Freedom shrieked when Kosciusko fell, but I doubt whether it
will so much as squeak over the exclusion from the United States of one distinguished British scientist and three other persons less dis- tinguished who wanted to attend a so-called World Peace Confer- ence in New York. In principle, no doubt, people ought to be free to go where they will and say, within reason, what they like. On the whole it might have been wiser of the United States to let them come in and deliver themselves of their views. But the United States happens to have a law under which persons of Communist sympathies may not come in unless they are members of delegations. It is not for me to brand Professor Bernal and his friends as persons of Communist sympathies. On the other hand if the United States says they are it is certainly not for me to contradict. So far as they are, the last thing they are entitled to do is to protest in the name of freedom, for freedom and Communism are about as violently antithetic as any two words in the English language. Moreover these " Peace Conferences," conspicuously Muscovite in hue, recently at Wroclaw, now in New York, soon in Paris, with the same stage army trailing round to each, are all part—a not very successful part— of Kremlin propaganda. The Kremlin is, of course, as fully entitled to carry on propaganda as the Band of Hope ; but the United States, if it objects to its being carried on in an American city, is equally en- titled to give effect to its objection. The chairman of the New York conference committee, Dr. Harlow Shapley, says the action taken will " prove inimical to the good relations of the United States with the peoples of Western Europe." Let me hasten to reassure him. No one who matters will so much as bat an eyelid about the business.
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