Herr Hitler Puts a Question.

The American estimate of Adolf Hitler's character varies with the intensity of the estimator's hatred for small mustaches and pretensions to magnificence. Hitler is no hero in this country or elsewhere much beyond his own borders. On the contrary, he is every inch the international public enemy. And with that appraisal we have no fault to find.

Yet it would be comparatively simple to contend, and to prove with documentary evidence, that there is about Herr Hitler a certain forthrightness which will be good medicine for Old World diplomacy. Forbidden to rearm under the same Treaty in which other signatories covenanted to disarm, der Fuehrer's bold and open rearming called attention to the truism that a treaty is a treaty only when both sides observe it. His rapprochement with Great Britain served notice to the world that despite all alliances and secret treaties in 20th Century Europe, it still was every nation for itself and the devil take the hindmost.

And now Herr Hitler is in the Rhineland, his troops in a so-called demilitarized zone along which France has erected fortifications. Hitler does not, let us hope, reoccupy this territory with the intention of provoking France to fight, but merely to ask graphically and forcibly how in the world France may be expected to live up to her pledge of preserving peace in Western Europe, in accordance with the Locarno Pact, and at the same time promise to support Germany's arch enemy, Russia, in any European engagement. It will be hard to answer.