IMPERISHABLE IDEALS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 21 June 1938, Page 11

IMPERISHABLE IDEALS

OBSERVATIONS ON WORLD OUTLOOK.

GERMANY’S PRESENT POLICY.

“If you wish to endeavour to make peace with an opponent, it is always wise to try to put yourselves in his position,” said Viscount Sankey, former Lord Chancellor, speaking in the House of Lords. “What is the cause of the present policy in Germany? It may be due to the pursuit of an ideal which we cannot appreciate, which we do hot understand and for which it is impossible for us to have sympathy. But it may also be due to a sense of injustice and oppression extending overmany years, for which apparently they have found no remedy. I should prefer to leave the details to those who know more about the facts than we do and who therefore are in a better position to enter into negotiations. Of this I would remind them, that no great nation can be expected to give way to arrogant demands, nor can any great nation for long submit to ignominious conditions. Lastly. I am still a believer in the ideals of the League of Nations. We have been told that the ideals which an age of reconstruction sets before itself are never realised and that they end in disillusion and disappointment. But those ideals remain. They have not perished, because they are imperishable. What has failed is the machinery by which the League of Nations sought to attain those ideals. Let us. therefore, work together in order to obtain those ideals, in the hope and in the determination that, at any rate before we leave, they will have been accomplished.”