The Wilmington morning star., 1940-06-15
Editorial Comments
From Other Angles
SWORD AND PEN
New York Herald Tribune)

To countless minds there is recurring, as it
has required before in times Of great crisis,
the passionate belief that somewhere, ultimate.
ly. there must be a limit to the powers Of brute
violence. This mighty apparatus of force
these tanks and guns and demolition bombs
are frightful Instruments. 1t may De that for
a time mere flesh and blood can find no answer
to them. But that they should triumph in the
end-that man, who made them, should be for
ever or for long enslaved to their senseless yer.
dicts-seems impossible.
Most living Americans have been brought up
to believe that in the last analysis the pen
is mightier than the sword" that men may be
slain but that ideas can not be, that govern
ments can be overthrown by artillery but not
the fundamental moral values of truth and free.
dom and fair dealing. With every advance of
Hitler's iron legions there surely must be rising
up the intangible resistances-the passion, the
conviction and the resolve-which will slow and
stop and finally rout them, as the forces of other
military conquerors have been routed in the end.
Man is not yet the creature Of a cannon: there
are still forces in this world superior too ex-
plosives.
One must cling to that conviction. Yet one
must cling to it with a sense of realities. It is
quite true that the pen is mightier than the
sword Gust as the engine which drives it is
mightier than the bombing plane) so long as
the pen has a sword to WELD. The most colos-
sal tank or the biggest battleShip ever built is
of no avail unless manned by men with some
idea or ideal powerful enough to make them
fight-as is proved by the history of many sur
rendered fleets and abandoned fortresses. But
however powerful the idea, it is also useless
without the weapons. And it is Hitler's instinc.
tive appreciation of both truths, unfortunately,
which is at the bottom of his whole success.
Hitler's pen has been just as mighty as his
dive bombers. He manufactured the ideal along
with the tanks; the first was put into quantity
production like the second, and there are many
stories now coming back from Europe of the
fanatic fury with which Hitler's young Nazis
are marching to the slaughter to prove that the
lceal has been as great a practical success upon
the battlefield as the tanks and bombers. We
cannot, therefore. comfort ourselves with the
thought that this is a struggle between free
men and machinery, in which the latter ulti.
mately must lose. 1t is a struggle between free
and machine-made ideals, between pens voicing
the ideals, emotions and moral concepts which
nave grown slowly out Of the common experience
of Western civilizations, and pens drafted to ere
ate with consummate art and cynicism a con.
trary and carefully manufactured ideal suitable
to the purpose Of military conquest.
1t is a darker struggle, and no one can say
how it will end. The Nazi ideal. like every
thing else in Hitler Germany, is ersatz, and one
may hope it will crumble finally. But so far
all, only by a civilized ideal armed with no less
powerful material weapons and endowed with an
equally blazing vitality for those who hold it.