"It is% solemn but inescapable thought that those of us who are alive *-^-—are living through the greatest crisis that has ever threatened civilization. This crisis is of such magnitude as to appear to many of us to be utterly fantastic—to be a bad dream from which some morning we shall awake to say: "However I could have dreamed such nonsense—of such horrors?" Unfortunately, it is not merely a nightmare. The crisis so reas and so acute that the next few months or even weeks may decide the fate of civilization.
"Those of you who read 'Mein Kampf' especially the unexpurgated edition, previous to September 1939, might well have regarded its pages as the ravings of an irre-ponsible lunatic, But if you still hold that view. you must realize that these ravings have been' converted into action—that almost everyone of Hit-"s preposterous and ruthless theories have been put into practice. You must alo have realized in the light of all that has happened since 1939, that a policy of appeasement and conciliation toward Germany never had the slightest hope of success. As long as Hitler remained in pow. er, nothing could have averted this awful catastrophe with its world-shaking consequences, and its awful toll of blood and misery.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.