of Governor Herbert R. O'Conor 629

TOWSON KIWANIS AND ROTARY CLUBS—JOINT MEETING
CALVARY BAPTIST CHURCH AUDITORIUM

March 18, 1942
Towson,

WITH our great Nation, which has never known defeat in war, facing
possibly the darkest year in its entire history, it is well for our citizens
to give deep and continuing thought to measures that might be helpful towards
achieving that final victory which we must win to survive as a Nation.

Anyone who can be complacent over the progress of the war to date, either
just doesn't understand what is going on in the world about us, or doesn't value
the freedom he enjoys as did our forefathers who fought and worked unceas-
ingly to gain and retain those freedoms for us.

If any one section of our entire Country should be concerned particulary
with the wars raging on so many fronts throughout the world, it is Balti-
more County, with its many important war industries, upon whose output our
fighting forces all over the world are depending. For that reason, particularly;
it is a source of deep satisfaction to have the privilege of being here this eve-
ning, to discuss with you the part we all may play in helping to achieve final
victory.

So many of our people, it would appear, have failed to get a proper per-
spective on the conflict, that now has engulfed almost the entire world. Be
cause most of the newspaper accounts of the fighting relate to happenings
thousands of miles away from our own shores, the natural attitude, and the
comfortable one, unquestionably, is to console ourselves with the thought that
such tragic events are too far away to concern us greatly.

It is now, before it is too late, for the people of America generally to ac-
cept the fact that no phase of this war is too far away to affect us. Unless we
do come to the full appreciation of that fact quickly, and understand fully what
the present world situation demands of us, we may on some not-too-distant
day find ourselves exactly where France and many other once-free countries
are now—at the mercy of heartless, ruthless despots to whom the rights of the
individual mean less than nothing.

Human nature does not take readily to new developments or to new under-
standings. Our ideas of war, gained entirely from the wars of the past, have
been all of one pattern. War, to us, has seemed essentially a combat in which
the valor and courage and daring of one nation's fighting forces enabled them
to overcome less valorous, less daring forces of another nation.

At Bunker Hill, our Colonial forces were ordered to hold their fire
until they could see the whites of their foes' eyes; at New Orleans, where
Andrew Jackson's men met overwhelming enemy force face to face; in the