France, as a nation, independent, integrated, free; France as a power and as an idea depends today. as she depended yesterday, upon the successful resistance to Hitler of the British Commonwealth. And if, with the assistance of the French, Hitler succeeds and Britain falls, then the reconstruction of Europe tomorrow into a continent in which peoples and individuals will again have freedom will depend upon revolutionary forces inside that continent. This regime will attempt to stifle those forces, too.
There are lessons to be learned from history. Mustafa Kemal Pasha, Mussolini and Hitler rose out of defeated or frustrated nations. But they rose to reverse the defeat, not to ratify it. The regimes that ratified the defeat all eventually were swept away in the rising tide of public indignation.
In France, and for! the first time.
Fascism becomes the symbol for a great people of capitulation, subser-vince and national slavery. This last recruit to Fascism is without Toady for Conqueror And Hitler Speaks The most they can do is to toady to the conquerors, and in doing so destroy the soul of France. The spectacle is more horrifying even than the French defeat.
They begin by casting into the dust the motto of a nation that' under that motto lived its proudest and most glorious days. "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity." Those words on flag of France were revolutionary words, and words that meant power and prestige—power over the imagitation of men, and power in the actual, material world. Even the Nazis could not erase those words from the, French heart and the French mind.
It remains for Frenchmen to at-
Let us recall to France the words of Hitler:
"Had the" German Republic taken up the sword which the monarchy relinquished; had it set to work to prepare the nation to reject a shameful peace; had it refused to rush to the fleshpots offered it by its conquerors, there would have been no Nazi' movement, but all Germany would have followed the democratic republic.'
What will the founders of the new France tell their children? How will they define the word "honourable"? Or will this quaint, old-fashioned word pass, at last, out of the diction-y of mankind?
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.