"Left-Hand Man"

To Canada last week went Wendell Lewis Willkie at the personal invitation of Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King. Officially, he was asked to help launch the Dominion's $5,500.000 drive for war charities. Actually, he was asked, as a man who had been a great success in Britain, to help inject enthusiasm into Canada's war effort.

Not even Host Mackenzie King could have foreseen the kind of reception Willkie got (Reporter F. D. Van Luven in the Toronto Globe & Mail called him the unofficial "left-hand man" of Mr. Roosevelt). He rolled out of Buffalo one morning on a train with Mrs. Willkie, found an escort of Royal Canadian Mounted Police in scarlet full-dress uniform waiting at the border. It was like the campaigning days of last autumn..

Thousands waited in Toronto's station, massed along the streets, hung out of windows. It was the same old Willkie: tousled hair, battered hat, cocky grin. From the steps of City Hall he watched a parade of Canadian troops. In Ontario's Provincial Parliament building the Legislature suspended business for an hour while Willkie told about his trip to Britain.

That night, in Maple Leaf Gardens, the big indoor arena of Toronto's ice-hockey team, Willkie handed Mr. Mackenzie King a check for $20,200 from the Linen Trade Association of the U. S. to buy a Spitfire plane for Britain. Then he got down to business. For 30 minutes he stirred the 17,000 Canadians in his audience, speaking in the same earnest, hoarse voice that he used in the campaign, but thrice as effectively.

There must be, said Wendell Willkie, a just peace this time--no more of the "trade restrictions and barriers, the unpayable indemnities, the arbitrary redrawing of boundaries, the moral degradation imposed by the Versailles Treaty" that led to World War II. "A military victory alone will not save the democratic system," said Willkie. "Democracy as a way of life is competing with . . . totalitarian ways of life. And Democracy will win only if it works better than they do." Next day, in Montreal, the tumultuous welcome was repeated. In Canada's biggest city Willkie challenged French Canadians to "stand up ... and be counted, and give their utmost to the cause of liberty." Said he solemnly: "You people of French descent, as you think of those pleasant villages of France trembling under alien hordes, and when you think of that gay capital, Paris, now rendered sad under . . . foreign rulership of totalitarian ideas --surely there is no man in Montreal . . . that will not give everything, including his life, to remove that stain. ..." In Montreal's war plants Willkie watched tanks and Bren gun carriers moving off production lines, saw aircraft, minesweepers and corvettes abuilding. He climbed on scaffolds, peered over workmen's shoulders, shook hands, poked at gadgets. asked questions, made more impromptu pep talks. That evening, while a cheerless, fine rain fell, he talked to some 20,000 people gathered in Montreal's Windsor Street railway station, expressed his hope that "when the war is over ... we can all remain joined in a great confederacy of democratic States. . . ." As he boarded the train that was to take him home, Montreal's citizens began to chant:. "We . . . want . . . Willkie!" Well the Canadians might want him, for since war began no Canadian politician had fired them with such enthusiasm for their cause, and many a Canadian has worried over his country's war effort.

Australian troops, jauntily wearing the laurels they won in Africa, were on their way last week to Greece, where they expect to win more. But the sad truth was that Canada's contribution, both of troops Heisuke Yanagawa; for local leaders and rank & file, the 3,000,000 members of the tightly organized Ex-Servicemen's Association.

This meant simply that henceforth Japan's one party is the Army. To Japan's politicians and Japan's industrialists (now bear-hugged in Government-run cartels) this spelled the end of any hope of an effectual voice in the New Order. To the 72,000,000 obedient people of Japan it meant only that tight censorship, short rationing, police spies, "economic restrictions," heavy taxes would get a little worse.

Still Premier was Fumimaro Konoye, still a finicking hypochondriac, still given to convenient escapist indispositions. But Konoye had become a convert to Zen Buddhism (Buddhist sect favored by the Japanese Army caste). He now spends each Sunday, said a Tokyo newspaper, "seated in a lotus form , . . meditating on the deeper, incalculable manifestations of nothingness."

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