Wairarapa Times-Age WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 29, 1941. “THAT IS DEMOCRACY.”

Wairarapa Times-Age, 29 January 1941, Page 4

Wairarapa Times-Age WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 29, 1941. “THAT IS DEMOCRACY.”

;i chorus of friendly and approving- comment mi the visit to Britain of Mr Wendell Willkie. President Roosevelts opponent in the recent election campaign, the London '’Observer” has spoken of the symbolic part Mr Willkie is playing in the battle for democracy. In fact, Mr Willkie part in the historic and momentous conflict now being waged is much more than symbolic. Although he has no official standing, he represents a not inconsiderable part of the American electorate and his visit to England is part and parcel of the effort he is making to unite, in his own words, “all of the United States so that they might give the utmost aid to Britain in its struggle for free men all over the world.” To a gathering of British. Allied and neutral newspaper men whom he met in conference at the Ministry ol Information. Mr Willkie said I am enormously impressed that this conference can take place with England under attack, and that you and I can come here in free discussion. I think that is democracy, and I hope you will always keep it alive. Democracy must survive and you people over here must survive. The strength of democracy appears not least notably in the open freedom of discussion to which Mr Willkie referred, but it appears also in efforts like his own to lift the cause of world democracy to a plane above that of party politics. Al the end of the world war of 1914-18, international policy became a bone of political contention in the United States and the outcome was disastrous, Mr Willkie is doing as much, perhaps, as any man to ensure that there shall be no repetition of that disaster. He is the leader of those people in the United States who are more or less at odds with. President Roosevelt in domestic policy, but who set the preservation of democracy in their own country and in the world above all less important considerations. It may be hoped that much is thus being done in the United States by Mr Willkie and others to help in laying the foundations of an effective association of peaceful and democratic nations. Decisively as it is overshadowed at present, isolationism in the United States dies hard. The latest exemplification of that fact is in the presentation to the American Senate by two of its members of a resolution which seeks to force the President to request the belligerents to define their war aims. Our newly-installed Ambassador in the United States. Lord Halifax, has lost no time in anticipating this request. Britain's first aim. he has said, is to win the war. Her peace aim is. with other countries, so to reconstruct the world that we will not have another war. To this Lord Halifax added that Britain has no secret treaties for territorial distribution after the war. It should he hardly necessary now for Senators Nye and Wheeler to proceed with their resolution. They have had from Lord Halifax a terse but comprehensive statement of British war aims, and the war aims of the totalitarian aggressors tire so defined that he who runs may read. These aims are summed up as enslavement, murderous oppression and exploitation. Senators Nye and Wheeler have said that most historians are agreed that the Versailles Treaty provoked the present war. That question is hardly now worth debating. It is in any event clearly established that it was after the Treaty of Versailles had been kicked to pieces and the policy of appeasement —deplorable. but perhaps necessary and inevitable in the time and eireiimst;ances in which it developed—- had been carried to its limits, that Hitler insisted on plunging the world again into war. The issue now to be faced is simply whether the world is or is not to be cast back into barbarism. It may be hoped ami believed that President Roosevelt and .Mr Wendell Willkie —opposed in domestic polities but of one mind on vital international issues—and not diehard isolationists, are giving the lead that the American people will follow in this great matter. Mr Willkie at all events is to be credited with a noteworthy initiative in promoting the open and frank discussion by which democracy now and in all time to come must shape its course ami the policies by which it must stand or fall.