DESIRE FOR PEACE
LORD HALIFAX ON BRITISH POLICY PROBLEMS EASIER TO STATE THAN SOLVE NECESSARY CONDITIONS OF SETTLEMENT (British Official Wireless.) RUGBY. June 21. Addressing a meeting at the Royal Institute of International Affairs, in London today. Lord Halifax. Foreign Secretary, observed that a growing appreciation of the cataclysmic effect of war and the fact that it unsettled at least as much as it settled, and that its influence on human affairs was rather disruptive than decisive, had given rise to increased public interest in foreign policy. There was a desire among British people, he thought, to make the most effective contribution it could to a settlement of the present world anxieties, and he cited with warm approval the words of Mr Cordell Hull, U.S. Secretary of State, that “national isolation is not a means to security, but rather a fruitful source of insecurity.”
Drawing a balance-sheet of British qualifications and disqualifications for making an effective contribution in foreign affairs, Lord Halifax put on the debit side the long experience of national unity, together with a lack of imagination and some failure to understand the thoughts and actions of other nations arising from that national unity. On the credit side he put certain positive qualities.. First among these the British respect for law founded upon the conviction that no social life was tolerable or possible on other terms. This the British held to be as true of nations as of individuals. The first necessity of an ordered life was that a settlement of differences by force should be abolished and replaced by a settlement through some process according to law. Secondly, there was the British recognition that the law must rest upon consent, and thirdly, the fact that, by its development of democracy, the British people had trained themselves in practice and atmosphere to toleration. The British people would have no use for a world society in which the law would be expected to be an obedient handmaid of lawless force. What they had to seek was a way of orderly and progressive change. Lord Halifax agreed that the problem was easier to state than solve, and said that it would never be solved except by mutual confidence in good intentions. The world, therefore, would find British policy repeatedly emphasising those things which united the nations instead of those things which divided them, and, for the same reason, would note that the British were not interested to secure so-called diplomatic success if by doing so they prejudiced an attainment of their main objective—appeasement and peace. Referring to the League, Lord Halifax said that events made a full application of the Covenant impracticable today, but there was no reason why a country like Britain, which believed the spirit of the Covenant to be the right spirit in international, affairs, should not continue to practise that spirit in its dealings with other nations. That is was trying to do.
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Wairarapa Times-Age, 23 June 1938, Page 7
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487DESIRE FOR PEACE Wairarapa Times-Age, 23 June 1938, Page 7
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