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The White Committee based its case on a simple argument. It wanted destroyers released so that they could give the utmost service for U. S. defense. The bargain was no trade, as suggested by Senator Pittman, no question of strategy, as raised by Major Eliot, no legal labyrinth. Said William Allen White: "If the British Empire, with all the weight of its democratic economic power and its military strength and naval force, should fall, the United States would be alone in a warlike world. . . . If war is not checked and thwarted in Great Britain, war will come inevitably to the United States. Because our first line of defense lies around the coast of Britain, in this crisis, we should turn to Great Britain in her hour of danger and agony with such neighborly help as public opinion in the United States may seem legally to justify. . . . Whoever is fighting for liberty is defend ing America."
Most of all, the White Committee wanted to turn sympathy for Britain into effective action, to overcome the greatest of aid to dictators — delay, and in Editor White's mind that was to test within the U. S. itself the strength of democratic sentiment, making use of democratic procedures to aid an endangered democracy.
To Chairman White democracy was not only legislative forms and procedures : "In every human heart are two conflicting forces, the altruistic urge and the egoistic instinct . . . the yearning to give and the desire to get. . . . [If] in any human unit, be it home or community . . . men are more kindly, decent, and reasonable than mean . . . then that human unit, large or small, is democratic. . . . But if . . . [it] is greedy, if it is suspicious of everything without and credulous of everything with in . . . turns to force to hold its place and win its way, then that social order . . . must turn to a tyrant for its hero and leader." Democracy, "awkward, sluggish, often sadly wasteful," nevertheless gives the freest play to the "common kindly impulse of organized humanity," but it will only survive if the democratically trained citizen — "naturally a bit lazy, instinctively inclined to improvidence, by birthright glad to let well enough alone" — decides in his heart that the democratic way of life is a good way.
Public Opinion. Last year when William Allen White returned to Emporia from the Rockies, like many another citizen he was brooding on the question: What case could democracy make for itself to justify its own survival? He followed his accustomed path from his house on Exchange Street to the Gazette offices off Commercial, spoke to his neighbors, squared off for work before a desk that shed old letters, mementos, galleys, gifts, ideas, books and last year's calendars like some queer surrealistic fruit tree ready to drop its harvest. His thoughts were gloomy, but no trace of gloom showed on his round cherubic features which, he says, make him look like a rear view of Cupid and prevent his being taken as a serious thinker. He went home for the dinner that in Emporia comes at noon. After dinner he stretched out on his double mahogany bed that stands beneath three ivy-shaded windows, put two pillows under his head, and slept.