Warning to the West

Somewhere on his trip around the world Wendell Willkie met a cyclonic outburst of popular feeling. Instead of diving for a storm cellar, he stood up to the tornado, felt its fury, and measured its strength. Convinced that he found no simple stirring of the breeze, the 1940 Presidential candidate reported his observations to the American people in words at once the most outspoken and the most resolute since the war began.

Only Willkie could have condemned so caustically the Anglo-American record of broken promises and outworn premises. Winston Churchill cannot criticize Britain's vacillation in India, nor Franklin Roosevelt rebuke his own appointees for faulty administration of Lease-Lend. Complaints from Joseph Stalin or Chiang Kai-shek would have been dismissed as "Communist" or "Oriental" gripings. But when the titulary leader of the opposition party speaks his mind so candidly, his works command attention and respect.

There was more than mere complaint in the address. Wendell Willkie, the man who won more votes on a Republican ticket than any previous presidential candidate, has left behind his record of foggy platitudes. No longer can he be labeled simply "Republican," with the overtones of Fishy Taftism. Willkie and the Old Guard have been estranged since his announced support of the President's foreign policy. After Monday's speech, even those tenuous bonds are finally shattered. The former "barefoot boy from Wall Street" has subjected Tory imperialism and Dollar Diplomacy to the most scathing public denunciation in recent years.

Such words from an erstwhile utilities magnate are news of the biggest sort. They stand as evidence of the new attitude toward other men which is slowly but inexorably spreading over the earth. The time when one hemisphere can indulge in an ignorant patronizing approach to the other half of the globe is fast waning. Willkie has felt the upsurge of this new ideal, and has recognized its strength. He is the first independent spokesman of free men, and of men who still must strive for freedom. The Asiatic and the African are stirring, while the myth of "Western Supremacy" slowly withers.