Succor

Untouched America Cannot Shut Its Ears to This Call

This word "quota" is not a very moving one. And so, when we read that the local Red Cross chapter is falling far short of its quota in the nation wide campaign now underway, our only feeling is that here is another drive about to fail.

But look. Failure in this case, far and above any drive statistic, translates itself into hunger. Hungry children, you see. Homeless, starving, tortured children with their whole bright world exploding red in their faces. Mothers and brothers confronted with that most tragic of all tragedies--no food, no shelter for their trusting children, or for themselves.

Failure in the local Red Cross campaign means that the suffering of thousands of people must go on alleviated, and failure in the national campaign means that the suffering of millions of people is indifferently allowed to become acute.

It's a crying need we cannot fail to ignore [sic, heed(?)]. We cannot depend on the rest of the country to make up the deficiency any more than they on us. We must reach our quota, thinking of it in terms of so much misery to be assuaged. And since the local Red Cross has raised only some $12,500 of its $20,000 quota, we see no way out of it except for the people who have cared enough to give something to give as much again.

By Daytime

Nazi Charge Against Allies Doesn't Fit the Fact

The Nazis announced piously that they are only going to bomb towns in the daytime. They are afraid they might kill a civilian if they attack at night, you see. Then they go on to sail into wicked old England and France for bombing at night.

All of which is quaint enough if you can smile about anything so grim as this war.

The Nazis may, perhaps often have, killed the civilians they have killed merely by accident in failing to spot their military objectives accurately. But the evidence is overwhelming that it has not always been so. It was not so at Rotterdam, where the business part of the city was deliberately wrecked. And it was certainly not so in the villages which have been reported by eye-witnesses among the reporters.

Nor was it so at Maubeuge. At Maubeuge the first wave of planes got the railroad station, crowded with refugees. About 150 of them were killed. Military men seem inclined to grant that railroad stations are a proper military objective, certainly in the case of important centers at least.

But having got Maubeuge station, the Nazi planes came back, destroyed the central business section of Maubeuge. And the business section of Maubeuge, like that of most French towns, is far from the station or any other military objective.

The Nazis will have to think up a new one. The Nazis bomb in the daytime because they are powerful enough in the air to do it when they can see best. The Allies bomb at night for quite obvious reasons.

Worst Peril

Defeatism Is Exactly What A. Hitler Wants of Us

The greatest enemy of the United States at the moment is defeatism.

France is in the gravest danger. But France is not defeated. Her armies seem to be still intact and her morale good. The very rage of the population against Italians yesterday testifies to a spirit which is in no mood to yield until the country is actually overrun. And if that spirit holds up, Adolf Hitler has his work more than cut out for him.

It is significant that the French Government has retired to Tours rather than to Bordeaux. Apparently General Weygand has made up his mind--first, to defend Paris until it is taken street by street, and second to retire beyond the Marne and the Seine when it is necessary to save his armies, with the expectation that before Tours--which is upon the Loire, the great central river of France--is reached the Nazi swine will have been bled to the point of exhaustion.

Meantime, however, Adolf Hitler is busy trying to convince the world--trying, above all, to convince us just now--that France has already fallen, his victory over the Allies is only a matter of days, and that we are simply wasting our time and putting ourselves in danger in attempting to help them. Night and day his propaganda machine grinds out stuff calculated to further that end. But none of it is so.

It is quite possible that France may be overrun. But not until the beast has paid so much blood as to exhaust itself.

New World

What That Lovely Bloom Would Really Be Like

Adolf Hitler tells Germany that his armies were again on the march "to fight for continuation of the liberty and future of our people." And goes on:

Among others that undoubtedly was aimed at the American people--with a view to further confusing the sentimental and unclear.

But Adolf Hitler's own oft-reiterated words and whole record show us plainly enough what this "liberty" of the German people is to be, what this "bloom of a new and better world" would be like.

The "liberty" of the Germans of which he speaks is the liberty to enslave and despoil the world, to murder us at will.

The "new and better world" is to be one in which:

Germans alone will be allowed to bear arms.

Adolf Hitler will replace the figure of Jesus as the center of religious feeling.

All men will work primarily for the enrichment of Germans.

Freedom of thought and speech will be hourly extinguished, men made into intellectual robots.

The chief values will be brutality, cruelty, mercilessness, the lie.

Great masses of humanity will be murdered or picked up and kicked out of their homelands, deprived of the goods for the benefit of Germans, left to starve.

Every man will live with the concentration camps and headman's axe hanging continually over his thoughts every time he opens his mouth.

Western culture will be extinguished in favor of a pattern which corresponds exactly to the anthropological account of the barbaric stage of man's culture.

And it might be just as well for Americans to know specifically that Adolf Hitler did not say "a new and better Europe" but "a new and better world."