MORRISON BLUNT

Gisborne Herald, Volume LXXV, Issue 22587, 16 March 1948, Page 5

MORRISON BLUNT

“TOO LITTLE, TOO LATE” BACK TO NIGHTMARE DAYS (N.Z.P.A.—Reuter— Copyright.) LONDON, March 13. “Time is running against Britain who, (hough she has done many big things since the war, is still in danger of do in" too little too late," said the Leader of the House of Commons, Mr. Herbert Morrison, in a speech in London. , Mr. Morrison said M. Jan Masaryk became a martyr to freedom. “His death strips away forever the pretence that what is going on in Czechoslovakia is anything but the trampling underfoot of democracy. M. Masaryk’s name will live in history as the inspiration of the new resistance movement against enslavers which will in time sweep across Europe.” The 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 disposing of Hitler. ’ 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 the present conditions was a crime not only against Britain but against civilisation. “In Britain we are facing squarely the questions 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 British people carry ourselves in the next two or three years.” He 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 Hiler found.”