NOTES AND COMMENTS

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXVII, Issue 23810, 11 November 1940, Page 6

NOTES AND COMMENTS

CITADEL OF POWER When they reflected on the response of the far-flung Empire of Britain to Britain's call, said Bishop Hensley Henson, preaching in Westminster Abbey, they could not but acknowledge a power greater than any that statesmen could direct or armed forces assert —the spiritual power which had its citadel in the human heart and there attested both its essential divineness and its assured victory. In the great kindred democracy of America and in every free nation throughout the world they marked how the public conscience was straining almost to breaking point the fictional bands of an indifferent or Laodicean neutrality, assisting the British cause with all that a sympathetic and understanding non-belli-gerency could permit. Totalitarian aggression proceeded in the chill of a moral isolation which was itself the pledge, the prophecy and the prelude of final defeat. QUESTIONS FOR GERMANS "For us the war is only just beginning," said Mr. L. S. Amery, Secretary for India, broadcasting in the German news service recently. "Hitler may stand to-day where Napoleon stood after Jena and Austerlitz. The same increasing moral resistance from those whom ho has conquered, the same need to break tho fetters of the English blockade, tho same inability to go back on his career of aggression—they will break him as they broke Napoleon; but they will break him much sooner. Do you realise that the tide is beginning to turn already?" Mr. Amery asked his German listeners. "What lias bocome of the much-heralded invasion and conquest of England? Do you realise that it is already beginning to peter out in a series of inconclusive air raids, each one of which proves the superiority of tho Royal Air Force in quality, and brings us British nearer to tho day when we shall enjoy superiority in numbers as well and can strike homo at Germany far more effectively than wo have done so far?" ADEQUATE LEADERSHIP Mankind needs always a leadership equipped and disciplined for tho right exercise of power, writes Mr. Basil Matthews in his new book, "Supreme Encounter." The fact that the title of the executive heads of tho two greatest totalitarian Powers in tho Western world is one and the same; —• the Leader—is significant. High among the factors that will decide whether democracy will survive under the stresses of tho contemporary world stands tho question of developing and sustaining a leadership adequate to the titanic burdens that it places upon the shoulders of men to-day. This stress is greater in a democracy than, in a totalitarian State, in that tho leader's decisions and executive action must bo sensitive to the needs and able to secure tho consent of the governed on the one hand, and yet wise and adequate for handling situations whose complexity the multitudes cannot possibly grasp. Leadership, then, in the democracies must rest upon an education both of the leaders and of the peoplo that gives them real underlying community j of purpose, such as creates mutual coni fidence and a sure sense of direction.