The Charlotte News

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 17, 1938

EDITORIAL

THE SALE TAKES FORM

Site Editor's Note: It is prescience like that below which had already by this time earned Cash the nickname, "Zarathustra", among his colleagues at the News. While other editorialists of the day were busy praising Chamberlain for having at least temporarily averted war with Germany, Cash was seeing beyond platitudes and understanding that Mein Kampf portended something else than appeasement with Rat-boy.

"Auf Wiedersehen," called out Mr. Bumble to his German hosts as he took plane at Munich--"Until we meet again." "Good old Neville," the English crowd shouted at Croydon.

But in Czechoslovakia no such cheer prevails. Quite the contrary. In Czechoslovakia a horrible suspicion is working in the breast of the Government and perhaps in the people that Well-Wisher Chamberlain's cheerings traced to the fact that he had about framed in his own mind the first draft of a bill of sale conveying a desperate little democracy, heart, soul and body, to its worst enemy. Certainly he left behind him in Germany sanguine expectations of something on that very order, justifying Hitler's appraisal of the Englishman he had to deal with, as intimated in his instructions to Konrad Henlein, Sudeten Party leader, to "ask for more; you'll get it."

It all, you see, is a part of Mr. Bumble's miraculous policy of "appeasement." He has appeased Italy by giving her a free hand in Spain at France's back door. He has appeased Germany by letting her have Austria without protest, making it essential to round out German territory into circular shape by cutting a line straight through the heart of Czechoslovakia. And there is a dreadful fear in Czechoslovakia that Mr. Bumble has gone even further--that he has consented not only to the handing over physically of the Sudeten areas to the Reich but the destiny of the rest of Czechoslovakia as well. And in Mr. Bumble's own England there must be a horrible fear that he has purchased with his temporary appeasement only an interlude permitting Hitler to dig in and prepare for the ultimate domination of Central Europe no matter who stands in his way.

In that light, Mr. Bumble's Auf Wiedersehen to his hosts becomes ominously prophetic indeed. They will meet again, undoubtedly, and again and again and again.


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