PRIME MINISTER AND PRESIDENT

Auckland Star, Volume LXXII, Issue 192, 15 August 1941, Page 6

PRIME MINISTER AND PRESIDENT

|F was no mean feat of organisation which enabled Mr. Churchill and President Roosevelt each to leave his country on a mission unknown to all but a very few of his countrymen, and to spend several days together in uninterrupted privacy. So many people, friendly or hostile, would have wished to know where the two men were, and what they were about. To British people everywhere, and, it is probable, to most Americans, the simple fact that the British and American leaders have met and discussed at length the vital problems common to their nations is pleasing and heartening. They represent, respectively, the nation which is the foremost fighting champion of democracy, and the nation which is the proclaimed "arsenal of democracy." The United States cannot afford, and avowedly does not intend, to see Britain defeated. To ensure victory, Britain must have the help which the United States is pledged to give. To enable that help to be given and received most effectually, it is essential that there should be continual consultation between the representatives of the two countries. The meeting of Mr. Churchill and President Roosevelt is another demonstration, the most striking to date, that tlie two great democracies have come together in pursuit of a common end, and that they will work together until that end is achieved.

The official statement issued after the leaders' meeting will be read with keen interest throughout the world, for it represents the closest approach yet made to a declaration of Britain's "peace aims." Even though the difficulty of making such a declaration in the midst of a war, before victory is in sight, is very great, the lack of it has been disadvantageous to the British cause. From the German side the world, and particularly Europe, is told day after day of Germany's professed aims, of the "new order." The fraudulence of that "new order" is easy to expose, but there is needed, besides the propaganda designed to expose it, a positive counter-statement of British aims. The Churchill-Roosevelt statement may be criticised for being too general and too vague, but it is probably as precise as it could be at the present time, particularly when it is remembered that one of its signatories is the head of a nation which is not formally at war. One of its beneficial results should be to remove the doubts which exist in the United States concerning the direction of the President's leadership. If Americans are ultimately, and perhaps suddenly, to find themselves really in the war, they want to be assured that, they will be lighting for ends which they, as well as the British peoples, approve. It is not sufficient for them to be told that their Government is intent upon helping Britain, for then they ask, "What is Britain fighting for?" Now they have before them a statement which should assure them that Britain in this war has no purpose to which they cannot subscribe.

From the British point of view, the most important article in the statement is the last. The British people know, as the Americans do not, the consequences of living close to an aggressive neighbour, and they are grimly resolved that what has happened to them shall never happen again. Any peace settlement which made it possible for Germany to rebuild the Luftwaffe would be, for Britain, a failure and a betrayal. The statement speaks of the "disarmament" of aggressor nations as an essential preliminary step towards a more permanent system of general security. That it is an essential preliminary must never be forgotten. How it is to be accomplished no man yet can say, but it is a source of satisfaction that its essentiality has been recognised and proclaimed, not only by Britain's leader, but by America's.