Timely Topics

Northern Advocate, 30 January 1940, Page 4

Timely Topics

Those neutral Powers who make protests against the British Ordcr-in-Council regarding exports might surely give conNEUTRALS AND sideration to the THE AGGRESSOR, fact that a Gor-

in a 11 victory rpells inevitably the end of their existence as independent nations (says a correspondent of “The Times”). There is ample evidence in the last three-quarters of a century of the German desire to annex or absorb the smaller European nations. Lord Mor ley records (“Life of Gladstone," ii, 320) Bismarck having told the Dutch Ambassador in 1865 that “he coveted Holland less for its own sake than for its wealthy colonies,” and tlmt in 1869. after the disgraceful Prussian attacks on Denmark and Austria, “the small nations were in trepidation and ; with good reason.” When reminded ‘that Belgium was guaranteed’ by I Europe, Bismarck replied that "a ; guarantee in these days was of little lvalue,” and when the Belgian Press ; did not conceal its sentiments, he "let ■ fall the ominous observation that if [Belgium persisted in that, course she might pay dear for it.” The sole restraining force was the probability 'that he would meet with the opposition of other Great Powers.

Referring to the ceremony of handing over to the Librarian ol' the United States Congress, for safe keeping during the CHARTER AND war. the finest CONSTITUTION, surviving copy of the Magna Carta, “The Times” says: That is its natural place, for in truth the United Stales' Constitution is the lineal descendant of the Charter.

No research has diminished the historic significance of the Charter itself. It stands for, and has preserved through seven centuries, one great idea—that the rights of the people are anterior to, and more sacred than, the rights of governments.

That idea is the warp of the American Constitution; the woof is the idea to which Alexander Hamilton dedicated his - life and genius, that in any human society the allegiance of the individual is due in a higher degree to the authority representing the whole than to that of any section in which he may be personally included From this idea, interwoven with the idea of Magna Carta, has come the federal union of the United States, which has enabled thirteen petty and mutually jealous sovereignties to be transcended in a single nation reaching from ocean to ocean, the most prosperous in the modern world, Hamilton’s conception has not prevailed without storm and stress; another statesman of his own order 01. greatness .had to steer the American Union through the tempests of civil war before it came safe to harbour; and Lincoln, like Hamilton, had to laydown his life for his work. But tinwork of these two martyrs stands, and today the United States may claim, with all the certainty that is humanly possible, that so far as concerns the relations of the 48 States with one another, the spectre of war is laid forever. •