BOLD VETO AGAINST DICTATOR STATES.

Auckland Star, Volume LXX, Issue 88, 15 April 1939, Page 9

BOLD VETO AGAINST DICTATOR STATES.

AMERICAN POLICY.

Match Force To Force When Necessary.

i WEST HEMISPHERE DEFENCE. United Tress Association.—Copyright. (Received 12 noon.) WASHINGTON", April 14. President Roosevelt, in a speech in the Pan-American Day celebrations, pledged the United Sjates to economic support and readiness to match "force to force" if necessary in the defending of the western hemisphere nations against foreign aggression.

The President took the role of spokesman for the West in a bold veto against dictatorial organisation of the world, his worfls apparently inviting the plain people of the totalitarian States "to break their bonds." His speech was translated for short-wave delivery in six languages to every corner of the globe.

Mr. Roosevelt reminded all men that "they have within themselves the power to become free at any time," carrying the thought further when he stated that "the truest defence of peace in our hemisphere must always lie in the hope that our sister nations beyond the seas will break the bonds of ideas which constrain them toward perpetual warfare. By example we can at least show them the possibility that we too have a stake in world affairs."

"The American family of nations pay honour to-day to the oldest and most successful association of sovereign Governments throughout the world," he said. "Few of us realise that the PanAmerican organisation has at present attained a longer history and a greater catalogue of achievements than any similar group known to modern history.

"Justly we can be proud of it. Even more rightly can we look to it as a symbol of great hope in a time when much of the world finds hope dim and difficult. Never was it more fitting to salute Pan-American Day than in the stormy present. Great Co-operative Group.

"For upwards of half a century the republics in the western world have been working together promoting common civilisation under a system of peace. That venture was launched so hopefully 50 years ago, and has succeeded. The American family is to-day a great co-operative group facing a troubled world in serenity and calmf

"This success is sometimes attributed to good fortune. I do not share that view. There are not wanting here all the usual rivalries, all normal human desires for power and expansion, and all commercial problems. The Americas are sufficiently rich to be the object of desire on the part of overseas Governments. Our traditions and history are as deeply rooted in the Old World as Europe's.

"It was not an accident that prevented South America and our own West from sharing the fate of other great areas of the world in the nineteenth century. We have here diversities of race, language, custom, natural resources and intellectual forces at least as great as those that prevailed in Europe.

"What has protected us from tragic involvements which at present are making the Old World a new cockpit of old struggles? The answer is easily found. It is a new and powerful ideal —that of a community of nations— which sprang up at the same time as the Americas became free and independent.

Will for World Peace. "We hold conferences not as the result of wars, but as the result of a will for peace elsewhere in the world. To hold conferences similar to ours it is necessary to fight a major war until exhaustion or defeat at length bring Governments together to reconstruct shattered fabrics.

"Greeting the conference at Buenos Ayres in 1936, I said, 'The madness of a great war in another part of the world would affect us and threaten our good in a hundred ways. The economic collapse of any nation or nations must necessarily harm our prosperity. I am confident we can help the Old World to avert the catastrophe which impends.'

"I still have that confidence. There is no fatality which forces Europe to-wai-ds a new catastrophe. Men are not prisoners of fate, but prisoners of their own minds. They have within themselves the power to become free at any moment.

"As an instance, last summer I stated that the United States would join in defending Canada if she were attacked from overseas. At Buenos Ayres in 1936 all of us agreed that in the event of a war or a threat of war to the Continent we would consult to remove that threat. Yet no American nation regarded these understandings as threats.

"American peace has no quality of weakness. We are prepared to maintain and defend it to the fullest extent of our strength, matching force to force if any attempt is made to subvert our institutions or impair the independence of any of our group.

United States Pledges. "Should the method of attack be by economic pressure, I pledge the United States also to give economic support so that no American nation need surrender any fraction of its sovereign freedom. An American may rightfully claim now to speak to the rest of the world. We have an interest to widen the mere defence of our sea-ringed continent. We know now that development in the next generation will so narrow oceans that our customs ana actions will be necessarily involved with Europe's.

"Economic functioning of the world becomes increasingly a unit, no interruption of which anywhere can fail in the future to disrupt the economic life elsewhere.

"The truest defence of peace in our hemisphere must always lie in the hope that our sister nations beyond the seas will break the bonds of ideas which constrain them toward perpetual warfare." , _ _...*.