of Governor Herbert R. O'Conor 493

cumulated resources of men and materials thus obtained, Hitler and his Germany
are now engaged in the bloody process of attempting to master the world.

There can no longer be any room for doubt or debate as to whether or not
this twentieth century Genghis Khan holds a threat of danger for us. The
truth is that he has already made plain his intention to destroy our system of
government and way of life. The public statements. of his philosophy, purposes,
and program time and again contain violent denunciations of us and those things
for which we stand. Over and over again he has proclaimed that there can be
no room for any other system than, the one he proposes.

The ruthless fanaticism with which his course has been attended, together
with the almost unimaginable success he and his revolution have so far attained,
destroys all doubt in any reasonably informed mind that unless he is crushed,
sooner or later he will undertake to impose his system and control over this
Western Hemisphere. This necessarily means that in order to do so, he will
have to undertake first to subjugate this Country and, of course, that can only
be by an act of war.

The complexities of life are so great amongst nations, as well as amongst
men, that Hitler may conceive the necessity or advisability of attack even now,
as his present war operations go on. It is a distinct possibility, though a ter-
rible one, to think of, that in the circumstances the alarm of an attack upon us
may be heard in the future. Bear in mind that we and our Government in the
face of such a fanatic, with such a philosophy and such power, may not have
the decision as to whether or not we shall go to war.

It is for that reason that with practical unanimity of all parties and of
all sections of our people, we embarked months ago upon our great program
of defense—and later, with the same unanimity, as further defense precaution,
undertook by the Lend-Lease Act, to aid Great Britain and those other nations
bearing the brunt of Hitler's attack.

In order to consider intelligently the probabilities of attack, it is necessary
to bear in mind the nature of the Hitler claim and the basic character of the
world revolution he and his Germany are carrying on. Unlike other world
revolutions, Hitler and the Nazi Germans proclaim the object of this one to
be not only the building up of a great German state, but the use of that state
together with conquered satellites, for the purpose of installing the absolute
supremacy of the race as a race over all other peoples.

This is an effort on a gigantic scale to turn back the clock of civilization
more than a thousand years. Not within recent centuries has any leader or
nation waged a war for such a purpose. Such a philosophy is founded upon a
basic falsehood, corrupting in the end both to the conqueror and the conquered.
To attempt to set up a theory that a given race is inherently superior, and
therefore entitled to be supreme over all other races, and to hold them through
direct or indirect subjection, is to fly in the face of all the experience of the
ages, as well as scientific knowledge.

Different races, it is true, have many qualities of superiority over other
races, but no race has been gifted by the Creator with any sufficient combina-
tion of qualities to enable it with any show of justification to claim the inherent
right to superiority over all others, even though that claim may temporarily be