NEUTRALITY ACT

Evening Post, Volume CXXXII, Issue 76, 26 September 1941, Page 6

NEUTRALITY ACT

BILL FOR ITS REPEAL

BEFORE US. SENATE

-DECREPIT MEASURE

LONDON, Septi 25. A Bill to repeal the Neutrality Act was introduced into the United States Senate today.

In introducing the Bill, its.sponsor, Senator Kenneth McKellar (Democrat, Tennessee), said: "We made the mistake of passing a law which has. done us no good." The Statute, he said, was already in conflict with the United States policy of the freedom of the seas which had been followed , for more than a hundred years, and for which two wars had been fought.

Mr. Roy O. Woodruff (Republican, Michigan), a member of the House of Representatives, said the Neutrality Act was the merest

shell of an empty Statute,

Americans ought to understand, he said—and most of them did—that when President Roosevelt gave his "shoot on sight" order he, himself, shot the decrepit Neutrality Act "right in the bustle."

The chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Senator Tom Connally, had previously announced that he was ready to sponsor an amendment of the Neutrality Act without a formal request from the President

He added that the Act was based on the illusion that the Nazis would not sink American ships if they stayed outside the combat zones. The "New York Herald Tribune' says that Senate isolationists admit they could probably muster only 35 to 40 votes opposing the repeal of the Neutrality Act. Yesterday it was revealed that American naval experts had asked tor an appropriation of £19,000,000 to arm United States merchant ships should events demand that they be sent to dangerous waters. , , ■