Peace Spirit Grows

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 597, 25 February 1929, Page 9

Peace Spirit Grows

SIR AUSTEN HOPEFUL Relations with America NO one will deny,” says the British Foreign Secretary, “not only that world peace is More secure, and that the nations are discussing their international difficulties in a new and better spirit, but also that they have turned a new leaf and closed the chapter of the Great War and the years that followed.” British Official Wireless

Reed. 11.15 a.m. RUGBY, Sunday. The Foreign Secretary, Sir Austen Chamberlain, speaking at Torquay last night, said: “Great Britain and the United States have many roots in common in their past history, and we live largely under the same laws and speak the same language. “We have recently had some discussion with the United States in which we have not been able to reach an agreement. We have such discussions not infrequently with the same result, yet nobody becomes alarmed and thinks it an unusual thing if a common solution of a difficult problem cannot be reached.

“The measure of attention which has been given to whatever differences have existed between the United States and ourselves is not really for the intrinsic value of the questions at stake, but it is a measure of the desire which we have for friendship with the nation which is most akin to our own/*

Dealing with the achievements of the Government, Sir Austen said that nobody would deny, not only that world peace was more secure, and that they were discussing their international difficulties in a new and better spirit, but also that they had turned over a new leaf and closed the chapter of the Great War and the years that followed.

It hacl opened a brighter chapter. The early years which had followed the signing of peace brought no peace to the nations, but the position became worse and it seemed a certain prediction that sooner or later, perhaps not in his time but in that of his children or grandchildren, old conditions would again arise, and the world would be flung once more into a terrible struggle from which civilisation would never again emerge. Behind all and at the root of all that lay the feeling of fear and signs of insecurity. “We sought to win back the confidence of France, and from close friendship with our war ally, to build up a common reconciliation. I am reproached with being in M. Briand’s pocket. I told him so, and he seemed to think his pocket was not quite big enough to contain the Foreign Minister of Great Britain. He also told me that if I was reproached with subservience to him, he was also in his own country reproached with subservience to me, but we have from the first declared that we base our foreign policy on the League of Nations. “I would not have you lull yourselves to sleep with the idea that the constitution of the League of Nations has made war impossible. That is a result which may never be obtained, or which, at any rate, must take long years of honest endeavour to achieve.’*