EUROPE TO-DAY

King Country Chronicle, Volume XXXII, Issue 4639, 13 May 1938, Page 6

EUROPE TO-DAY

LOSS OF FREEDOM. HOOVER WARNS AMERICA. THE RATTLE OF ARMS. New York, April 14. Mr. Herbert Hoover, returning from his fourth visit to Europe—his first since the war —told Americans he observed seven "forces or factors" that had come to the forefront in the intervening nineteen years:— "1. The rise of dictatorships—totalitarian, authoritarian, or centralised Governments, all with so-called planned economics. Nationalism, militarism, and imperialism have certainly not diminished in nineteen years. At one moment (if we include the Kerensky regime in Russia) over 500,000,000 people in Europe embraced the forms of democracy. To-day, if we apply the very simple tests of free speech, free Press, free worship, and constitutional protections to individuals and minorities, then liberty has been eclipsed amongst about 370,00,000 of these people. But to-day there are 30,000,000 less people living under liberal institutions than there were before the war.

"2. The race to arms. Every nation in Europe—Communist, Fascist, democratic—is now building for war or defence more feverishly than ever before in its history. In five years their expenditures have doubled from four to eight million dollars annually. That is probably three times as much of their national substance as before the war. Europe to-day is a rumbling war machine, without the men vet in the trenches.

"3. i.. creased Government debts and deficit. There is hardly a balanced Budget in Europe—that is, if we strip off the disguises of words. Government debts are increasing everywhere. Another inflation in some form seems inevitable.

Self-Sufficiency.

"4. The effort to secure more and more self-sufficiency in industry and food production, for either military reasons or to meet the necessity of planned economy. This applies not only to the Fascist and Communist areas, but in some degree to even England and France. The old-fashion-ed barrier to imports by simple tariffs has proved inadequate to protect these policies. New and far more effective walls have been erected around each nation by quotas, exchange controls, internal price-fixing, clearing agreements on both purchases and sales.

"5. Failure of the League of Nations .as a potent force for peace, and its complete replacement by the old shifting balances of power.

"6. Fear —fear of nations of one another, fear by Governments of their citizens, citizens of their Governments, and the vague fear of people everywhere that geneal war is upon them again. And there is the fear of the promised massacre of civil populations from the air. "7. The steady increase in some nations of brutality, of terrorism, and disregard for both life and justice. Concentration camps, persecution of Jews, political trials, bombing of civil populations are but the physical expression of an underlying failure of morals terrible to contemplate."

Afraid of Alliances.

Mr. Hoover bluntly advised Americans not to be drawn into the next war. "If we join with the two other powerful democracies, Great Britain and France we are," he said, "engaging ourselves in an alliance directed i against Germany and Italy and all the satellites they can collect. But we are doing more than this. Great Britain has her own national and Imperial problems and policies. Any commitment of ourselves will mean that we are dragged into these policies. France has her own special alliances and her own policies, including an alliance with Communist Russia. We would be supporting Stalin. But, more than all this, we would be fostering the worst thing that can happen to civilisation; that is, buildingup of a war between Government faith and ideologies. Such a combination of democracies would at once result in combining the autocracies against the democracies. It could have all the hideous elements of old religious wars." In a profound survey of Fascism— Communism, he forecast, would disappear first —Mr. Hoover said that if President Roosevelt's planned economy was not "an infection from the original stream of Fascism," it was at least a remarkable coincidence.

Democracy Will Live. "I have no doubt," he said, "that Fascism will fail some time, just as Marxian Socialism has failed already. The stifling of intellectual progress, the repression of the spirit of men, the destruction of initiative and enterprise will offset all the efficacies of planned economy. Even economic life cannot succeed where criticism has disappeared and where individual

responsibility is constantly shirked for fear of the State. Even in Fascist countries, liberal ideas are not dead and will not be downed. Every despotism to-day lives with fear of liberty at its heart—or there would be no concentration camps."