620 Szechuen Road "Telephones 16856-5 determination of the British Government that what the people of Britain may have to suffer shall be repaid in precisely the same manner, that if the enemy cannot, or will not observe the common decencies of war, there shall be no restraint placed upon those who otherwise would behave quite differently.
There should be no shiily-shellying about it. If British women, and children are to be slaughtered, or maimed by the indiscriminate bombing of the enemy, the same treatment should be meted out to their own women and children. Let it be an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth as long as the enemy wishes it, or until the blockade has considerably reduced their appetite for war. It is not to be believed for one moment that Mr. Churchill will hesitate to adopt some such policy, and thus carry home to the German people themselves the iniquities which Herr Hitler, and his accomplices contemplate perpetrating over Great Britain as they have done in the Low Countries and in France. Of the invasion by sea much has already been written to show that there is every possible factor operating against the likelihood of the enemy being able to land sufficient troops in Britain to stand up against the imposing forces which are ready to meet them. The large amount of shipping required to transport even the most modest army, as it has already been pointed out, would present the easiest target for the surface boats which Britain can mobilize to meet any such threat, and while the Germans may think they stand some chance of crossing the Channel under artillery fire, it is also a fact that the convoys would in their turn have to cross under a similar fire from the British coast, and that from guns out of range of the Germans. There is, therefore, every reason to regard this threat to the British coasts with quiet confidence. Every day which passes digs deeper and deeper into the enemy resources. These latter have undoubtedly to some unknown extent been replenished by the material secured in France. That, however, Herr Hitler appears to have contemplated in the prosecution of his famous timetable, so that from that point of view he is just as near the exhaustion of his war materials as he reckoned he would be. They are still limited by the fact of the blockade, and by holding out until after the date fixed by der Fuehrer for the termination of the war, namely August 15, Great Britain and her Allies will have broken the tradition of his invincibility and have set themselves upon ihe path which will lead to victory.
A Disappointment The news that President Roosevelt has ordered the U.S. Navy Department to cancel the transfer of twenty motor torpedo boats to Great Britain will come as a painful surprise to those who believed from the reports originally io hand that the whole transaction was on the verge of completion. But the Attorney General has issued a ruling that the sale of the vessels to Britain would be a violation of a statute prohibiting the sending from American jurisdiction "any vessel of war with any intent or under any agreement that such a vessel shall be delivered to a belligerent," The law on which the ruling was based is at least twenty-three years old, and the Administration appear to have lost sight of it when coming to the arrangement which they did. The ruling apparently does not refer to other war material and as far as it is known at present there is likely to be no statutory hindrance to the continued despatch of aeroplanes and other war material to Great Britain. Had it been possible to have secured the vessels in question they would have proved a valuable adjunct to the forces which are necessary to patrol the British coast against the invasion which is expected in the near future. Nevertheless the situation is not thereby worsened, for after all it amounts to the frustration of a hope rather than anything in the shape of a deprivation. The British Navy has suffered so comparatively little up to the present that it is still more than able to maintain the greatly extended blockade brought about by the surrender of France, though in a war of this sort every little does undoubtedly help. It would seem now that the only means whereby these vessels could now be made available would be by the passage of a special enactment by Congress specifically permitting such a thing to be done. It is unlikely that Congress would be willing to consent to the passage of any such legislation, and, because of the very apparent desire of the United States to build up a Navy sufficiently strong to meet the menace which the Administration so fully realizes, no real reason why they should do so. This new development is naturally a disappointment, but not a particularly grievous one.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.