Democracy's Strength

New Zealand Listener, Volume 4, Issue 84, 31 January 1941, Page 4

Democracy's Strength

HE most encouraging feature of Mr. speeches is not his repeated declarations that America will support Britain but their clear indication that America does. Russia might decide to support Britain, and if it did its support would be welcome; Spain might; Yugoslavia might. But that would be support from the outside. Support from America is support from the insidethe support not merely of one democracy for another, or even of one English-speaking community for another, but of one family for another that eats at the same table and breathes the same air. Although we must not make the mistake of supposing that Americans are a British community living in another hemisphere and under another flag, it is a bigger blunder still to forget that the American republic and the British commonwealth have both the same way of life. Love of liberty made them both as love of peace disarmed them both, and if our enemies choose to add that love of ease has also demoralised them both, we must take that jibe and not forget it. For we were being demoralised by ease, and if our enemies had been cunning enough to allow that process to go on, a day might have come when recovery would have been impossible. But that sickening danger has passed. We know now what would happen to us if we failed, and we know what would happen to our civilisation-that way of life which, with all its faults (no one could be so dull as not to shudder at them), at least aims at humanity and justice. And because our way is also America’s way, there is a unity between us that cannot now be broken. Nor does any of this mean that the struggle is all altruism on one side and all selfishness on the other. To the extent to which selfpreservation is selfishness, Britain is selfish. To the extent to which union for a common end is opportunism, America is opportunist. But to the extent to which there is any Christian way of life among nations both are fighting a crusade, and President Roosevelt meant neither more nor less than that when he said that America was more than the sum of all its parts, and could not be transferred alive to an alien control. The strength of democracy is the fact that it cannot, like tyranny, surrender and still live.