Manawatu Evening Standard. THURSDAY, APRIL 18, 1940. THE AMERICAN VIEW.

Manawatu Standard, Volume LX, Issue 119, 18 April 1940, Page 6

Manawatu Evening Standard. THURSDAY, APRIL 18, 1940. THE AMERICAN VIEW.

Keynotes of Roosevelt’s speech to the governing board of the Ran-American Union, broadcast to the world, are the phrases that the Americas can keep open the way to eventual peace only if they are prepared to meet force with force if the challenge comes to them, and the realisation expressed that whatever happens in the Old World directly and powerfully affects the peace and wellbeing of the New World. They are truisms which sound almost like the echo of the statements made by British Ministers for the benefit of all neutrals, for it is exactly in order to provide a lasting peace and the removal of the menace of barbaric aggression against the weak that the Allies are at war to-day. Some may read into the President’s statements an admission that there can be no isolation as America has known it, and still practises it, if in Europe might triumphs over right. That is unquestionably true, so that, if the inference is carried further, the Allies are not only fighting the battle of the weaker and small neutrals near the theatre of war, but are verily waging a conflict that is just as much the concern of the Americas. There is no other logical answer. The force that has raped European countries is not concerned with boundaries adjacent to it; nor has it any respect for what are regarded as the laws of warfare. Allied and neutral vessels have been sunk and men, women, and children sent to a watery grave just because of the inhuman' lust of the Nazi coterie for power. The barbarism of the Nazis in the past few years should have shown every statesman who loves liberty that a force has been let loose on the world that even the darkest ages of persecution, rapine, and inhumanity cannot parallel. The neutrals know this. The smaller of them, fearing for their safety, and wondering if it will be their turn next as the victims of aggression, attempt to maintain what at one time was termed strict neutrality. They do not expound their fears because of the greatest fear of all—swift retribution, for it is part of the Nazi technique to proclaim that those who fear them most require their “protection.” The case of the Americas is different. By their attitude toward the economic needs of the Allies they recognise the justice of the latter’s cause. Hitler lias yet to express threats, for instance, against the United States for her supplying of war materials to the Allies. He dare not. But if it so happened that he became further maddened by a success at arms —which the Allies are assuredly preventing —not even the breadth of the Atlantic would prevent his machinations from reaching across. No nation can

live unto itself, and in the gaining of a new international order, which Mr Roosevelt claims the Americas have found without force, all the strength of justice will be needed in the great human adjustments that will follow the war. The conflict that is raging is not only a matter for the framing and maintaining of international policies—it is being waged because millions of individuals, plain men, women, and children, have been slaughtered, crushed into poverty, uprooted from their homes and submitted to the most bestial forms of savagery to gratify the aims of the cult of Nazism. In the “struggling of the whole world to form the basis of its life for the coming centuries,” of which Mr Roosevelt speaks, the Americas’ duty is clear.