The Northern Advocate Daily “NORTHLAND FIRST” Registered for transmission through the post as a Newspaper WEDNESDAY, MARCH 12, 1941. The War’s Wide Web

Northern Advocate, 12 March 1941, Page 4

The Northern Advocate Daily “NORTHLAND FIRST” Registered for transmission through the post as a Newspaper WEDNESDAY, MARCH 12, 1941. The War’s Wide Web

THE news that the Lease or Lend Bill has become the law of the United States, marks another stage in the evolution of American opinion and determination. “From neutrality in deed though not in thought” the people of the United States have passed through “all aid to Britain short of war” to “all possible aid to Britain irrespective of consequences,” to use the language of a writer who says that nothing more clearly marks the increasingly “total and world-wide character which the war has assumed.”

No continent is now free from the scope of the war. The fate of the Far East and the fate of Africa are as inextricably involved in it as the fate of Europe and the future of the American continents. If there are fewer nominal participators than in the latest stages of the World War, the repercussions of the present struggle are already more far-reaching and more universal.

“The Times,” commenting upon this fact in a recent editorial, said that the repercussions are also more profound. If the last war was the harbinger of social and political revolution, this war has thrust us into the midst of revolution itself. The events of 1940 have brought home to men’s consciousness everywhere there can be no return to the past. The old order has fallen before Hitler’s onset as irrevocably as the relics of feudalism swept away by the armies of Napoleon. Herein, it is held, lies the most striking contrast between this war and the last, and the strongest hope ultimately for a more understanding and more durable settlement than that of 1919. The war of 1914 broke on a prosperous and well-ordered world. There was some excuse for regarding it as a hateful and irrelevant excrescence on the march of civilisation, and for supposing that once the forces of evil had been overthrown, there could be a return to former ways of life which seemed in the main good ways. As “The Times” says, there now can be no looking back. Throughout Europe—and in other continents as well—the demands of war are revolutionising ways of life and thought; and we shall carry these new ways with us to meet the demands of peace. There will have to be the same thinking ahead, the samp pooling of resources, the same readiness on the part of the individual to place himself and his possessions at the. service of the community, and on the part of the nation to take its place in a wider community of nations. There will be no disagreement with the contention that the task of reconstruction, not less than the effective prosecution of the war, will demand a common economic planning and a common economic policy. The cardinal blunder of 1919, when the working machinery of inter-Allied economic co-operation was broken, up immediately after the Armistice, must not be repeated. Frontiers have been swept away in Europe, and a bridge built across the Atlantic. . These things must not be undone. Negative lines of approach have failed and will not serve. Positive organisation based on equal and balanced consideration for the economic needs of all countries is the only answer to Hitler’s order based on domination.