood together during the war. Let us hope that the union will last after the war.

"I have purposely refrained from speaking of Germany's relation to other countries after the war but I cannot close without expressing the belief that the war will bring a new life to all the nation's engaged in it. May we not hope that the universal striving for inner reconstruction, the newly-awakened longing for a higher civic consciousness, the ideal of a national life devoted to the cultivation of the highest powers of the individual, will finally quench the blind passions and violent hatreds inflamed by the war, so that a regenerated Europe will more firmly-than ever before, believe in international brotherhood?