FREE MEN

Wairarapa Times-Age, 27 November 1941, Page 6

FREE MEN

WILL NEVER SUBMIT TO BONDAGE

MRS ROOSEVELT ON HOPES OF DEMOCRACY. AND RACIAL TOLERATION. NEW YORK, September 29. Mrs Franklin D. Roosevelt today had joined the ranks of radio news commentators in the fields of PanAmericanism, defence and democracy with a criticism of isolationist leaders who inject religious and racial intolerance into their anti-war preachments. Her initial talk, over the National Broadcasting network last night, opened a series of 26 weekly commercial radiocasts and was a reassertion of faith in the triumph of freedom in the world.

Mrs Roosevelt deplored the “tragedy that we find ourselves again in a position where our freedoms may have to be defended with force,” but declared that the nation, built around the word “democracy,” would “melt away if certain of these so-called leaders (of the America First Committee) are acceptable to any appreciable number of people.” 4 “The sincere advocates of America First probably are moved by a sense of futility which they feel when they contemplate the results of their efforts for peace since the close of the last war 22 years ago . . ~” she said. “They have felt perhaps that this country could accomplish by itself what might seem impossible for other countries, and they are loath to give up their

dream of peace. “One can forgive these sincere idealists, but one cannot forgive those who, for personal and selfish reasons, insist on being blind and advocate a course which would destroy us as a nation and which seems to endorse the principles which hold sway in other nations because their leaders consider, them necessary to their national life.”

Mrs Roosevelt -saw the nation as “again facing the dedication of our people in the same way that Lincoln and our citizens were facing it on that battlefield of Gettysburg.” “A wind is rising throughout the world of free men everywhere, and they will not be kept in bondage,” she continued. “Democracy shall triumph.”