TOPICS OF THE DAY.

Waikato Times, Volume 119, Issue 19887, 16 May 1936, Page 6

TOPICS OF THE DAY.

America and, the Kellogg Pact. [ “Our own Government as a signatory of the Kellogg Pact is a party to a treaty which may give us rights and impose on us obligations in respect to the same contest which is being waged by these other nations. The nation which they consider an aggressor and whose actions they are seeking to limit and terminate may be by virtue of those same actions a violator of obligations to us under the Kellogg Pack. Manifestly this in itself involves to some extent a modification in the assertion of the traditional rights of neutrality. The very conception of collective action against a breach of the peace involves a change in the old-fashioned conception of the attitude of a neutral. One can hardly be neutral in thought or in action between a sheriff’s posse and a breaker of the peace, and in domestic law to assist a felon is a crime in itself.”—Mr H. L. Stimson, former United States Secretary of State. Dictatorship’s Road. “The fact is that no dictatorship, whether by an individual or a committee, even when claiming to represent the ‘people’ or that section of it known as the ‘proletariat,” can sustain itself for many years except by creating a psychological state in the mass akin to that of war. In order to distract attention from the genuine loss of individual liberty and the real nature of the Government, the illusion of an ‘enemy,’ the capitalist class, some institution or other has to be created so that the people will make the same sacrifices which they have formerly been induced to make by the propaganda and hysteria of war and the military operations against a human foe who is painted as threatening all which they hold clear. All emotions tend to exhaustion, and if they are to be maintained must receive stronger and stronger stimulation. The supporter of a dictatorship is much in the position of a drug addict, and the longer it lasts the greater is the conflict between natural exhaustion and artificial stimulation. The Italian people, exhausted by a dozen years of forced adulation, have been offered the strongest drug in a dictator’s power to administer —a foreign war.”—James Truslow Adams, in “Scribner’s Magazine.” » -e ' A.