BRITISH EMPIRE

Hokitika Guardian, 28 October 1933, Page 5

BRITISH EMPIRE

GOOD CO-OPEIIATIOI MR THOMAS’ BROADCAST SPEEC (Per British Official Wireless.) RUGBY, October 26. During a broadcast auuress upoi “Tim miipiro in World Politics, ”■ ih Dominions Secretary, Mr J. H. Thomas, said: “The cause of peaceful co operation between nations lias jusi ' received a strong blow.. It is not ; knockout. The world can and will re cover from it. How best can we heir toward this recovery? Worldwide cooperation is for the moment in great difficulties, but there is in the world the group of nations and peoples or the British Empire, covering between them more than a quarter of the earth’s-'surface, and including nearly a quarter of the human race’ in which co-operation has not only not failed but is living and growing. ‘'Relations between other nation and peoples are based fundanienthll: o n a desire to avoid war. It is t< that aim almost the whole of then foreign policy is directed. It is witl that object the . League of Nation; w-as created. The acts of their Gov-

ermnents are wise or foolish as they diminish or increase the dangers of war. The Governments of the British Empire, on the contrary, start from an assumption that war between them is inconceivable. “We can direct our energies to the positive end of achieving good, and not merely to the negative end of avoiding evil, and, as a result, we can afford not merely in our relations with one another, hut in our relations ■with the rest of the world, to seek other than purely selfish ends. The real organ of this positive co-operation is an inherent- love, of personal liberty and self-government in the races which make up the Empire. “It is to mere chance that, at a time when democratic government is rapidly disappearing elsewhere, within the British Empire it was never more firmly rooted than to-day. A nation which has yielded up its libeity must be kept drugged, and tlie easiest drug of all to administer is a- stiong •dose of selfish national conceit. Democracy labours under no such necessity.” Mr Thomas expressed his belief that imperial co-operation explained the fact that, relatively to the rest of the world, the British Commonealth suffered less during the world economic crisis than had other nations. There were real hopeful signs that the. worst was past, and nowhere were those signs more noticeable than in the British Empire.