TRUMAN’S PLEDGE

Gisborne Herald, Volume LXXV, Issue 22617, 21 April 1948, Page 5

TRUMAN’S PLEDGE

DEFENCE OF FREE CURBING AGGRESSION HELP FOR EUROPE (10 a.m.) WASHINGTON, April 20. The United States would not permit free nations to be engulfed by aggression, declared President Truman, in a message to the Daughters of the American Revolution Congress last night. President Truman said: “The best way of avoiding war is to make it known by our words and actions that we will not permit the free nations of the world to be engulfed in any aggression. “We must make plain the fact that we lack neither the spiritual nor the material strength to meet any challenge. As a nation and as a member of the United Nations, we have worked diligently to repair the destruction inflicted by war. We have had considerable success. We would be much farther along the road to world recovery but for the determined campaign of obstruction by one great Power which has sought to perpetuate poverty as a means of aggression.” ' President Truman expressed a doubt whether civilisation itself could withstand the shock of another war. He said that no nation wanted war and emphasised the importance of the defence measures he had proposed to Congress- “ Even more essential, perhaps, is the general understanding of the present by all Americans,”’ he added. “I feel certain that the determination of the remaining free people of Europe to band themselves together in common defence of their economic and political liberties will be matched by equal determination on our part to help them to do so.”