S. E. P. on Democracy

"The [Lend-Lease] Bill is a charter of dictatorship and an assurance of war, and you shortly will have your wish. May you relish it in hindsight as much as you do in prospect. Hating fascism, you are embracing it by the back door. You are destroying the United States in the vain hope of mending a Europe about which you are as romantically deluded as were most of us in 1914-17." So said the Saturday Evening Post in one of the extraordinarily bitter letters with which it answered some readers who protested the magazine's stand against the Lend-Lease Bill.

Last week in an editorial ridiculing the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies ("The League of Many Names to Save America by Saving the World") for advocating that the democracies make plans for a workable, desirable peace, the Post reached a new high of bitterness: "Democracy is the beautiful damosel to be saved--democracy in the whole world.

Having girded ourselves for that heroic errand, shall we pause to ask if she will mend her morals? . . . Either she is worth saving as she is and was, or she is not worth saving at all. . . .

"How we got into the war we shall not know entirely until we read the history that is now hidden. We are in it. We are in it all together. . . . The one war aim is to destroy Hitler."

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