HARD ROAD THAT LEADS TO FREEDOM

Auckland Star, Volume LXXII, Issue 284, 1 December 1941, Page 6

HARD ROAD THAT LEADS TO FREEDOM

TV/TR. JOHN G. WINANT, United States Ambassador, received the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws and Literature at Edinburgh University recently, and then the freedom of the city. In his reply on receiving the freedom Mr. Winant said:—

"Perhaps the greatest issue of the present war is the freedom of the individual in a friendly world in which Christian virtues and moral values are not spurned as decadent, and outmoded, a world where honest work is recognised and a man can own himself. In no time in our history have we had greater need for the generous heart of Robert Burns that moved him to write in homely language the text of democracy: That man to man the warid o'er. Shall be for a' that. "A short while ago we were living in a world that was partly cynical and at the same time generously naive, and it was a long time before we recognised that we were compelled, not by choice but as a matter of self-preservation, to face the brute forces of conquest—and all of us have not realised it yet. Until the elements of democracy were actually snatched from man, few understood the wealth and value of their heritage. If I might transpose a sentence of By-ends in 'Pilgrim's Progress,' there were too many who had forgotten the hard road that led to freedom and democratic government; too many were willing to walk with democracy only when it appeared in 'silver slippers in the sunshine and with applause.' "In you parkway at the foot of the great castle there is a simple bronze statue of an American soldier. It was dedicated in memory of those who died in the last war. He is in a sitting position with his eyes lifted towards your great memorial chapel on the hilltop built to honour those who died for country. The statue has a strange like-

ness to Sergt. York, whom General Pershing commended as the bravest soldier in the American Expeditionary Force. He still lives, a simple citizen of th Tennessee Mountains, unspoiled and unafraid. He spoke at the grave of the Unknown Soldier at our National Cemetery last Memorial Day. You might be interested in what he had to say: " 'There are those in America to-day who ask me and other veterans who fought in the World War, 'What did it get you? Let me answer them now. " 'It got me 23 years of living in America, where a humble citizen from the mountains of Tennessee can stand on the same platform with the President of the United States. It got me 23 years of living in a country where the goddess of liberty is printed on men's hearts and not only on coins in their pockets.

" 'People who ask that question, 'What did it get you?' forget one thing. True, we fought that last war to make the world safe for democracy, and we did for a while. The thing they forget is that liberty and freedom and democracy are so very precious that you do not fight to win them once —then stop. Liberty and freedom and democracy are prizes awarded only to those people who fight to win them and then keep fighting eternally to hold them. . " 'By our victory in the last war we won a lease on liberty, not a deed to it. Now after 23 years Adolf Hitler tells me that lease is expiring, and. after the manner of all leases. I have the privilege pf fighting to renew it or letting it go by default. I choose to renew it, and I have no doubt that the American people Choose likewise.' "That is the language you can understand," Mr. Winant said. "It has to do with the primary things that you Scots learned long ago in your heather-covered hills of Scotland. "In speaking to you to-day I have talked rather through others than using a more direct form of address, and yet what I have had to say I believe deeply, and if in ending I again speak through another, it is still an expression of my own faith. I would remind you of the words of John Donne, clergyman, written more than 300 years age: " 'No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed awav by the sea, Europe is the less as well as if a promontory were, ;.s well as if a manor of thy fi iendn or of thine own were. Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it toils for thee.' "We are a part one of another. We would not nave it otherwise."