LOOK AHEAD

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 58, Issue 4190, 29 May 1939, Page 6

LOOK AHEAD

AN AMERICAN TO AMERICANS. “ Shall we be content to sit idly in this present security, which may be only momentary, or shall we use these great advantages carefully and moderately but firmly and intelligently to help to protect the world, which includes ourselves, from its imminent and continuing danger ? “ Should general war come in Europe this spring, this Neutrality Act might put us in the position of facilitating a result which would make the United States the next victim of attack.

“I weigh my words when I say I believe our present civilisation is threatened with the gravest danger with which it has been confronted for four centuries.

“ The American people are not insensible to cruelty and aggression or too unintelligent to distinguish the aggressor nation from its victim. Nor are they a constitutionally timid people. They are not smitten with an inferiority complex. Yet the form of the Neutrality Act tends to make the outside world believe these fantastic falsehoods and guide their own policy in that belief. “ It would help to prevent a threatened general war to make it clear that these misconceptions do not represent the real views of the American people.” Mr Henry Stimson, formerly United States Secretary of War.