GENEVA.

Hokitika Guardian, 3 February 1928, Page 4

GENEVA.

I( is hardly too much now to n;y -that in spite of everything, good has resulted from the Geneva discussions. The real harm of an abortive (\.i,ler rare lay in the danger of rperiniillations and of lessened con ! ulem< , and in the oonsequet set-back' to the growth in both countries of enl'ghteneil common sense. These dangers have been avoided, and the test to which Anglo-American friendship has been put has served to provide reassuring evidence of its wearing qualities. It would, of course', have T;een an excellent thing if agreement, with its consequent economies, could have been realised out of hand. Those economies would have been more valuable to us than to the Tnit.ed States, just 11s the whole question is in every way more vital. But it is too much to expect that in the wide and increasing range of activities which both peoples are pursuing all over the world, agreement will always he forthcoming as soon as there is a divergence of view. The really important point, as General Dawes said in his remarkable speech, is that there is a latent public opinion in both countries determined to keep all such disagreements in their place and not to allow them to jeopardise the larger common in I crests. The very magnitude of those common interests tends to give an air of rhetoric, and so of unreality, to spoken or written relei'enees lo them. Assertions which would he h'lmbaslie ( lapt rap - pardonable in a peroration, but still fanciful in most oilier i onneel icus iip tail literal and prosaic statements cl fact when made about the relations of the Knipire and the ('nil 'll l-tai 's. f, is a (rue paradox that advantages can ho re .(real that they are liable to he overlooked. —"The Times." ]