Aims and Rights

While British sailors died at sea and British soldiers idled in French mud, British orators fought for their country on the mental fronts of World War II.

Wells. Biggest push was made by inexhaustible little Novelist Herbert George Wells. In a letter to the London Times he called for a statement of Britain's war aims so written as "to appeal very forcibly to every responsive spirit under the yoke of obscurantist and totalitarian tyrannies."

Mr. Wells then proceeded to quote a "trial statement of the rights of man, brought up to date," which he and friends had drafted. The wording was carefully aimed at German hearts and heads, to persuade them that Great Britain claims for Germans more than Adolf Hitler is giving them. Excerpts:

"Every man ... is entitled to nourishment, housing, covering, medical care and attention. ... He is entitled to sufficient education to make him a useful and interested citizen. ... He and his personal property ... are entitled to police and legal protection. ... He shall have adequate protection from any lying or misrepresentation that may distress or injure him. . . . There shall be no secret dossiers in any administrative departments. ... He may engage freely in any lawful occupation. ... He may move freely about the world at his own expense. ... He shall have the right to buy or sell. ... A man, unless he is duly certified as mentally deficient, shall not be imprisoned for a longer period than three weeks without being charged with a definite offense against the law nor for more than three months without a public trial. . . . No man shall be subjected to any sort of mutilation or sterilization except with his own deliberate consent. ... He shall not be subjected to imprisonment with such an excess of silence, noise, light or darkness ars to cause mental suffering. ... He shall not be forcibly fed nor prevented from starving himself if he so desire. . . . The extreme punishments to which he may be subjected are rigorous imprisonment for a term of not longer than 15 years or death. . . . The provisions and principles embodied in this declaration shall be more fully defined in a legal code. ... It incorporates all previous declarations of human right. Henceforth it is the fundamental law for mankind throughout the whole world."

Cooper. Into action on the U. S. front went Alfred Duff Cooper, the Conservative statesman who last year resigned as First Lord of the Admiralty in protest to Prime Minister Chamberlain's "surrender" at Munich. He arrived in Manhattan with his beauteous actress wife, the former Lady Diana Manners, to tour the land and deliver 40 lectures (for a "very substantial fee," his agent said).

Mr. Duff Cooper's first contribution was a press interview in which he announced his belief that the War will be ended, soon or late, by a revolution in Germany of the Right, joined in by the German Army. "National Socialism," said Lecturer Duff Cooper, "is a revolutionary force, a form of Bolshevism, and now the outer mask has been dropped. Many Germans, who had been told that they were the world's bulwark against Communism, now see that they have been made the allies of Communism. And it is well to remember that the Right in Germany is strongly religious."

Lecturer Duff Cooper pictured the restoration of monarchy in Germany, perhaps under Archduke Otto, pretender to the Habsburg thrones and "a very respectable young man."

Mr. Duff Cooper said he did not agree with Colonel Lindbergh's strictures on Canada's course in the war, but "he is entitled to his own views."

He acknowledged deep interest in proposals advanced abroad (articulated in the U. S. by Clarence Streit, longtime League of Nations correspondent for the New York Times) for a federal union of European democracies after the war.

In an article for the New York Herald Tribune he attacked what he described as a subtle German effort to persuade the U. S. that World War II is a clash of two imperialisms rather than Democracy V. Dictatorship. He deplored the vulgar error of considering the war a direct result of the Treaty of Versailles, since the Treaty of Locarno became the revised basis of British, French and German relations after 1925.

Lothian. Remembering 1914-17, U. S. isolationists spotted the arrival of Lecturer Duff Cooper & wife as the beginning of a British propaganda effort to lead the U. S. to war. Anxious to deny any such intention was the new British Ambassador to the U. S., Philip Henry Kerr, Marquess of Lothian. In a speech to The Pilgrims society in Manhattan, he said Britain merely assumed the right "to explain to you . . . what we are doing and why we are doing it." The final judgment of the U. S. is its "inalienable right. That is what we mean by saying the British Government conducts no propaganda in this country. ...

"As I always tell my fellow countrymen, it is inconceivable to me that the United States, which has already done such immeasurable things for freedom of mankind, which in the past has produced the greatest democratic leaders that the world has seen--Washington, Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson --should not have its own contribution to make to the solution."

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