Sept. 6.
Nothing could possibly have been more biting than the indictment of Herr Hitler ty Mr. Neville Chamberlain, in the course of a short wave broadcast to Germany, in which the latter attacked the former in no mistakable terms, Der Fuehrer stands acused of a persistent policy of bad faith, and even to those charges which Mr. Chamberlain levels against him, others are now being lided, 'There can be no further trust in the man's' word, nor in the words of those immediately surrounding him, for they are ainted, with the same brush. Hiller fave his word that the Locarno Treaty would respected. Yet he broke it. He gave his ord that he neither wished nor intended to annex Austria: yet he did so. He declared that he would not incorporate Czechoslovakia in the Reich; nevertheless it was done, Munich he announced that he had no further territorial demands in Europe, That assur-ince also he has broken. He said he id not want the Polish provinees; he is invading them, and for years he swore that he was the mortal enemy on Bolshevism. He is now its friend. There is evidence that respect for civilian life so far as raids is concerned has been totally abandoned. The attempt.' to bomb the country residence of the American Minister to Poland would be sufficient evidence of that, even if there were none to be obtained from other localities in Poland, while his promise that Germany would not resort to unrestricted submarine warfare has been clearly broken by the wilful sinking of the s. Athenia, and the imperilling of the lives of fourteen hundred civilians amongst whom there was a very substantial proportion of neutrals, Fortunately the casualty lists resulting from that outrage are small, but that is in no way due either to the German leader, or the men who perpetrated the evil deed. "For all they eared the whole Of those passengers might have suffered death. It was due to the efficiency of the British arrangements that that unhappy result was averted, and beyond the loss of a handsome, and valuable ship no very great damage has been done to British interests. It is perhaps inevitable that for a short while occurrences like this will have to be faced, though there is every reason to believe that the submarine war will never gain the dimensions which it did before being brought under control during the last war.
Something has evidently gone wrong. The German Government denies responsibility for the sinking of the Athenia contending that that was contrary to the express orders of Herr Hitler. In view of the foregoing how much reliance is to be placed upon that assurance? In a welter of lies who is to decide what is the truth? That question is emphasized all the more by the three different versions which the Germans are secking to give of the occurrence. The first was a denial that the Athenia was torpedoed, the second was that she sank as the result of a boiler explosion, though how they could possibly know that passeth the wit of man-Kind to understand, and the third was that the Athenia was deliberately sunk by the British themselves for the purpose of producing a bad impression upon public opinion in the United States against Germany. There all the circumstantial evidence in the world to suggest that the Athenia was sunk by enemy action. It is completely inconceivable that, knowing war was imminent, as Herr Hitler must have known, submarine dispositions would not be made to do as much destruction as possible to British shipping in the early days of the war. The German denial that none of their submaitines was operating in that area, suggests that they were in others, and the Reich's word being what it is cannot thus destroy the conviction that there was a German submarine operating in that very locality. 'The theory of the boiler explosion is naive in the extreme, while as for the third alternative the sugges~ tion that Great Britain would sacrifice a valuable ship in times like these, and possibly well over a thousand lives' clearly is the lo which it is identified as such. It will be interesting to learn what the survivors have to say about the whole matter, for while most of them were asleep, there are doubtless many who were awake engaged in the task of operating the vessel, and they will be able to establish with certainty what occurred. The whole of the Reich's behaviour throughout the various crises, which have now brought Europe to war, suggest that the same ruthless callousness which characterized German behaviour from 1914 to 10918 is to be again demonstrated.
That this is so, must be easily perceived in the declarations and prophecies of German writers on the trend of modern warfare. The aeroplane in their minds is clearly de-Signed to strike terror into the hearts of civilians in order to reduce their morale and so bring about the realization of the blitzkrieg. Consequently the more bombing of military objectives, which the Allies have promised to restrict themselves to, can have rib appeal to a government which regards the bomber as the principal weapon of offense when employed in its widest scope. Thus while Great Britain and France have Fesponded to President Roosevelt's appeal against the bombing of civilians, by declaring their readiness to refrain from such action provided Germany does, the latler has as yet made no such promise. To do so would stultify the activities of this Ishmael amongst governments, and the first few days of the war have given every indication that the leopard has changed none of his spots, and that in the not too distant future the war wil! be conducted with all the bestiality which marked the last one, Thus to the awful responsibility of having provoked thi resent war may be added in due course that anticipated obloquy attendant upon the manner in which it is apparently to be carried out. That contrasts unfavourably with the action of the British in attacking the German navy by air. The German navy was an objective which can hit back, and, if German reports are correct, did so. Mercantile vessels earrying civilians and neutrals cannot do so, nor as a rule can areas in which diplomatic representatives usually establish their country homes. The first British attack on German civilians seems to have been to shower mil-ions of leaflets upon them pointing out the criminality of their leaders who have again lunged them into the possibility of much'
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.