PROVED RIGHT

Gisborne Herald, Volume LXVI, Issue 20114, 7 December 1939, Page 7

PROVED RIGHT

BRITISH POLICY CARE IN MOSCOW STATES OF THE BALTIC AGGRESSION FORMULA ULTERIOR DESIGNS REVIEW BY HALIFAX (British Official Wireless.) Reed. 3 p.m. RUGBY, Dec. 5. In concluding 'his speech in the House of Lords to-day, the Foreign Secretary, Viscount Halifax, said that earlier in the year Britain tried to improve the relations with Russia but in doing so always maintained that the rights of third parties must remain intact and be unaffected by the negotiations. He thought that recent years showed that the (Government had been right to refuse an agreement with .Russia on terms of formulae governing acts of indirect aggression on the Baltic States since it is clear these formulae may have been a cloak for ulterior designs. He then referred to the terrible acts of oppression perpetrated in Poland and also in Czechoslovakia. Turning to neutral protests concerning the extension of the British contraband control to German goods carried in neuitral ships, Lord Halifax said that they would toe answered in full detail. Britain was trying to alleviate as much as possible the hardships on neutral trade and he pointed out that “nothing we have done on the sea has put into peril a single life of any neutral citizen.” In conclusion Lord Halifax said we did not know what would toe the conditions under which peace was made. “It already is being said,” he continued, “that a new order in Europe would only come from surrender, in some measure, toy the nations of their sovereign rights in order to clear the way for some more organic unions. “I do not know that I should go quite so far as to condemn all attempts at a new order, but I do agree that it would only court disaster if we forget that no later plan will be finalised Which does not freely spring from the mils of the peoples, which will alone g;ive it vigour and life.”