Evening Post THURSDAY, JANUARY 2, 1941. THANK YOU, ROOSEVELT!

Evening Post, Volume CXXXI, Issue 1, 2 January 1941, Page 6

Evening Post THURSDAY, JANUARY 2, 1941. THANK YOU, ROOSEVELT!

It is difficult to set any limits— military, strategic, political—to the tremendous import of the New Year's gift which the fighting Allies have received from America through the "fireside chat" of the President. We would not attempt to challenge the i high valuation of this oral bomb expressed by the "Daily Telegraph" when it states soberly that Mr. Roosevelt's contribution "makes the issue of the conflict certain." The same idea of a decisive, worldshaking pronouncement comes from Turkey, where an Istanbul paper pronounces the "fireside chat" to be "a turning-point in the war." It may seem paradoxical to say that one non-belligerent, standing up as the representative of a non-belligerent country, can, by word of mouth, decide a war. But the President has come very close to accomplishing this prodigious feat. He has projected a picture of the near future —an armaments picture—which, as a Tokio paper complains, "ignores the German-British war situation"—and ignores it with every justification, since America holds in her hand that which can reverse every Hitler victory. The Hitler propaganda pales before the Roosevelt writing on the wall. Nemesis is afoot, implanting hope in the democracies, and carrying dismay, terror, and rage into the totalitarian camp. The "fireside chat" conveys the background of a peaceful hearth in an unbombed country. But from that quiet hearth-side issues a force that can subdue a world conflagration. The magnitude of that force is in some degree indicated by the extremes of gratitude and of hate with : which the President is greeted. Among democracy's many tributes to the great American, we dwell particularly on three words of the "Daily Herald," whose heading, "Thank You, Roosevelt," is, by its very simplicity, the highest expression of gratitude, expressed (as gratitude well may be) with the greatest economy of words. The Roosevelt of the New Deal has developed into an even greater Roosevelt of world authority, to which high place he has climbed by inches. No pilgrim moving on hands and knees ever approached his shrine or goal more circumspectly than did the Roosevelt of 1934-41. Anyone who casts the mind back a few years will remember how Roosevelt was 'called to task for not moving faster than his isolationists at that time would let him. To one oversea visitor who pointed out the worldwide menace of Hitlerism, and democracy's unpreparedness, he is reported to have replied: "You are on page 267 of the book; I am only on page two." But day by day, in the intervening years, something has been added to the book of American education, just as Hitler has added daily to the warp and woof of the Nazi plot. And now the book on which Roosevelt has toiled has reached the page on which blazes the most scorching indictment of Nazism that either the Old World or the New has ever listened to—a warwinning page of thunder with lightning between the lines. It should be noted that, side by side with this indictment of the Nazi evil, comes news of a New Year message by President Roosevelt to the King of Italy, in which the President expresses the significant

hope that some time in 1941 the Italians "will be enabled to enjoy the blessing of a righteous peace" A righteous peace for Italy clearly has nothing in common with the kind of appeasement that Hitler is working for with the apparent support of certain individual Americans —appeasement with retention of spoils, and with the retention of all the thuggery that Hitler stands for. King Victor. Emmanuel of Italy replied to the President with "cordial good wishes" to the American people "and to you personally"— a phrase which Mussolini would not endorse and which assuredly did not carry his counter-signature. The next step in America is the action of the newly-elected Congress, which will have to deal with the meaning of "aid short of war." In the American isolationist camp there is a tendency to redefine the phrase as meaning aid "short of what Hitler may deem. to be a cause of war"; but Congress cannot endorse that definition, which represents the absolute reverse of all that the President has said. The leasing, lending, exchanging, replacing plan, as applied to war, can hardly, be defined within the four walls of an Act of Con-

gress; so Congressional co-opera-tion is the essence of the situation. New Zealanders gradually are realising that they do not take a semi-detached view of the declared and undeclared wars now proceeding. The President's words, our own Prime Minister reminds us, "provide a powerful contribution towards our own security in the Pacific, and enable us, with full confidence, to concentrate our whole energies upon the struggle in the main theatres of

war."