Foreign News: Pep Talks

The debaters were the familiar trio of Edouard Daladier, Neville Chamberlain, Adolf Hitler. The subject was the well-worn proposition: “Resolved, that the Allied cause is just.” As usual, the speakers roamed far & wide from their subjects. The French Premier, for instance, got very bitter about the “madmen who rule at Berlin.” The German Chancellor was also given to personal insults and mockery. The British Prime Minister meandered among the non-belligerents. All in all, last week’s speeches were mainly pep talks for the home folks. Certainly this round in the European war of words did not change many opinions.

Daladier opened for the affirmative in a radio speech from Paris. Rarely since the war started has M. Daladier publicly opened his mouth without viewing with alarm the Nazi dream of “world domination,” and this was no exception. “Austria, Bohemia. Slovakia and Poland,” he said, “are only lands of despair . . . subdued by treachery or brutal violence.”

Hitler sneaked into Berlin’s Sportspalast to make a speech before a selected Nazi audience—his first since the November Munich bombing. The Führer was tough, but repetitious. About all he did was to sneer at Bible-toting “old Chamberlain” and bitterly assail “M. Daladier.” “They wanted war; they shall have war!” shouted the Führer. thus officially ending the distinction between Germany’s hostility to Great Britain and her sympathy for Britain’s “tool,” France.

Chamberlain tried to comfort the home front, but his main theme was to reassure the neutrals suffering from the British blockade. “We do not for one moment question the rights of neutrals to decide whether they shall come into the conflict or stay out of it,” he said. “But we do ask them, whether they be small or weak or whether they are great and powerful, to consider that though, in the exercise of our undisputed belligerent rights, we may have taken action which causes them inconvenience or even loss, at any rate we have never sunk a neutral ship and we have never willingly sacrificed a single neutral life. . . .”