VIRTUE IN DECAY

Gisborne Herald, Volume LXVII, Issue 20184, 29 February 1940, Page 5

VIRTUE IN DECAY

GERMAN NATION RECKLESS OF COST SPECTACLE OF POWER HYPNOTISED YOUTH * TRAGEDY OF EUROPE (Elec. Tel. Copyright—United Press Assn.) (British Official Wireless.) Reed. 11.10 a.m. RUGBY, Feb. 28. Commenting on the speech given at Oxford yesterday by the Foreign Secretary, Viscount Halifax, The Times says that Lord Halifax put his finger on a fact that can only darken the tragedy of Europe. “Against the youth of Britain and France, and not of these countries alone, the youth of Germany stands embattled,” states The Times. “It is hypnotised by the spectacle of power, jubilant in its fetters and reckless of the moral and intellectual cost of its infatuated self-submission. “All that has given Germany her place in Europe and in history is in decay. German music, art and letters are dead. German education and commerce are perverted. German arms and discipline are discouraged and the German conscience is sealed and silent. Betrayal of Civilisation “To look at Germany alone is to know how great a betrayal of civilisation would have been a British refusal to stand in arms. And if anyone doubts that force can have a positive liberating quality, let him consider not only that part of ‘waste land’ that is Germany, but also those other parts of it in which Germany is seeking to eradicate, along with the last traces of political freedom, the very means of cultural and intellectual progress. “There has been no such threat to common life in all modern history. The German mission to-day is to destroy the heritage of Greece, Rome and Christianity, to exalt the herd and annihilate the individual and make it the destiny of ‘lesser Europeans’ to serve, in an inferior station, the pride and power of the Reich. “The Allies will tolerate no thought of a settlement that might compromise in any particular the aims for which they stand. There will be no peace but a just peace and, as Mr. Chamberlain said last week, there can be no security for peace while the German race is in the keeping of the present regime and of the ideas inspiring it. So long as German honour requires the right to bully the Czech or Pole or some other ‘inferior’ with impunity, just so long Hitlerism will flourish and nothing but force can be trusted to unseat it.”