FRIEND AMERICA

Auckland Star, Volume LXXV, Issue 304, 23 December 1944, Page 8

FRIEND AMERICA

AND SOME PROBLEMS

'SELLING OURSELVES SHORT'

(By JAMBS LANSDALE HODSON) LONDON, When the news arrived that President Roosevelt is to be President of the United States for a fourth term a picture of him flashed across my mind. I saw him in Washington last spring—one of the most striking men I ever saw, as clean-looking as Bernard Shaw, as able to make you feel he is delighted to see you as Lloyd George is, and as good in handling a Press conference with wit and good humour as Winston Churchill. His is a fine face—good, strong, and nothing coarse in it. His eyes are a bluish grey—maybe a touch of violet in them—again reminding you of Lloyd George. He has a trick of pursing his mouth and another of puffing out his cheeks—quick little movements. His face is large, squarish, and much creased round the eyes, his nose is big, well shaped and rather aquiline; his forehead has nobility in it, and his hair, although now thin and mostly grey, still preserves a wave. As a young man he must have looked rather magnificent; today, at 62, he is handsome. He was seated when we entered— he is always. seated when journalists enter. He faced fifty or sixty of us—and it is safe to say that fourfifths represented newspapers opposed to him. Written Firmly Into History

He said that a good many people were doing nothing to help the war and they ought to do some soulsearching about it. If folks were not mindful of the good of their souls they had to he helped to mind them. His voice was quiet, and he turned his lean face with its rimless spectacles here and there, probing us. For 15 ' minutes quick-fire questioning went on. Afterwards I stayed behind to be introduced to him. He has a hand that befits his face, and he has the gift of making you feel that he is exchanging a confidence or two with vou to the world's exclusion. He is certainly an accomplished politician—but he is far more. He has written his name almost as firmly into history as did Abraham Lincoln. Now he has been re-elected for a fourth term. No man has ever done it before. It is pretty certain that no man will ever do it again. It is a tribute to his stature, but it is also a tribute to the vision, idealism, and hatred of war that is in the people of America. Mr. Henry Wallace, vice-Presi-dent, who has himself delivered many a distinguished utterance in this war, says that by this fourth term "the people of the United States have voted a mandate to Congress to plan for lasting peace." That, I think, is a Just statement. No nation in the world hates war more than America, though we in Britain and the British Commonwealth hate it just as much. That there are some people in the United States who seem to think we rather like war is one of our misfortunes. That so many Americans are ignorant of the basic facts about the British Commonwealth, about how it is knit together, about the freedom of the Dominions to go their own way (as witness the neutrality of Eire), about what the Statute of Westminster is and what it did— these are misfortunes also. Time after time, when in the United States some months ago, I was asked, "What did Churchill mean when he said he had not become Prime Minister to liquidate the British Empire?" to which I had to retort, "Do you suggest he should have said that was what he had gone into office for? Would you agree that without the Commonwealth this war would have been lost, and does not that strike you as a justification folks existence and continuance?"

Clouds in the Offing While we can all rejoice at President Roosevelt's re-election, for he is a good friend of the Commonwealth and the cause of world peace, we should be' unwise to imagine that all will be plain sailing from now on between America and us. The Atlantic is wide. The differences of opinion on the international control of air routes have already made plain that there are divergencies of view. Moreover, unless the United States is to have 10,000,000 or 15,000,000 unemployed in the immediate postwar years, she will have to muscle in to foreign trade markets to a degree that far outstrips what she did before the war, when but 10 per cent or rather less of her products were exported. In a wisely-run world as short of goods as our world will be there ought to be room for all of us, but arguments, bickerings, jealousies, and scramblings are almost inevitable. In our relations with America we shall have our ups and downs and our moments of trial to offset our moments of enthusiasm. We had better be tolerant of each other. The United States will have her own problems—of capital and labour, and of the negroes, besides the mighty turnover from war to peace. It will take all the President's strength and wisdom to keep her on a level keel in the rough wind and water.

The Greater Sacrifice The other thing which I suggest we should be wise to do is to have a just appreciation of what we ourselves have done in this war. America has been superb in sending her men all over the world to.fight, but as yet, as I have shown, the price in men that we ourselves have paid is immensely greater than hers. If, as time goes on, an J especially in the Pacific war, America seems to be enduring a greater burden, a more accurate view of who has done what will be obtained not by concentrating our eyes only on what is happening in the last phase, but on the war as a whole from the moment we declared war on the Germans to the moment when Japan capitulates. The last act of. the play often stays in the mind more vividly than the first and second acts, but without those the last is nothing—it could not have been played at all. It was the British Commonwealth which did not wait to be attacked, but launched itself against Germany When its armament was about as powerful as a hand grenade against a tank. We went in first and we shall come out with the last. We went in to the war naked, so to speak, expecting nothing, and we shall emerge having acquired nothing on the way but having, on the contrary, made ourselves most desperately poorer both in men ani goods. Our responsibilities are vast and we should be humble as we face them. But we have the right to look back with pride and face the future sure of ourselves and sure of our place alongside Russia and the United States, vaunting nothing we have done, but not belittling it and certainly not "selling ourselves short."