Editorials

The general reading public has interpreted little Austria’s defiance of Hitler and Hitlerism as a token of friendship to the Jews, but the fact of the matter is that the government of Engelbert Dollfuss is to be preferred to that of a Nazi regime as the frying pan is to be preferred to the fire. The Jewish Telegraphic Agency’s special despatches have pointed out that the present Austrian government is keeping a weather eye open against the possible contingency of a Nazi revolution, so that when, and if, that revolution comes its leaders will not be able successfully to accuse the Dollfuss regime of pro-Semitism. Nor, should it be borne in mind, is the party which the Chancellor represents officially or unofficially friendly to the Jews.

This knowledge will make less puzzling the recent cable from Vienna to the effect that the American Minister to Austria, George H. Earle, 3d, during a motor trip of the provinces told representatives of those provinces that if anti-Semitism is encouraged, Austria will lose American sympathy and support. It was a courageous thing for Minister Earle to have said and done and his merit is no less whether he uttered the warning on his own initiative or upon instructions from a higher source.

At the press interview in Vienna, at which Mr. Earle made known the object of his motor tour through the provinces, he told newspapermen present what even Americans sometimes forget, that “ninety-five percent of all Americans are either fugitives from persecution or descendants from people who crossed the ocean because of religious or racial persecution. They cannot cooperate sympathetically with a country where people are persecuted on account of birth.”

The grandsons and grand-daughters of a revolution sometimes flout the very purposes for which their own grandparents fought and bled.

Mr. Earle’s simple two sentences have a deep between-the-line meaning for the grandsons in America of the German refugees of 1848. One could not know from the alacrity with which German-American grandsons today are saying “Heil Hitler” that their sires fled from a despotism in Germany which made life intolerable for them. Every son or grandson of a German-American who fled from a despotism milder even than Hitler’s and who says “Heil Hitler” is nothing less than a traitor, both to American ideals and to the ideals of his own ancestry. These sires proved their fealty to the ideals of Lincoln by helping to free the slaves. Their sons, rather feebly Americanized, are doing their damnedest to enslave the free.