of Governor Herbert R. O'Conor 257

been denounced and thrown into the discard; governmental forms developed
through ages of struggle and blood for the protection and growth of organized
society have been cast aside.

In the place of these accepted methods, ways and national form, a strange
new dangerous system of control, based solely on force, has been substituted.
This change and challenge to the democratic process for which the civilized
world struggled more than a thousand years, have been brought about and
imposed by a ruthless combination of military despots. Having seized con-
trol of the resources and peoples of practically all Europe, these Dictators,
through the use of the marvelous mechanistic appliances furnished by inven-
tive genius, wield a power for conquest and destruction greater than the world
'lias ever seen.

We, as a Nation, have only recently begun to realize the awful significance
of that change, and that power. It may be suggested that many of our people
have not even yet come to a full realization of the far-reaching effect of that
change, and the danger that power holds for our own land and its institutions.
In fact, it has only been during the past year that the average person began
to sense the possibility that the European situation presented any danger to
us at all. The slowness of the beginning of that realization is 'easy to under-
stand. 1'he attention of our people for the past decade has been fixed upon
their domestic troubles. We were all, during that period, concentrated in
thought and action upon purely our home—American affairs. Europe seemed
a long distance away. We had and enjoyed to the full our individual liberties,
our economic and social systems, —and were, therefore, concerned primarily
with correction and readjustment following the debacle of 1929—and withal,
were we not blessed by having the Atlantic Ocean between us and the con-
flicts of the old world?

First came Russia with its revolutionary program of the complete destruc-
tion of the right of private property and liberty of the individual. Then came
the development whereunder the rights and resources of the Italian people
were seized and compounded into a system of autocratic rule. Shortly there-
after, the present Dictator of Germany, and leader of the world onslaught
now being made, taking advantage of the conditions of despair the German
people labored under, began that agitation and movement which has resulted
in his direct and indirect control of the European continent.

From time to time we, as a people, took note of these vast transactions.
We remembered, however, that the civilized world had, throughout its history,
witnessed revolutions and change. We felt that after a few years of tumult
and turmoil the old world would re-adjust and, perhaps after some change in
economy and system, settle its affairs according to the accepted pattern of
civilization as we had known it. The great mass of Americans failed, however,
until the calamitous happenings of the present year to awake to the fact that
these new masters of men and nations are indeed revolutionary and ruthless
to the last degree; that their ambitions and plans are practically world wide;
that by the intense use of instrumentalities produced by the age of oil and
electricity, they are determined to seize and bend the resources and peoples
of all the continents to their mad purpose; that by force, unless checked by
superior force, they intend to substitute state slavery for the customs, manners,
ways and methods of civilization as heretofore developed and used.