A Blow for Freedom.

Attorney General Francis Biddle's speech on Columbus Day, with its announcement that the six hundred thousand Italian citizens living in the U.S. were no longer to be regarded as "enemy aliens," was an act of grand strategy. Once more it has been demonstrated that the best diplomacy is courageous generosity, at least in a conflict, which is not a war of nation against nation but of progress against black re-action, of human aspiration against brutality. It is a long time since anything has so deeply stirred the five million American citizens of Italian parentage and forty-five million Italians in Italy. Only one other event, occurring a few weeks earlier, created in Italy a sensation nearly as profound.