DAWES’S REBUKE

Sun (Auckland), Volume IV, Issue 1054, 19 August 1930, Page 13

DAWES’S REBUKE

AMERICAN “CLIMBERS” MAGNET OF BRITISH COURT In the United States, even more so than in Great Britain, mothers and daughters vie with other mothers and daughters in their desire to he presented at the British Court. Every year hundreds win and many hundreds lose in this most exciting social race. Still, every springtime sees the entry list swelled enormously in proportion to the preceding year, says the “Daiiy Mall.” In view of this fact significance attaches to the rebuke administered by General Dawes, the American Ambassador, in a speech on behalf of the honorary graduates at a dinner given by the masters and fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge. General Dawes, who is known equally well in his own country and in Britain for the straightforwardness of his English, said: “I have the honour to represent in this country the Government of a people of over 120 million population, of whom about half are of British descent. In my country, therefore, there are at least ten million more people of British descent than live in the island of Britain itself. “As American Ambassador I come frequently into contact with certain travelled Britons and Americans who are continual purveyors of the trivial and irritating in international relationship. They do not seem to have sensed the inevitable consequence of an existing tie of blood upon the permanent and fundamental attitude of the two peoples.” The Ambassador proceeded to administer the rebuke which was very apparent to those who heard it. He said: “But we have recently had in London a body of American travellers representing a section of the American people—representing the heart and soul of the American people—a body of travellers not self-invited, with their minds occupied by thoughts of society reporters or fashionable dressmakers, but mothers invited by the Government of the United States to make their first and last visit to the graves of their sons in France who fell fighting under British command by the side of their comrades of the British Army. “They brought no social introductions. The credentials which each carried were but the photograph of a son and a few withered flowers from a garden at home to lay on a grave in France. They needed no more. “I shall ever remember it, for therein the strength of the tie between the English-speaking peoples could be measured in its full and lasting' strength.”