President Roosevelt's statement yesterday was transmitted without delay to French listeners over the short wave radio. The President said that the American people can hardly believe that the French Government would "lend itself to a plan of voluntary alliance" that would apparently deliver up France and its colonial empire.
The surrender of the French Atrican colonies and their Atlantic coasts would be a "menace to the peace and security of the Western Mediterranean." It is inconceivable that the people of France "will willingly accept any agreement for so-called collaboration, which will in reality imply their alliance with a militar: power whose central and fundamental policy calls for the utter destruction of liberty, freedom and popular institutions everywhere."
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.