EMPIRE SABOTAGE

Dominion, Volume 36, Issue 32, 2 November 1942, Page 6

EMPIRE SABOTAGE

Charge Against Wendell Willkie (Received November 1, 9.50 p.m.)' TORONTO, October 31. The former Prime Minister of. Canada, Viscount Bennett, in a speech said that Canadians resented Mr. Wendell Willkic’s recent speech in which “Mr. Willkie proposes to sabotage the British Empire.” He added, “Mr. Willkie is not qualified to speak about the government of India. India is the greatest tribute to British greatness. We are fighting in order to maintain the integrity of the Empire, and we are proud to be doing so,”

After the speech Viscount Bennett told a Unifed Press interviewer that Mr. Willkie was urging the United States to interfere in domestic problems of the Empire, guided 'by hearsay evidence frojn people who knew nothing about the problem.

In the course of his broadcast last week after completing the special tour of the war zones, Mr. Willkie said: “Discussing India, the wisest man in China said that when India’s aspirations for freedom were put aside to some future unspecified and unguaranteed date, it was not Britain but the United States that suffered in public esteem in the Ear East. That wise man was not quarrelling with British imperialism in India, though he did not. believe in .it, but he was telling me that the United States, by’ its silence, bad already drawn heavily ‘on the reservoir of goodwill in the East, where they were unable to ascertain from our Government's wishy-washy attitude toward India what we were likely to feel after the war about the other hundreds of millions of Eastern peoples. Throughout the whole of the Far East freedom means the orderly but scheduled abolition of the colonial system, . . . The Americans must share with Britain the responsibility of making the whole world a commonwealth of free nations.” INCREASED AID URGED NEW YORK, October 30. Mr. Wendell Willkie, in a second broadcast, renewed’’his plea for increased aid to Russia and China. Ho said that the American flyers in China were frustrated and impatient. They’ had only a few planes and bombs, but such a big opportunity.