AT A TENSE MOMENT

Wairarapa Times-Age, 20 August 1938, Page 5

AT A TENSE MOMENT

ROOSEVELT’S STATEMENT ABOUT CANADA CALCULATED AND PORTENTOUS ANNOUNCEMENT REACTIONS IN EUROPEAN CAPITALS By Telegraph—Press Association. Copyright. ' NEW YORK, August 19. The New York “Herald Tribune,” in an editorial, says: “There is nothing very surprising in President Roosevelt’s expansion of the Monroe Doctrine to include the defence of Canada. For many years nobody has imagined that the United States could remain indifferent to any threat against Canadian soil and if the scope of the doctrine has been enlarged it is only in the technical sense. “Yet the President has given calculated portentousness to the announcement by timing it at a tense moment in international affairs. Apparently the President and the Secretary of State, Mr Cordell Hull, are trying to exert the influence of the United States in Europe without making any pledge and are apparently trying to preserve peace by hinted threats of war without committing their own people. “President Roosevelt and Mr Hull may feel thatz their utterances are safely within the limits of neutrality, but foreign commentators, who in London and Paris received the speeches with enthusiasm and in Berlin and Rome with anger, are under no such fragile illusions.” President Roosevelt, in an address at Kingston, Ontario, stressed the value of friendship between the two nations, and added: “I give you the assurance that the people of the United States will not stand idly by if domination of Canadian soil is threatened by any other empire.” He said that the people of the United States and Canada were friends and that this was due to the frankness governing the relations between them.