The Auckland Star WITH WHICH ARE INCORPORATED The Evening News, Morning News, The Echo and The Sun. WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 6, 1939. "HE GAVE HIS WORD."

Auckland Star, Volume LXX, Issue 210, 6 September 1939, Page 8

The Auckland Star WITH WHICH ARE INCORPORATED The Evening News, Morning News, The Echo and The Sun.

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 6, 1939. "HE GAVE HIS WORD."

For the cause that laclca assistance, For the wrong that needs resistance, For the future in the distance, And the good that we can do.

I hough the German is denied the right

to own a wireless set which will pick up messages from beyond the borders of his

own country it is probable that hundreds <>t thousands heard the damning indictment

of Hitlerism stated with such dynamic intensity and so dispassionately yet convincingly phrased by Mr. Chamberlain. He used no oratorical or rhetorical methods or tricks, but calmly and with the deliberate

force of a steam hammer he drove home to those of the German people who were ready and able to hear, and all the rest of the listening world, the story of the leader of a nation who time after time had broken his plighted word, though it had been given in the sight and hearing of all men, of a leader who had forsworn every principle of international freedom, who had betrayed his own people and with them civilisation itself.

The speech was a brief one, but every word was a hammer blow. Locarno, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, the treaty with Hitler's sworn enemy of years, Bolshevism, passed in review before the German people to remind them of the limbo of unrighteousness and broken faith into which they had been led. This measured summing up of the course of German aggression during the past six years may have little effect on tlie Keich at the moment, but even there its. remote effects will be great. To

neutral nations it will come as a grim reminder of the brutal activism of Nazi aggrandisement, a warning of the sword of Damocles hanging over their own heads if the subjugation of weaker nations one by one is to be allowed to continue. The appalling cynicism revealed by Hitler during the discussions covered by the White Paper, when, totally regardless of the principles of right and justice, the only defensive point he attempted to make was that "neither Poland nor England could gain anything out of war," will not be forgotten by the free peoples of the world, and the danger to their own integrity, of which Mr. Chamberlain's speech is such a forcible reminder, will bring home to them the necessity, as the man in the street has said, for "stopping Hitler somewhere." The renewal of the campaign of ruthlessness is a danger signal for all minority nations; for their self-preservation they must learn the threatening lesson of the last months of negotiation on the one side and of violence and broken trust on the other.