LIBERTY MENACED

Dominion, Volume 32, Issue 152, 23 March 1939, Page 8

LIBERTY MENACED

Spirit Of Aggressor Manifest EUROPEAN SITUATION Hope For Settlement By Peaceful Means “Liberty is the very basis o£ the British Commonwealth and cannot be allowed to perish from the earth,” said the High Commissioner for the United Kingdom in New Zealand, Sir Harry Batterbee, speaking to members of the Royal Empire Society and the Victoria League in Wellington yesterday. “Now, as never before,” he added, “the principles in which we believe —the principles of liberty and democracy of fair plav and justice, of settling all questions, not by force and violence, but by reason and negotiation —are being tested.

“The present international situation is I know, in all our hearts today. The cables, which have appeared in the Press, have shown the anxiety which is being felt by those in the Mother Country—anxiety which, I know, is being shared by those in this country. “I trust with all my heart that peaceful means may be found to check the spirit of aggression and of challenge to liberty, which has manifested itself during the last few days. The best service we can render is to pray that the efforts of all those who are trying to preserve the principles of liberty and democracy in the world may succeed. “It is tragic that just at the time when science has given us a mastery over Nature greater than ever before, the resources which would have built a better and happier world for us all should have been devoted to building instruments of destruction to add, not to the happiness, but to the impoverishment of mankind. It would be more tragic still if, through the wanton act of any nation, those instruments were used to plunge mankind into war, and into miseries, the full extent and depth of which no man can foresee or measure.”