Briton worthy of his salt will for one moment agree. Where Senator Wheeler and those others who think like him are wrong is in failure to understand the seriousness of the issue at stake. This has long ceased to be merely a war between nations. It has become enlarged to.a struggle to the death between the forees of good and evil, between those who would impose serfdom upon the rest of the world for the sole benefit of the German people—the super-superior race, save the mark!—and those who have not the slightest intention of submitting to any such process. When such clear cut issues are in= volved anything in the nature of a compromise which would give the forces of evil an opportunity to prepare for another war would be nothing but arrant stupidity.
What sort of peace could now be predicated upon the word of a Hitler? Senator Wheeler provides the answer himself in his admission of distrust of the man. The first essential to.
'a just peace is the final elimination of those men whose insatiable ambitions, whose declared intention to conquer the whole world, have brought about this grievous tragedy. Once that is done the road will be cleared to a just peace. Even then that can be assured not only by equitable adjustments all round, but by taking care that neither Germany nor Italy shall ever again be ins position to endeavour to impose upon their neighbours. Then it will be possible to establish justice, not that of the Franco-German armistice which has been shown to be predatory in its terms, bus a justice in which tha rule of law shalt again bbe restored, in which good faith shall again prevail amongst the nations and the narrow nationalisms which have arisen since the ast war finally done away with. 'Those who advocate any other sort of peace at this juncture are in fact playing Hitler's game and Betraying the cause of Great Britain and her'
Allies. They did not lightly take up the sword, nor will they lightly lay it down, Tu fact they dare not until all they are fighting for has been completely vindicated, and the rights of men and nations fully freed from danger of suppression.
Eire would be well within her rights in demanding that her own trade should go unhindered, even if it meant submission to an enemy system of navicerts such as that which Great Britain applies to other neutral What is so pathetic about it all is that Mr. de Valera apparently believes that his present attitude would save Eire from being absorbed into the Germanic system which Hitler obviously contemplates in the event of the victory which is being denied him. Doubtless he has received assurances to that effect from the German emissaries in Dublin.
Hitler would certainly not hesitate to make such promises if there were anything to be obtained from them, but that any statesman should, in view of all that has happened, be lined to place any trust in them, is something which it is more than a little dificult to understand. On the face of it, therefore, the alleged neutrality of Eire is a miserable fiction, for though she has not been subjected to bombing from the air or such other action as the enemy could take, the fact remains that Eire is not being treated as a neutral but as a part of the British enemy.
There is another aspect of the matter which is not without interest. This is the second instance within a few weeks in which the enemy press, obviously at the dictation of their governments, have presumed to threaten war should the United States take a certain line of action. One of the ideas of which the enemy cannot divest themselves is that those threats of war are at all likely to divert Washington from any policy which it might decide to adopt. The people of the United States may be sentimentalists, but on the other hand they are also realists, and they view the issues, which the aggressive Powers have raised, in such a light that the utterance of threats by the enemy press is not likely to have more than an irritating effect in the western hemisphere. In this connection it needs to be emphasized that there is no official confirmation of the reports that the United States Government intended to send U.S. ships to Eire, and the possibility that they were merely enemy propaganda designed to give their press a chance to "make faces" at the United States cannot altogether be disregarded.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.