WAY TO DISARMAMENT

Wairarapa Times-Age, 23 January 1939, Page 3

WAY TO DISARMAMENT

MR A. DUFF COOPER’S COUNSEL. LESSON OF STERN & TERRIBLE DAYS. “We have to ask ourselves whether we have been pursuing from the first the right idea,” said Mr A. Duff Cooper, former First Lord of the Admiralty, speaking at a League of Nations Union meeting in England. 'Many people thought .that the first thing we had to get was disarmament. I never took that view. I have said—and I think I have been proved to be right—that you will not get peace through disarmament. You will only get disarmament through peace. You have first to persuade people they are not going to be attacked, and then they will put down their weapons of their own accord. The only way you will ever get permanent disarmament is as the result of a profound belief that war will not take place. “We have, in the stern and terrible days in which we are living and with which we are faced, to make up our minds on this fearful problem—whether there are things which are even more shameful than war itself. Let us be perfectly clear, looking back on the immense relief we have felt in the last month or so, whether we are avoiding war because we hate it and despise it, which is right, or because we fear it, which is wrong.

“The country that goes into negotiations with the determination that in no case will it fight is at a helpless disadvantage against a country which goes into those same negotiations with a preparedness and willingness to fight under certain eventualities. When the statesmen of the world meet together round a conference table and one is prepared to fight and another is not, if the other is never going to be prepared to fight then that country is doomed to a gradual diminution of all its powers and prestige, and it must gradually go down the hill, and then must be disarmed.

“We should be sure, above all, of our own motives, and we should be sure that what we yield to reason we will never yield to fear. While seeking to promote peace in every possible way, we must be prepared with courage to face the fearful alternative in order to maintain our own liberty and free-, dom.”