OPPORTUNITY AFTER MUNICH

Wairarapa Times-Age, 23 January 1939, Page 2

OPPORTUNITY AFTER MUNICH

“When Mr Chamberlain came back from Munich most of us that day wore our hearts on our sleeves,” said a woman in a 8.8. C. broadcast on her reactions to the crisis. “Now at last we seemed to have our chance. For 20 years we had missed our opportunities and crisis after crisis had swept over our heads. Looking back we seemed always to have been trying to snatch peace at the eleventh hour out of these crises, when passion was high and clear thought impossible. What a grand chance we now have, if we will but use it. I should like to see the British Commonwealth, the fortunate possessors of so much, foremost in offering to readjust grievances and to frame a new and lasting peace. If it -is a generous and a just peace, then the mere offering of it will test the sincerity of those who were once our enemies. It must also be a peace which people can trust, even to the extent of agreeing to limit their armaments. Before turning out the light on that momentous night we agreed that the Munich settlement would be reckoned in history to be a great good or a great evil, not so much upon its own merits as upon what the Primo Minister and all of us do now.”