It may be true that M. Daladier, Prime Minister of France, is noted for his reticence, but it is also a fact that when he does speak, he really has something very pertinent to say, as witness his nation-wide broadcast on Monday night. The enslavement of the German people by their Nazi masters, and the enslavement of other peoples to the German slaves is what the world has been witnessing these last two years. Austria, Bohemia, Moravia, Slovakia and Poland have been reduced to, nothing but lands of despair, and their people compelled to live the most miserable of lives. If corroboration were wanted of this statement it is to be found in the report which has been prepared by the Roman Catholic Church for submission to the Pope, in which it is alleged that beating, torturing and murdering of priests in Poland and a barbaric campaign for the extermination of the Poles generally are being carried on. These reports have been officially described in Berlin as "sheerest invention," but if there has to be any doubt as to who is telling the truth the Holy Church is more likely to be believed than the officials of the Reich, who have been strangers to the truth for so long a time that they probably cannot recognize it when they see it. The world at large does not know the whole tale of what is going on in the territories conquered by the Nazis, It does know of Poles forced to labour for their enemy, of people dispossessed of their homes in order that the Germans forcibly evacuated from the Baltic States shall be accommodated, of mass deportation of subjugated peoples, and the general ruthlessness of men whose code knows nothing of mercy to the defeated but only of cruelty, brutishness, and deceit. This campaign in Poland against the Roman Catholic Church is no mere accidental outcropping of what has occurred of late; it is part and parcel of a scheme to destroy the great moral force which must be inevitably opposed to the immorality of the Nazi system, and is just as carefully thought out as Herr Hitler's progress towards the present war.
In view of the naked hostility which the Nazis, display towards the Church there are some who wonder just how much longer the Vatican will maintain its present neutrality, It sees reared against it all the carefully organized forces of evil which the German leaders have determined to impose upon the world, and the question is often asked as to. when the Roman Catholic Church will avail itself of the enormously potent moral weapons which it has in its armoury. That is a matter for the Pope to decide, though he will probably realize that if the democracies ever go down in defeat the very existence of the Church itself is threatened. M. Daladier reaffirmed the solidarity existing between the Allies, which the Reich would so dearly like to destroy. All attempts have failed up to the present, and there is little likelihood of others in the future being any the more successful, so long as they continue to present to the world at large the prospect of what would happen were the Allies ever to permit of a German victory. It must be clearly understood that the Nazis contemplate in the event of victory nothing so comparatively innocuous as the much condemned Versailles Treaty. Their scheme involves the complete, and utter subjugation of the democracies in exactly the same way as they have subjugated, temporarily, it is hoped, those countries unfortunate enough to be neighbours of Germany. That is what the Allies are facing; the imposition of a system of slavery to a gang of men who fancy they are in some mysterious way superior to the ordinary run of humanity. It is as well to remember these things in the light of- the whispering campaign whereby German propaganda is being carried on. To each class of people a different story is told. The wealthy are informed that they will lose their riches if the war goes on, the workers are told this is merely a war of the rich,—parenthetically it may be remarked that this is so singularly true in view of the enormous wealth the Nazi leaders are "..0v'n to have accumulated,—intellectuals and artists are threatened with the destruction of all that is beautiful, and indeed the whole system involves appeals to the weaker side of humanity and its fear of losing that which it holds most dear. That will be lost in any event should Germany win this war.
M. Daladier makes a good point when he says that Germany by her very system of Government has already lost the moral battle in this present war, but material victory has still to be won. He has not committed the mistake of under-rating the great strength of the enemy, as being one of the most formidable in the world. The Allies are fortunately possessed of enormous reserves, and have facilities for adding to them which are denied to Germany. That, together with the inspiration of a voluntary discipline which is one ofthe proud characteristics of the democracies, is a favourable augury for the future, and a guarantee that the Allied conception of life will not be destroyed by a victorious Reich. It is only necessary to contrast the wretched lives of the Germans under their Nazi masters, that denial of personal freedom and the reduction of the average German to a mere automaton conformable in all things to the wills of evil men, with the freedom which democracy has always given mankind to work out its destiny in individual freedom, to realize what Nazism would mean to humanity were it able to run riot over the whole world in accordance with the.expressed ambitions of its leaders. Mankind as the slaves of the helots of the Nazis, whose system of government costs Germany something in the neighbourhood of £140,000,000 per annum, would be condemned to the brutish existence of mere labouring animals. It is that against which the Allies are fighting. It is for the survival of all that is good in the system of human society that arms have been taken up in response to the Nazi challenge, and it is for that reason that appeals for peace have been rejected, because of a determination that this evil conception of the Nazi leaders shall be wiped out once and for all. No Allied statesman has underestimated the huge effort which will be necessary to shake off the threat of the German yoke over all Europe. It will require all the energies of the Allies to do so, but the will is there, and the readiness to make the necessary sacrifices to ensure that the rule of brutally, criminal men shall be destroyed, not only for the sake of the rest of Europe but also for that of the German people on whom this evil thing has battened.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.