Southern Christian Advocate

ECHOES OF THE GERMAN ELECTION

President-elect von Hindenburg will avoid all display, particularly of the military sort, in taking the oath of office. He will leave the train at a Berlin suburb and drive to the official residence, and will be inaugurated in plain civilian clothes. This does not cast any damper over the restoration enthusiasm of the monarchists, as the following extract from their leading paper, the Kreuz-Zeitung, illustrates:

"Field Marshal von Hindenburg is today our president and we have no Kaiser," says the article. "But the representative of the German nation is no longer identical with the representative of the revolution of 1918. Now Germany has a leader evolved from the Prussian-German tradition, one who personifies and maintains that tradition and presages a brighter future."

The same paper in congratulating the Crown Prince on his forty-third birthday, assures him that the election of von Hindenburg proves that the German people are turning back to the happy custom of looking to the Prussian kings for their virtues, and that, although a hard fight is ahead, the royal cause will win if the reawakened national ideal can be victoriously moved toward power. There is a strong movement to restore the imperial flag instead of the flag of ancient German nationality that the Republic has adopted.

The Communists have decided to stage a twenty-four hour strike as a protest against the inauguration. If they had acted sensibly and had voted for Marx, there would have been no President Hindenburg against whom to protest. The two million votes they threw away on Thaelmann would have made a majority of more than a million for Marx.