QUO VADIS?

Otago Daily Times, Issue 23883, 10 August 1939, Page 14

QUO VADIS?

"All will come right," says Mr Winston Churchill in an epilogue to the nublished collection of his speeches, "if we persevere to the end." But to what end? asks Mr Keith Feiline. writing in the London Observer. If this question is not answered soon there is danger of a return to " chatter." to a confusion between means and ends, to the contrast between processes representing high ideals, such as appeasement or disarmament, and a lassitude, a refusal to probe deep, in the pursuit of them. On the short-term policy, to which we have been driven, nothing could be more eloquently final than this book, vet two armed camps are not a world order, and peace remains the objective of mankind, not even an undeclared war. We stand, not dumb, but inarticulately protesting. in a vicious circle; the one side saying. "You shall not use force." and the other rejoining. "What else but force has ever extorted from vou a remedy for evils which half even of vour own world admits?" Such was the argument over disarmament, over refusal of the Anschluss, over the Sudeten: such it will be over German Danzig, or the colonial distribution at Versailles as conflicting with President Wilson's basis, history, needs, and powgrs. Few men living could make with such authority as Mr Churchill the contribution to a long-term policy. It is not an academic theme, even now. It is the long-term justification of a short-term necessity, a confession of national faith, a shield in war. and an instrument of peaco.