Article January 21, 1939 Issue

Signs of the Times

Topic: Friendship Among Men

with contributions from Henry Geerlings, Herbert Crabtree, Harry Emerson Fosdick, Robert Quillen, Frank Lowe

[Editorial in the New York Times, New York]

In the last analysis we are either our brother's keepers or his destroyers. Though we set no troops marching, though we clear no decks for action, there is still no neutrality.

The phrase "collective security" has come to have a bitter taste in men's mouths. Yet in the long run there is no choice between collective security and ruin. In the long run the lives and property of peaceable, nonoffending men and women of peaceable, nonoffending nations will be made safe or civilization will die. And it will not die. It is a far tougher organism than those who assail it and those who betray it are willing to believe. It has come out of pain and sweat and sacrifice. It has come out of the minds and hearts of men and women turning away from ease and softness to do hard tasks. It has come out of hopes and dreams and visions. It has been defended on battlefields and on sinking ships and in the narrow room of poverty. Those who have built it. those who now sustain it—the humple and obscure as well as the powerful—are slow to anger, but, like "the mills of God," when once aroused "they grind exceeding small." They can be driven back and defeated for a day, a week, a year, but not forever. There is justice in the world, cherished in men's hearts, and let there be no doubt of it—in the end it will prevail.

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