Site Ed. Note: Relative to "The Conqueror Demands", the French Ambassador to Germany, M. Francois-Poncet this date sent a memorandum to the French Minister for Foreign Affairs, M. Georges Bonnet, regarding the outcome of a meeting two days earlier with Hitler at Obersalzberg, his mountain castle hideaway.

The opening and closing remarks offer a candid inner glimpse to the personal life of a psychopath:

After indicating his disappointment with Munich, Hitler proceeded to discuss the various proposals with regard to France, Spain, Hungary's and Poland's respective demands on Slovakia, including a tirade against Britain for sabre-rattling and assumption of superiority, a denial that this was justified for mistreatment of the Czechs who he claimed not to have mistreated at all, only protecting "Germans", his great desire for peace in Europe and recognition of existing mutual frontiers with France, a willingness to discuss a mutual non-aggression pact, an omission to ask that France dissolve its pact with Russia, a hedged willingness to discuss arms limitations as long as arms limitations meant Germany would retain superiority with respect to each of her several neighbors against whom it would otherwise be vulnerable to collusive attack, further complicated by his fear that any such agreement would suggest he was backing down in the face of British coercion, a willingness to agree to withdraw all foreign troops from Spain in the confident belief that Franco's forces would be victorious over the Loyalists, and that Hungary and Poland keep to the principle of ethnicity in drawing new boundaries out of Slovakia, just as he had done with respect to the Sudetenland, his concerns that the intransigence of the Hungarians and Czechs over this matter could lead to "most unpleasant complications", meanwhile congratulating himself for his and Mussolini's valiant attempts to reconcile the two sides to a less entrenched impasse. He spoke, said Francois-Poncet, in moments "as a European". Then:

A month later, on November 23, Hitler would inform the new French Ambassador to Germany, M. Coulondre, "These relations I wish to see peaceable and pleasant, and I see no reason why they should not be so. There is no cause for conflict between Germany and France."

Perhaps, in lieu, France should have sent M. Cash.

Mr. Lonnie Sides undoubtedly had the best of that argument.

Yesterday Mr. Sides proposed to his fellow Councilmen that the City Attorney be instructed to secure a copy of a recent Supreme Court decision on a Blue Law case at Elm City, whereunder it was decided that the privilege of running a filling station on Sunday didn't carry with it the right to sell soft drinks and so forth.

Mr. Sides is no friend of Blue Laws, despite his record for uneasily sliding back and forth across the fence. It is probable that he wants the law applied by way of testing how real is Charlotte's fervor for the Blue Law. For all that, the law is the law. And if this ruling applies to Charlotte, then it is the sworn duty of the Council to find out and see that it is enforced.

But, just as we predicted, the closed-Sunday faction on the Council objected strenuously to any mention of the subject. What they esteem is the status quo, be it good, bad, indifferent or plainly unlawful. Ain't that sump'n!

It is of such acts of routine heroism as EAL [Eastern Air Lines] Pilot Hissong's, who brought his ship down with his right engine fallen out and flames in the control cabin, that traditions are built. Such traditions are strong where human lives and safety are the direct responsibility of other human beings, generally uniformed in order to impress their obligations upon them. Long years have inculcated this code into men of the sea, and it holds for railroading, too, though they are not often called on for heroism.

As a matter of cold fact, Pilot Hissong's deed was no more than the simple performance of duty. The ship had to be brought down; he brought it down. The really notable part of it was his, and the rest of the crew's, valued cool headedness in the face of extreme danger. It is not enough to have a hero's impulse. The essential quality is to have a hero's calm. And that he and his fellows quietly exhibited to a striking degree.

Farmers who spend half their time in the field and the rest on their AAA paperwork are going to have to do some more figuring in connection with the claims for crop control made by E. F. Arnold, Secretary of the N.C. Farm Bureau Federation. Urging the farmers to vote again for control in the December referendum, Mr. Arnold cites tobacco as an instance in point. "I think it is not too much to estimate," he says, "that if it were not for this law tobacco would today be selling for ten to twelve cents per pound." (Let that pass for the moment, but make a note of it.) "If this is true, tobacco is selling at ten cents per pound higher because of" control.

"If," he proceeds, "estimates made by the Department of Agriculture that North Carolina will make this year 539,800,000 pounds of tobacco, then the law has brought to North Carolina $53,980,000."

Whoa! The gentleman's arithmetic is all right, but farmers gripping the plow behind some jarhead will have plenty of free mental time to discover that he has left out a step in his syllogism. If the tobacco crop had been 730 million pounds instead of 539, the price, to be sure, might have dropped to ten cents. But the extra production would have represented by no means a total loss. The growers would have had the extra 200,000,000 pounds, you see, which even at ten cents is worth something.

Precisely as everybody predicated, the surrender at Munich has Mr. Hitler's egomania swollen practically to the bursting point. His tongue throughout the whole proceedings has been that of a Napoleon who has just won a war and who is laying down terms that the beaten are powerless to resist. But nowhere has he more adopted the tone of the conqueror than in his proposals to France yesterday--to France, the nation which, as he has often said, his ultimate aim is to humble in the dust.

Those proposals were:

1--The ignominious acceptance of a second-rate position by France and the placing of her cities in the same status as Spanish cities--helpless before Hitler's whim to murder their population--by agreeing that he is to have the superiority in the air.

2--The return of the colonies which Germany lost after taking a terrific beating the last time she had a fit of idiotic superiority and undertook to give France a kicking.

3--The further rendering of herself helpless before him by abrogating the Soviet pact and agreeing not to oppose him anywhere in Central Europe.

And in return for that, he was to give? Simply a promise not to attack France! It is a promise not to do what immediately he cannot and dares not do. And it is a promise which, by the record, would be totally worthless once he ever got himself in position to dare to violate it. And, of course, the things he demands are precisely calculated to make him able to violate it!

Down at the First Methodist Church today the Western North Carolina Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, is beginning its last meeting as such. When next it convenes it will meet as a member of the Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States, and the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, will be only a memory. So will end a division that began 93 years ago when the Southern delegation left the General Conference at Philadelphia--as the culmination of a long controversy over the fact of a Louisiana Bishop who held slaves in contradiction of the rule of John Wesley and the early policy of the church in America--and went to Louisville to found the Southern church.

Well, it is all long ago and faraway now, and it no longer matters who was right or who was wrong when the division began. They were all good, well-meaning men on both sides, no doubt. And the division was natural enough in view of the war that was coming and which was perhaps inevitable. But it is encouraging that the old wound is healed at last. It means that the nation is now more than ever solidly one, and that sectionalism is coming to count for less and less, which in most matters--and certainly in religion--is a most desirable thing indeed.

How many days it is to Christmas we haven't figured out yet, but the days until the general election November 8 can be counted on the fingers and toes. Each day that passes without agreement on the Democratic nominee for Congress in the eighth district, a controversy which the Supreme Court remanded again to the lower court yesterday, means more votes for the Republican candidate, who is standing by demurely and amiably. To save our lives we can't help a little feeling of jubilance at the woes of the Democratic Party. They arise, as everybody knows, best of all the party stalwarts, from unmitigated electoral frauds which the party has tolerated as between Democrats because of their great usefulness as between Democrats and Republicans. And it would be a test of Jovian quality if the very instrument itself, the absentee ballot law, were to slip and injure its manipulators.

It is unlikely to happen, we suppose, for the simple reason that there are more Democrats than Republicans in the eighth district. Besides, the Democrats still control election machinery. But if it should happen, it would serve them right and perhaps bring about what reason, morality and simple justice have not been able to accomplish--the repeal of the law that gives full play to fraud.