To begin with we said France and England would do the job; then Norway; then the Low Countries; then the Balkans; and now we sit back and actually rely on the Russians. We cheer the news that the Navy is going to fight but shrink at the idea of an American Expeditionary Force. Why? For the same reason that war with Japan has many more advocates than war with Germany, because we could leave a sea war to the professional fighting men of the Navy. We shirk calling things by their proper names. Never have we used so many weasel words. Conscripts are “selectees”; naval war is “hunting pirates”; hiring the British to do our fighting for us is “lease-lend”; isolationists become “noninterventionists”; interventionists argue tediously for “all-out aid,” but few of them ever come out plainly and say we ought to go to war. All of this evasion stems from the refusal to face the supreme reality, namely that we have to go to war, that it is our war and was our war from the beginning. Q. _But haven’t we gone far toward recognizing that it is our war by our lease-lend appropriations of around thirteen billion dollars?_ A. Do you realize that we actually delivered only $190,000,000 worth of goods in the first six months of lease-lend to Britain and China? That is only a little over one per cent of the total lease-lend money involved. If it takes us six months to deliver one per cent, how long will it take to deliver 100 per cent? Certainly, the beginning is slowest; certainly speed of deliveries will increase almost geometrically after the new factories begin to produce. But the fact is that we will never produce enough to win this war without going formally to war. As Donald M. Nelson, chief defense buyer, suggested, the only way to get capacity production for armaments is to make the program so big that civilian needs will be irresistibly pushed into the background, and every factory capable of producing armaments will be forced to drop its civilian business and go immediately to work on war materials. What does “pushing our civilian needs into the background” mean? It means sacrifice; it means a lowering of our standard of living. Do you know anyone, have you a single person in your acquaintance in civilian life, whose standard of living has deteriorated as a result of sacrifice for our so-called defense effort? Leaf through your smart magazines, read the news of the shops, and ask yourself what the fighting folk of Europe would think of the war effort of a country whose rugged males in the bloody autumn of 1941 are asked in full-page advertisements: “Have you seen the new brown diamonds for men? These interesting, subdued stones are rapidly becoming a major item in the well-dressed man’s wardrobe.” Would this make very good evidence against Hitler’s assertion that we are a “decadent, degenerate democracy not to be taken seriously in war”?