The Editor’s Saturday Night

Northern Advocate, 4 December 1939, Page 4

The Editor’s Saturday Night

I “The majority o£ Americans are s convinced that Britain and France ; are right; but are determined that AmI erica should stay

AMERICA AND THE WAR.

out of the war,”said Mr Raymond Gram Swing, a

commentator on American, affairs, broadcasting from New York to the British public. “That determination is the strongest idea in American life today, and t since that is true I think it needs to |be faced. ? “The determination not to fight can|not be a determination not to fight ion the side of Great Britain and t France, for most people are in profound sympathy with their cause. It lis a loathing of war. It is a loathing |to be involved in a European war. It *is a feeling which arises from a sense I of security. i “Nobody in the United States needs ho fear an immediate danger. Bombs I are not going to be dropped on New I York. No one is going to send tanks facross our frontiers:. While the great i majority of the people arc determined • that America should slay out I do not I believe that the whole of the majori ity or anything like believe it is going fto be possible. The war may not | look today as it will six months or | a year hence.”

“In totalitarian practice ,the attainment of what is, good is achieved by paying a price we, cannot pay”: (says Lord Baldwin).

THE VALUE OF A GOOD CITIZEN.

“The' triumph' of these ideas is

brought by the suppression of the liberty of the individual human soul, the very life and spirit of the ideas upon which our conception of democracy is based. “The Bolsheviks, whose original Leaders were men of great though narrow intellectual power, saw clearly that the greatest obstacle to the enslaving of the human will was the Christian faith, made that faith the, object of their bitterest attack from the first. Only by the elimination of a power which in the human heart they knew to be greater than their own could they create- a generation malleable to their influence. And it is a terrible thing that in the extreme Nazi teaching you see this tendency in Gemany today. “Many of us, as we get older and look back, come to realise that the motive force of Christianity is the life of the Christian. We can think of individuals, often in the humblest walks of life, who by their lives, all unconsciously, have strengthened us, given us purpose, have made the struggle, the daily struggle of life, seem worth while. And is it not true in the democracy we would all wish to see? “The example of the good citizen is the preserving salt. And what power might not go forth throughout this great land if every one of us here went home to our daily avocations resolved to be good citizens? To be true and faithful servants to the people? And that with no thought of our own advancement, but because we are members one of another, integral parts of that whole creation which groaneth and travaileth together

“ . . . Wars settle nothing; they unchain evil passions for the years to come, violent as the passions that begat the war itself. But the. struggle for the soul of man will go on whether there be war or not.”