SELF-CENTRED AMERICANS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 3 June 1940, Page 7

SELF-CENTRED AMERICANS

INDIFFERENCE TOWARD WAR OUTCOME.

A small minority of Americans are increasingly concerned by their fellowcitizens’ complacent indifference toward European affairs, notes a New York correspondent. For example, Mr David Lawrence, writing in the United States News on the threat to selfgovernment in the United States, says: “A flabby, lazy-minded nation is likely to drift into economic chaos, on which, of course, ‘Stateism’ thrives. Our basic defect in America is that we do not really care about our brethren in democracy abroad, or about our neighbours in this hemisphere, or, in truth, our neighbours in the same block or in the next apartment. We have grown self-centred and indifferent. We have lost the spirit of love that goes with religion and the spirit of virility that goes with patriotism. The answer to the question. ‘Do we really care?’ can unhappily at the moment be only an unfortunate negative. It will remain so until some influence or leadership arouses America from the defeatism and provincialism of the hour, and makes us aware that with the downfall of European democracies and the substitution there of dictatorships the United States will not be immune from the epidemic.”