The Moulding Machine Herr Hitler's May Day speech made no
reference to foreign affairs, apart from a passage in which comment, which sounded a little perfunctory, was made on Germany's need for expansion. The Fiihrer's reticence on his country's external relations is to be welcomed, for what the world needs at the moment is to be left alone a little, except so far as quiet diplomatic negotiations, such as M. van Zeeland is conducting in regard to economic questions, may clear away obstacles to a general understanding. But in respect to internal affairs Herr Hitler was far from reticent. The country, he affirmed, was united, and he specified the measures by which it was to be kept united. There would be a short way with obstinate individualists—in the Churches and out of them.
"We arr: taking their children away from them and are training them to become new German men and women. When a child is ten years old it has not yet acquired any feeling for high birth or ancestry, but is like other children. It is at this age that we are going to take them, to form them into a community, and not let them go until they are 58 years old. Then they will go into the Party, the S.A., the S.S., and the other organisations or they will go at once to work and into the Labour Front and the Labour Corps, and then for two years into the Army. If that won't make a nation out of such people
nothing will." .
So the youth of Germany is to be pressed child by child into a mould, to emerge in due course with identical imprints —stereotyped pieces of mechanism impervious to the play of the free human spirit. That is Germany's affair, if Germany accepts it. But the world is in a measure impoverished thereby as well as Germany.
* * * *
