"SPINELESS DISPLAY"

Rotorua Morning Post, Volume 1, Issue 150, 17 February 1932, Page 5

"SPINELESS DISPLAY"

(Press Assn.-

league's attitude

STRONG CRITICISM VOICED BY MR. WICKHAM STEED JAPAN OUTSIDE PALE

— By Telegraph — Copyrifrht.)

Rec. Feb. 16, 11.45 p.m. LONDON, Tuesday. "If the League Council insist on merely sticking fig leaves over the nakedness of Japan's aggression in China, it is certain that the Disarmament Conference will he a fiasco. What nation will disarm while the League's helplessness to assume security is so consistently displayed.. Indeed, the League itself can scarcdly^survive such a spineless display," said Mr. Wickham Steed, a leading authority on the League's work, in the course of an interview. Great Britain and the Dominions, he said, should immediately inform the Council that Japan, by her repeated violation of pledges has placed herself outside of the international community of nations. If Australia, Canada and New Zealand thought their interests would be best served by a policy of laissez faire because momentarily it might appear in their interests to let Japan get a stranglehold on China's best resources, they were mistaken, A postponement of the problems would mean that they would again arise in a decade for a united aetion on the Anglo-Saxon front. Things would drift until there was danger of an American-Japanese clash, which no part of the Empire could regard with impunity. Mr. Steed recalls that Canada's action a decade ago was the deter--mining f actor in ending the AngloJapanese alliance, and said that the threat of trouble to Canada and Australia is certainly not less now.