6 Too Little Too Late': British Danger

Greymouth Evening Star, 15 March 1948, Page 6

6 Too Little Too Late': British Danger

LONDON, March 13.

“Time is- running against Britain, who, though she has done many big things since the war, is still in danger of doing too little too late,” said the Lord President of the Council (Mr Herbert Morrison) in a speech in London. Events in Czechoslovakia were another blow in the rear. “On top of all our economic troubles we find ourselves back in the same sort of nightmare of aggression we thought we had banished by the defeat of Hitler,” he added. The extent and variety of the threat to civilisation was In some ways comparable with that of 1938. Defeatism at home or refusal to co-operate in present conditions was a crime not only against Britain but against civilisation. “In Britain we are facing squarely the question whether we and Western civilisation are to go down and the chance of firmly establishing world peace is to be lost as after 1918. The answer depends to a sobering degree on the way we and all the British people carry ourselves in the next two or three years.”

Mr Masaryk’s Death Mi- Morrison said that Mr Masaryk had become a martyr to freedom. “His death strips away for ever the pretence that what is going on in’Czechoslovakia is anything but the'trampling underfoot of democracy. Mr Masaryk’s name will live in history as the inspiration of a new resistance movement against the enslavers which will in time sweep across Europe.” Mr Morrison added that the wheat agreement signed last week in Washington was a landmark in world economic history. It struck a blow at inflation and the danger of an agricultural slump, and “struck incidentally at the hopes_ of those banking on world economic chaos to give them the same easy road to dictatorship that Hitler found.” “Only Step Available.” A Labour member of the House of Commons, Mr E. G. Fletcher, who returned to London from Prague on March 10, says in a letter to The Times that several days before the event, Mr Masaryk intimated his decision to commit suicide.

“Mr Masaryk felt that this was the only step available to him as a demonstration that the new regime was a denial of all the ideals of Czech freedom arid independence, for which he always stood.” Mr Fletcher suggests that the reason why Dr Benes is standing, so markedly aloof frorri the hew regime is thjit he is not free to speak his mind, that, if he were he would be linwilling io speak as President against the regime, and that if he did so it might well provoke civil war.