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Frances PerkinsFrances Perkins
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“They're reasonable people. They reason like the rest of us.”

However, in this day in '39 when the Germans had started an agressive war you heard them damned in Cabinet meeting for their very lack of reason. John Garner said, “God gave them reason. They're supposed to be good Christian people, aren't they? They're the damndest cusses and aren't fit to live with the devil if they do this kind of thing.” It was a vituperative feeling against them, much worse than it would have been against the Japanese if they'd done it, because they weren't supposed to have Christian enlightenment and the Germans were. There is a difference. I feel it myself. I think that's natural. Those who have participated in the same kind of civilizing spiritual and intellectual knowledge are more blameworthy if they go into a war deliberately, or go into any other sinful action deliberately, than those who are heathens raised without any recognition of the fact that man is the work of God made in his own image. Christ died for man and therefore he has worth and value. The Japanese, however polite their religion may be, have not got that in their background, and so you can't feel as angry at them, because they are in what the church calls “invincible





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