BRITAIN AND IRELAND.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLIII, Issue 2304, 19 July 1921, Page 2

BRITAIN AND IRELAND.

LECTURING before the Royal Colonial Institute. Dr Vaughan Cornish showed that London is the strategic general headquarters of the Empire. From a review of the strategic relations with the overseas Dominions, he touched on the natural ties between Great Britain and Ireland. They Were not merely such as existed between any two islands comparable in* sixe, lying close together and far from other islands, for physical structure made them rather a'double island than a paiiv They were not two complete structures, hut the complementary parts of an unsymmetrical structure. The economic .result was that Great Britain must import food, and Ireland must import manufactures, each being moreover the nearest source of the supplies needed by the ether. In economic geography*, therefore, Great Britain and Ireland were more truly described as one country than two. Moreover, they lay east-and-

west, which was the principal course of traffic in the Northern Hemisphere, so that each closely flanked the essential communications of the other. It was, consequently, a sure induction from strategic geography that if Great Britain and Ireland be independent of ono-another, each became dependent on foreign support. Ireland would be unable to maintain herself against Great Britain with a population nine times as great, and would, therefore, be dependent on recruits and munitions from abroad. Conversely, if the ocean road to the world's supplies of food were controlled from the harbours of an independent Ireland, the people of Great Britain could be starved but for the concurrent good-, will of a number of European Powers, by whose railways food supplies must come.