WAR-TIME POWERS.

Ashburton Guardian, Volume 59, Issue 299, 30 September 1939, Page 4

WAR-TIME POWERS.

The resting of wide and dictatorial powers in most Empire Governments since the outbreak of war, and earlier action of the same kind in France, give point to some observations made last year €>v Mr Wickham Steed in an essay on political freedom. Hitler, he wrote, attributes the unanimity! of the British peoples in the Great War to the superior quality iof their “herdunity” as against the dispersive tendencies of German minds. But he seems not to have understood that our “herdunity” was the willing co-operation of members of free communities in an hour of danger to thier own freedom, or that, in the presence of this danger, they deliberately waived many a hardwon right with a spontaneous spirit of .self-devotion that only a community of individuals, long expert in freedom and willing to bear its responsibilities, could have displayed. So be took up the idea of like-minded herd-instinct, to be enforced by constraint and propaganda, upon a German folk-community, as a substitute, an Ersatz, for the undictated cohesion of a free people.