1300KS OF THE DAY
A Great Interpreter
NOTHING could be more opportune than the appearance of this volume in a week which has seen Lord Lothian's warnings of the naval danger to the United States dramatically driven home by the naval battle off Greenland (Hitler will have two new 35,000- ton battleships, Tirpitz ' and ' Bismarck,' and other vessels in the North Sea early next year," he said at Baltimore last December), and his ceaseless efforts to convince America of her essential identity of interest with Britain rewarded by the amplest assurances of unstinted support that have yet emerged from Washington. These speeches abundantly merit publication, both as tribute to their author's singular wisdom in a position in which a false step would have been as easy as it might have been disastrous, and as an unfaltering and incontro- vertible statement of the common principles which unite the two democracies—whether in a common belligerence or not—against everything that National Socialism aims at.
In his first address in America, to the Pilgrims of the United States, in October, 1939, Lord Lothian observed that there were two views as to whether a professional diplomat or a person in public life makes a better Ambassador to the United States. His own record goes far towards tilting the balance decisively, and the speeches here reprinted reveal him as an ideal interpreter of one great democracy to another. That indeed is his essential theme—what democracy means, and the deadly danger with which totalitarianism threatens it—treated scrupulously within the limits to which, in Lord Lothian's view, a spokesman of Britain to the United States must conform. " It is not for me to tell you what you ought to do," he said at Baltimore in the speech delivered for him the day before his death. "That is entirely for you to decide for yourselves. But it is my business to see that you are informed of the essential facts. Unless you are so in- formed you cannot form judgements, and I and not you would be responsible for the consequences." That raises at once the question of propaganda, a subject on which the Ambassador repeatedly made his position clear.
" The free peoples " (he told the Chicago Council of Foreign Relations in October, 1940), " are entitled to speak to one an- other; provided they tell the truth, as I shall endeavour to do. I do not see how we can arrive at any sane programme of peace unless we do talk frankly to one another. Propaganda, as I see it, is quite a different thing. Propaganda is the deliberate attempt to influence your own countrymen, or other nations, to a particular course of action, by lies or half-truths or tendentious innuendos. The truth is never propaganda; it is the very staff [? stuff] of public life. The mark of a good citizen is his or her capacity to distin- guish between truth and error. The subjects of a dictatorship are never given any training or responsibility in this vital function."
That is worth quoting at length, for it was the basis of the whole of Lord Lothian's approach to the American public. On it he rested his consistent thesis, repeated inevitably in speech after speech, that democracy—expressed in the right to self-govern- ment and the title of the individual to freedom from arbitrary arrest, freedom of religion and speech, and freedom of political opinion—is the heritage of the two countries, which they must defend or die. He contrasts that again and again with totali- tarianism. Declaring, in a phrase rich in memories to every American ear, "The earth cannot long remain half-Nazi and half- free," he recalls how the world had for a century been saved from a world-war by the operation of the Monroe Doctrine, suggested by the British Canning, and in effect defended by ihe British Navy in the Atlantic, with the American fleet thus left free to look after the Pacific. Now the possibility that Hitler may defeat Britain and gain possession of the British Navy is a threat to the very vitals of American security. " For the seas are only a barrier when they are controlled by a superior fleet. Otherwise they are a roadway to our own doors." Repetitive though the speeches are, for there was only one gospel to be preached to the different audiences, a steady develop- ment of the argument can be traced. It begins with an emphasis on a common democracy, and on the responsibility resting upon men of goodwill everywhere for its defence, it passes to a reminder of the extent of Hitler's ambitions and the perils they portend to the United States, it states frankly Britain's need for all the help America can give, and it ends, in the last paragraph of the last speech, by swinging back to the question of responsibility. "The issue now depends largely on what you decide to do. Nobody can share that responsibility with you. It is the great strength of democracy that it brings responsibility down squarely on every citizen and every nation. And before the judgement- seat of God each must answer for his own actions." There is no pretension to great oratory. It is clear, sincere, convincing reasoning, courageously and firmly phrased, and the evidence is abundant that it did its work. Lord Lothian's speeches, next to President Roosevelt's and Mr. Churchill's, have brought America to where she stands today. They might stand as a model of the propaganda of truth, and a pattern of the interpretation of one nation to another. And they breathe throughout an unshaken confidence in victory, on the ground—which history does not uniformly vindicate—that right must ultimately conquer might. " The Sermon on the Mount is in the long run much stronger than all Hitler's propaganda or Goering's guns and bombs'" The book contains a preface by Lord Halifax, and the admirable memoir of Lord Lothian which Sir Edward Grigg contributed to the March Round Table.
WILSON HARRIS.
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