Waiting for the President
While the world waits for Mr. Roosevelt's Independence Day speech it has had the opportunity of considering unusually out- spoken utterances by two of the President's Cabinet Ministers, Mr. Harold Ickes, Secretary of the Interiori‘and Col. Knox, the Republican Secretary of the Navy. Mr. Ickes, speaking at Hartford, Connecticut, came as near as any responsible Minister, precluded from going beyond the President's declara- tions, could do to urging that America enter the war forthwith. Col. Knox, addressing a conference of State Governors at Boston on Monday, gave the disquieting reminder that (as official statistics published here have already shown) over 2,000,000 tons of shipping had been lost in the Atlantic in the first five months of this year, and urged that the United States Navy' should be used forthwith " to clear the Atlantic of the German menace." That, presumably, means war without declaration, and it is clear that the majority of Americans are ready for it. But by no means all. The isolationist Senator Wheeler is agitated by a report that a German submarine has been sunk by an American naval vessel already—an allegation since denied—and there is a section of opinion which, so far from seeing in Hitler's preoccupations in the West an opportunity for America to come in and help finish the job, takes the com- pletely misguided view that Britain is now in less need of help. President Roosevelt must have hoped that the issue might be forced by the torpedoing of one or two American ships, but apart from the ' Robin Moor,' which is apparently not held to provide a casus belli, that has not happened.
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