THE LONG VIEW

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 61, Issue 4341, 4 October 1940, Page 7

THE LONG VIEW

SELF-GOVERNMENT IN EUROPE.

“The Danes, Norwegians, Dutch Belgians, and Frenchmen have behind them a long native tradition of free institutions. They had learned and practised the arts of self-government before Germany and Italy so much as existed as States.

“It is unthinkable that peoples with this history and these traditions can be won to anything more than a sul-

len acquiescence in Nazi domination. Others, like the Poles and Czechs, have kept alive their hope of .freedom under centuries of oppression and have refreshed it with 20 years enjoyment of independence.

“A heavy hand and a ruthless suppression of resistance are Germany’s only weapons; and these are not weapons by which proud and highly civi■ized nations can be organised and governed. For the moment opposiion may be crushed.

“But the first sign of military reverses or the widespread economic distress which the occupation is doomed to create, would reveal the hollowness of Germanl’s control and

the colossal nature of the task she has taken on herself.

‘‘Seventy-five million Germans, even assuming that they were solid hi their loyalty to the Nazi cause, cannot permanently hold down a population of ninety millions united -q their hatred of the German yoke. “Administratively, a German-run nd German-Bidden Europe is not merely a nightmare. It is a tour de ’orce which Napoleon could not mainain, which Germany cannot inainain, which no one European race could hope to maintain.”—“The T imes” (London).