The Republicans Will Do Well To Avoid That

There is some question about the nature of the determined fight in which William Edgar Borah and his Republican colleagues announce they will put up against the repeal of the arms embargo.

Quite possibly, that is, it may be simply a gesture designed to save the face of Borah and, even more, those of the crew of Republicans numbering nearly the whole GOP membership in the Senate (with the prominent exception of Taft) who in July suddenly discovered that they were isolationists.

But it is possible, too, that these good men propose a filibuster. And if so they are preparing to put themselves into about as untenable position as any group of American legislators ever got into.

It is Borah's argument that he is making this fight because "American boys will inevitably follow American guns into the trenches." But it is a very well-known fact, of which Senator Borah himself cannot possibly be ignorant, that the materials for the making of guns, food, clothing, machines--that all these things are just as certainly weapons in modern war as are guns themselves. And the only way he can really square his position with logic is to say: "As surely as we sell the Allies anything at all, American boys will end in the trenches."

But does he say that? Far from it. On the contrary, he emphatically favors selling everything but arms--for the very good reason that he knows that the people of Idaho, not to say the people of the United States, would very quickly and powerfully resent it if he sought to cripple the United States after that fashion.

And as for most of his colleagues--the plain fact is that the dominating motive with them is partisanship.

There is no doubt at all that the neutrality law as at present written is anything else but neutral. What it really does is to deprive England of part of the advantages which are hers by reason of her sea power. And willy-nilly, to make us an aide of the Nazis! We shall be well within international law in repealing the arms embargo, as the President asks. And if it means that the brow-beating Nazis will inevitably kick up a war of words about it, the responsibility for that lies straight on the shoulders of Mr. Borah and his Republicans who refused to change the before war came, in the face of clear warnings from the State Department that it was coming.

Finally, there is no question that the American people want this law changed. The various polls show an overwhelming majority of them convinced (1) that Adolf Hitler is wholly to blame for starting this war, (2) that all our interests make it desirable for the Allies to win, and (3) that the arms embargo should be repealed.

And anybody who sets out to oppose this opinion by any such device as the filibuster is high-handed beyond sufferance.