FORCE OR FREEDOM

Wairarapa Times-Age, 15 April 1939, Page 11

FORCE OR FREEDOM

DEATH GRAPPLE FOR WORLD. WHERE AMERICA STANDS. What America sees, at least as clearly as Britain does, is that the old world structure has gone, and that a new world structure is in the making, writes Mr A. G. Gardiner in a London newspaper. The ideas of Force or Freedom are engaged in a death grapple for the possession, not of this country or that, but of the whole world. Human society can, in Lincoln’s phrase, no longer “endure half slave and half free.” In the new world that is coming to birth one principle or the other must be universal. ' And, in the light of this issue, there is no doubt on which side America will take its stand. This is the vital difference between the position in July, 1914. and the position today, adds Mr Gardiner. We know, and the Americans know, in which camp the United States will .be found, if the dictators force a fight to a finish.. It is this fact which should be brought into action now. Just as in 1914 there would have been no war, if the Kaiser had known that the United States would be in the field against him unless he consented to Grey’s conference, so Hitler and Mussolini would think twice in the light of a similar warning.