U.S. REARMAMENT PLANS

Press, Volume LXXVII, Issue 23223, 9 January 1941, Page 7

U.S. REARMAMENT PLANS

Roosevelt Creates > “Super Agency” PLACING ECONOMY! ON WAR BASIS (UNITED PRESS ASSOCIATION —COPYRIGHT.) (Received January 8, 8 p.m.) 1 WASHINGTON, January 7.

Mr Roosevelt has formally created • new “super agency’’ for the control of rearmament. It is headed by Mr W. S. Knudsen, former president of the General Motors Corporation, who is production member of the National Defence Advisory Commission, and Mr Sidney Hillman, former vice-president of the Congress of Industrial Organisetions, labour member of the'- commission. The agency has the responsibility of placing the nation’s economy on a war basis. The Secretary for the Navy (Colonel F. Knox) and the Secretary for War (Mr H. L. Stimson) are also members. Mr Roosevelt emphasised that Mr Knudsen and Mr Hillman would act

jointly. He refused to say whether M t Knudsen’s power was greater than Mr Hillman's.

An executive order outlines th« duties of the new agency. They include formulating and executing all measures needful to increase and regulate defence production and to insure effective co-operation among Government departments; co-ordinating the placement of defence contracts; taking all lawful steps necessary to assure an adequate supply of raw materials; determining when and how priorities are applicable; and the taking over of private plants not co-operating in the defence programme. The members of the new authority have issued a joint statement pledging

themselves to use all their powers to make the United States, in the President’s phrase, the “arsenal of democracy,” They appealed to Americans to do all they could to make the arsenal adequate.

TOKYO COMMENT ON ROOSEVELT

“VIRTUAL DECLARATION OF WAR”

(Received January 8, 11 p.m.) 1

LONDON, January 8.

The Japanese newspapers agree ill describing Mr Roosevelt’s message to Congress as a virtual declaration o£ war on the Axis Powers. The Tokyo newspaper “Nichi Nichi,” complain# that Mr Roosevelt’s statement was aimed equally at Japan. DEATH OF HENRI BERGSON FAMOUS FRENCH PHILOSOPHER I LONDON, January 7. The death has occurred of M. Henri Bergson, the famous French philosopher, in his eighty-second year. Henri Louis Bergson was born ia October, 1859, in Paris. He received his early education at the Lycee Condorcet, and later attended the Ecole Normale Superieure. On completing his training he was appointed teacher of the history of literature. Ifi 1883 he became professor of philosophy at the Angers Lycee, and two yfears later he went to Clermont, where he held a similar post. From 1888 to 1889 he was professor at the College Robbin, from 1889 to 1897 at the Lycee Henri IV, and from 1897 to 1900 he was “Maitre de Conferences” at the Ecole Normale. From 1900 to 1921 he waj a member of the staff of the College de France in .Paris.

Bergson was regarded as one of the greatest French thinkers of his day. He represented the modern aesthetic philosophic movement. He added scope to the theory of life known as Neo-Lamarckism. He was a most strenuous opponent of the mechanist conception of life. In his most important work, "L’Evolution (1907), Bergson broke with recognised philosophic systems apd proposed new ways of thought. This work is regarded by some as equal In importance to Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason.” The two works “Matiere et Memoire” (1896) and “Introduction a la Metaphysique” caused lively discussion when they first appeared. Among his other books are “Essai sur les Donnees immediate de la Conscience” (1889) and “L’Energie Spirituelle” (1919).

Bergson was in 1901 elected a member of the Academic des Science! Morales et Philosophiques, and iA 1914 of the French Academy. H4 Wai alio a member of the Council of the Legion of Honour. In November, 1928, hi was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for the year 1927.