10 JANUARY 1941, Page 1

ROOSEVELT AND HITLER

BY the programme he laid before Congress on Wednesday the President of the United States carried to what is so far its culmination the policy he has been pursuing with indomitable patience and extraordinary skill for the past three years at least. It was in his memorable speech at Chicago in October, 1937, that Mr. Roosevelt first openly denounced the lawless ambitions of the European dictators, who were then intervening for their own ends in the civil war in Spain. " If these things come to pass in other parts of the world," the President declared after recounting the dictators' crimes against normal decencies and international law, " let no one imagine that America will escape, that it may expect mercy, that this Western hemisphere will not be attacked, and that it will con- tinue tranquilly and peacefully to carry on the ethics and arts of civilisation." In that speech Mr. Roosevelt began the educa- tion of his countrymen on America's peril and America's responsibilities. He had a long way to carry them. Isolation was strong. The fear of implication in war was to all appear- ance ineradicable. In his insight into the situation then existing and his foresight regarding its development the President was so far ahead of the country that he must have needed restraint to keep contact with it. Today, schooled by a remarkable series of public speeches, formal charges to Congress like those of Monday and Wednesday of this week and what he likes to call fireside talks, the country is asking nothing of the President except that he should press on further and faster with all measures short of war.

That is a great achievement. In the course of his crusade for the defence of democracy Mr. Roosevelt has made history by securing election for the third time as President, and has revealed himself as one of the three greatest personal forces in the world. He has played his cards with masterly skill. His own isolationists are disarmed by the force of his contention that the only hope of keeping America out of war is to enable Great Britain to win without appealing for American belligerence. Not without appealing for American arms. That appeal is inevitable. or would have been if the President had not so anticipated it as to make it unnecessary. He is con- vinced, and has convinced nine-tenths of his countrymen, that with the help of American aeroplanes and American tanks and American guns and American ships the British Empire can defeat the Axis without the help of American armies or, in all likelihood, of the American Fleet or Air Force. And he has found a way for the essential weapons to be supplied without the limit imposed by the necessity of paying cash for them. His arguments are unanswerable, and his demands have been received by Congress with acquiescence and by the country with acclamation. America has accepted unreservedly the role of the arsenal of democracy.

The President's diplomacy is as notable as his driving-power. It was hardly a coincidence that on the very day when Mr. Roosevelt was laying his unprecedented programme of arms- production for joint British and American use before Congress, involving an expenditure of 17,500,000,000 dollars and the increase of the personnel of the fleet to bring it to war-strength, an American Ambassador, taken from another important post by reason of his special fitness for a special task, should be presenting his credentials to Marshal Petain at Vichy—the only foreign emissary so far accredited to the new Head of the French State—or that the American Ambassador at Rome should be returning to his post after an absence of many months just at the moment when signs are multiplying that an intermediary between the Italian Crown or people and the Government of Great Britain may before long have a role to play. Above all, Hitler is left in hopeless hesitation whether deliberately to provoke America into war, thus courting hostili ties with the most powerful State in the world, or to watch that State methodically but with vast momentum mobilising the whole of its gigantic productive force for the benefit of Ger- many's existing foes. It is a bitter choice for the Fiihrer, and whichever way he decides he loses. He has proclaimed his contempt for democracy. The greatest democracy in either hemisphere has taken up his challenge, and by so doing sealed his fate.