National Affairs: Old South

Three years before the Civil War began, Carter Glass was born in the city of Lynchburg, Va., that rises steeply from the James River at the base of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Last week the venerable legislator, ill for the past month, propped himself up on a pillow in a Washington hotel bedroom, and with all the ardor and oratory of the Old South said his say about peace, war, Adolf Hitler, Congress, cash-&-carry, and the U. S. state of mind.

"Never in my eighty-odd years of life," rasped the veteran Virginian, "have I known or heard of a more humiliating spectacle than that presented by the legislative body of a great, rich and powerful nation spending months in devising expedients to contravene immemorial requirements of international law through positive fear of a Central European assassin."

Having thus taken Congress to task for talking about the wrong things, the Senator damned some other topics as irrelevant: "In my view, the talk about the President or any other personage dragging the country into war is the sheerest drivel. The only person on earth who may drag this nation into war is Hitler. . . . His pledged word is not worth a thrip.* He is a fervent believer in the immoral Machiavellian doctrine of the end justifying the means, however vile the end may be. He has repeatedly lied as to his purposes since the deplorable Munich conference and it may confidently be expected that under his wretched domination Germany still regards written treaties as mere scraps of paper. . . .

"To talk about the munition industry dragging this country into war is incredible fiction. . . .This country went into the World War to vindicate its rights on the high seas, and now to relinquish these rights through fear of Hitlerism is to dishonor our dead. . . . The proposition is utterly destitute of courage and moral sense. . . . One of my sons was gassed and the other was a combatant soldier. . . . But a nation without spirit or an elevated soul is as bad as a derelict on the seas. . . . This country should not be content simply to eat and sleep and go to the movies. That would be a sorry contribution to modern civilization."