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Show fGENERAL 'JOHNSON k Jour: Finne in Gallant Key Battle Lut We Should Either Discard Neutrality Neu-trality or Make No Loan . . . the CCC and the Army. By HUGH S. JOHNSON WASHINGTON. If we want to take a hand in the wild European war game, let's do it above the board, discard our neutrality and take the consequences. Sending money to the Finn to buy our "surplus "sur-plus agricultural products" In full knowledge that they do not now need them, do need arms, and can and will sell them to create credit to buy arms, is just another Roosevel-tian Roosevel-tian "clever little scheme." The fight on the Finnish front Is a key-battle. It is a dangerous flank attack In the war between western and eastern Europe. The defense ranks with the highest of all military mili-tary traditions. It is strangely like the heroic stand at Thermopylae. There a handful of Greeks held off a Persian steam-roller waiting for Spartan assistance which could have brought victory but never came. Yes, Finland which is the narrow eastern gate to Scandinavia, is defending de-fending the left flank of all western , Europe. As those endangered nations na-tions value eventual victory, they j ought to rally to her not only by furnishing credits to enable her to buy arms here, but in every other way. Our case is different. With all the good-will and admiration possible we must still remember that this key position is in a European Europe-an war in which our people almost unanimously wish to have no part. WASHINGTON. The question of using CCC as an army reserve or pool of possible recruits in case of war is being agitated again. The project won't get far. Even though the subject was approached ap-proached with the greatest caution and no such purpose was announced, the first smell of it aroused a howl of protest from one end of the country coun-try to the other. The complaint was and still is: "Why should the very poorest of our youth be put out first as cannon fodder?" The average CCC company knows hardly enough about military drill to fall in for roll-call. It does live in barracks under rules for hygiene, No Cannon Fodder . . . CCC boys are not in army. sanitation and cleanliness that approximate ap-proximate army barrack life, but there the similarity ends with a bump. I think this policy is right The manpower problem is the least of our military puzzles. Under the selective se-lective draft principle used in 1917- 1918 we can get the very cream of our crop of youth with practically no delay whatever. By intensive training they can be taught in a few days more than the average CCC boy knows about military service. serv-ice. But the selective service idea wbn,'t. work at all if its burdens do not bear with absolute fairness on . every class of men within the draft ages.; Proposals now being discussed are not to require CCC boys to join the army but to encourage and to permit per-mit them to volunteer. They have that right anyway in peace, but if v:e have to raise a big army for we will have to have selective seivjce. After that starts, volunteering, volun-teering, must end. You can't have two.-classes the "wents" and the "sets" under the selective system. Borah This country, as never before, needs men like Senator Borah. You can count his like on the fingers of one hand. He and I have had disagreements. He was a great disagreer. You couldn't have a whole senate of Borahs and still have either party organization or much cohesion in the senate itself. Alone with such a few veterans as Carter Glass, he simply did not play in the pork-barrel game of political po-litical patronage. He was so strongly strong-ly entrenched in the good-will and confidence of the people of his state that there was no necessity to do that. But we need a quota of such men. It is the antidote for personalized power. Like Thomas Jefferson, he had sworn eternal hostility toward any form of domination over the mind of man. He voted and acted as he thought and believed and he always thought and believed sincerely. sin-cerely. With this controlling principle princi-ple guiding him, he paid scant attention atten-tion to party policy, presidential prestige or popular reaction if any of these influences interfered with what he thought was right. In private life he was as gentle as a woman. |