Old Walt Whitman saw his country lying on the road between Europe and Asia. The great explorers, from Columbus on, had been turned back by the American continents; but the Good Grey Poet could see mankind spreading out over the prairies, crossing the Western mountains, reaching the shores of the Pacific and sailing over it to fulfill the dream that had always haunted Europe. He wrote:
Passage to more than India! . . .
Have we not stood here like trees in the ground long enough? . . .
Have we not darken'd and dazed ourselves with books long enough?
Sail forth! Steer for the deep water only!
Time and again the U. S. had warned itself of the menace if it let its passage to the East be closed—but each time it had decided that the crisis was not critical.
It had worried for years over reports that Japan was secretly building fortifications among its 600-odd mandated islands that lie in unpronounceable profusion in the vast wastes of the Western Pacific. It had been told often enough that a Japanese grab of The Netherlands East Indies would leave the Japanese dominating U. S. trade routes to the Philippines and the Malay Peninsula, thereby threatening its sources of rubber and tin.
But only a few citizens could remember the meaning of the passage to India as Whitman saw it; fewer still could recapture the spirit of John Hay, when he spoke of the U. S. future in the "opening field" of the immense Pacific "on whose wide shores so much of the world's work is to be done."
Washington. Last week the U. S. view of its passage to India was sharply, suddenly clarified. In Washington Sumner Welles gave a clear reply to a vague Japanese claim of peaceful aims. He said, "In the very critical world situation which exists today, the Government of the United States is far more interested in the deeds of other nations than in the statements that some of their spokesmen may make."
Promptly a Japanese spokesman made another peaceful statement. In the elaborate Japanese Embassy, Ambassador Admiral Kichisaburo Nomura leaned back in his chair before more than 50 reporters and talked affably for 45 minutes about Japan's policy, about her indifference to U. S. improvement of the harbor of Guam, about the absence of Japanese desire to seize any territory. But even Admiral Nomura would not deny that Japan might fight to gain her ends. And the new Ambassador confessed that he found the U. S. atmosphere not so favorable as he had hoped when he left Tokyo.
Temperature of that atmosphere was measured this week by the Gallup Poll, which reported that 60% of U. S. voters believed U. S. interests would be menaced if Japan took Singapore and The Netherlands East Indies. A majority—56%—believed that the U. S. should try to keep the Japanese from doing so.