War Compacts

Dominion, Volume 28, Issue 86, 5 January 1935, Page 16

War Compacts

“For ourselves, another Europeon war would be utterly ruinous, and to embark in it would be an act of criminal folly amounting to insanity. The question is whether our Government has not entered into compacts which might conceivably drag us into the abyss,” writes Dean Inge, in the “Evening Standard.” “I am very much afraid that the French think that we should help them again if they went to war with Germany. I think so from what I have read in French books and periodicals. My own conviction is that, pact or no pact, the people of this country would refuse to fight for the French, and I see no reason why we should. The Germans, I believe, understand the state of public opinion in England; but the French do not. . “This is an extraordinarily dangerous state of affairs; nothing could be more likely to cause a catastrophe; and we might find ourselves in a position from which we could hardly extricate ourselves without dishonour. “I think, therefore, that we ought, while there is yet time, to withdraw from any agreement which in any conceivable circumstances may compell us to join in a ruinous conflict which does not concern us at all.”