A PEACE OFFENSIVE.

Wairarapa Times-Age, 28 October 1940, Page 4

A PEACE OFFENSIVE.

JT may be believed with a great deal of confidence that the totalitarian aggressors could undertake no less hopeful, enterprise than their predicted peace offensive on the eve of the United States Presidential election. One account of Hitler’s recent visit to France and his meetings with Marshal Petain and General Franco is that he is anxious to make a show of the extension of his “new economic order” in Europe and to induce the United States to withdraw its aid from Britain and to support a peace based on acceptance of the Nazi “new order.” To any overture on these lines, the United States has made and is making day by day a more than sufficient answer. That answer was summed up admirably by the American. Secretary of State (Mr Cordell Hull), in a speech reported today, in-the course of which he said: —

Only once previously has such grave danger threatened this nation. Today all peaceful nations, including the United States, are gravely menaced. The danger arises from the acts of a small group of national rulers who have transformed their peoples into forceful instruments for widespread domination by conquest. . . .

The tragedy of the present world situation lies in the fact that the peacefully disposed nations failed to recognise in time the true nature of the aims of the rulers of heavily-armed nations. They were lulled into a false sense of security by the assurances given by these rulers that their aims were limited.

To believe that this declaration will be endorsed emphatically by the American democracy, and that a Hitler peace offensive, on the eve of the Presidential election or at any other time,:' will fall stillborn in the United States, is only to assume that the people of that country will exercise common sense. It is a poorly informed American citizen who does not know today that Hitler and his gangsters aim at world domination and that Britain, in her inflexible determination to make an end of Nazism, is defending American liberties as well as her own. No other policy, it may be taken for granted, would now be tolerated by the American, people than one of maximum defence preparation, together with the extension of all possible aid to Britain.