THOUGHTS FOR THE DAY

Dominion, Volume 34, Issue 298, 13 September 1941, Page 8

THOUGHTS FOR THE DAY

Comments —Reflections

Intercession. O God, defend those who defend us: deliver our Allies from danger and thralldom. Convert the hearts of all men, and so order the Issue of the war that we may be brought to a- just and lusting peace; through Jesus Christ our Lord. * * » “A world founded on four essential human freedoms: Freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear."—President Roosevelt.

“When men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe in the very foundations of their own conduct, that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas —that the best test of truth is the power of thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out.” —Oliver Wendell Holmes.

“If a phoenix is to arise from the ashes of our devastated cities let it be la smokeless one. We should be guilty of the gravest oversight if we neglected the opportunity of eliminating smoke and dirt and all the ugliness which accompany these when we begin once more to rebuild the towns and cities of our country which have been ravished and desolated by war. Smoke cannot be justified on'- any ground—personal, aesthetic or economic. It is a travesty of our modern civilization and should be abolished. We must not allow the subject to be forgotten for lack of emphasis and, if neecssary, reiteration.” —Dr. J. Johnstone Jervis.

“I have heard many bitter criticisms of the peace terms which followed the Great War, but I have never yet beard anyonexgiaintain that from the moral point of view Germany ought to have won, Historians maydisagree on many matters in connexion with the war, but on this point they are unanimous, that the nation which won was on the side of Right. It will be so again. What makes some people a little bit doubtful about that is the shameful way in which the ideals for which those men fought were ignored and forgotten as soon as the war was over; with the result that ‘the land fit for heroes to live in’ became a land fit for the unemployed to lounge in. But even that cannot make Hitler’s cause right. What it should do is to fill us with an unbreakable determination that this time the new world, after the war shall be a fact and not a fiction.’’—'Canon 8. J. Marriott in the “News Chronicle,” London.

"It is the fashion to decry the Treaty of Versailles and find in it the root of the present war. But that is superficial thinking. A treaty does not produce a war in a democratic world. There can be no great war in a democratic world in which peace is maintained with the same scrupulous opposition to lawlessness and the same devotion to justice as in the domestic life of a democratic nation. Peace is an international responsibility. The failure after the World. War was not the Treaty of Versailles but the inadequacy of the organization of peace. If rhe United States had joined the League, even with the reservations worked out by the Senate, France would have been secure, and the League might have grown from its imperfect beginnings into a workable system of peace. The origins of this war was the failure of the United States to understand that you can’t have a democratic world unless you have organized a peace in which every free nation assumes its share of the responsibility.”—Mr. Raymond from Swing, the well-known American broadcaster. •

“Let us, when the time comes to make our British now order, continue to thank God for the diversity of His creatures. There must, of course, be some planning, both nationally and internationally, economic as well as political and strategic. But let us remember that there are limits to what planning can achieve. No war, however victorious, no revolution, however triumphant, no radical and sweeping movement of reform, however successful, has ever gone according to plan. Who can plan even his own life? What, parents can plan even the life of a docile child? What man running a business, what woman running a household, does not know that the unforeseen will again and again upset every plan. How presumptuous, therefore to imagine that we can plan the future of the world, of a continent, or even of a nation! We shall have to face the European situation empirically, as it emerges; we shall have to face it with open, balanced and resolute minds —and, I should like to add, with some recollection of old and not wholly disestablished wisdom and experience.”— Mr. F. A. Voight, editor of the Nineteen th Century, in a recent address.

“Hitler's first diplomatic maxim is to mislead. That is, if you come to think of it, a war-time instinct. When war is being waged, it is the business of a general to mislead his enemy, to befog and confuse him, to keep him guessing. The German mind is much more military than diplomatic. Bismarck himself said that Prussians could never be good diplomats; and the mentality of Hitler, though he is not a Prussian, is essentially military. Just as he planned from the first an economic system which was designed to serve the country best in time of war, so his diplomatic values have been the values of war time; for instance, surprise. Lull his opponent and then deal him a sudden blow. And he always thinks in terms of force. The rest ot us meant what we said when we signed the Kellogg Pact in 1928 and ‘outlawed war.’ We did mean that war should not be used as an instrument of policy. Hitler always thought of war as an instrument of policy, which gave him rather an obvious advantage in peace time.” —Captain A. L. Kennedy in a lecture on Nazi diplomacy.

Fortitude. Yield not thy neck To fortune’s yoke, but let thy dauntless mind Still ride in triumph over all mischance. —Shakespeare, “Henry VI.”