PROOF DESIRED

Wairarapa Times-Age, 23 June 1939, Page 5

PROOF DESIRED

OF JAPANESE PEACEFUL INTENT STATEMENT BY FOREIGN SECRETARY. UNDERSTANDING SOUGHT. (British Official Wireless.) RUGBY. June 21. The Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, who was the guest of the NineteenHundred Club this evening, in the course of a speech referred to the situation in the Far East. He deplored the recent events in Tientsin as bringing new anxieties and complications upon the international scene at a moment when a much-needed lull from surprises or threats seemed to hold .the stage. Declining to discuss the incident of the blockade in detail, Lord Halifax said ho hesitated to believe that the Japanese Government wished deliberately to challenge the whole position and policy of Britain in the Far East. He preferred to believe that the situation with which they were confronted had developed out of a misunderstanding. The British Government had been asked to take action which, on the evidence before it. it had felt it could not take. It might have been that, if

placed in similar circumstances, Japan might have felt for her part able to take the action suggested, and she, therefore, was at a loss to understand Britain’s refusal and so tended to attribute that refusal to a desire to harm Japanese interests. “I hardly need say,” declared Lord Halifax, “that whatever may have been the general British judgment about the events in China, it is no part of Britain’s intention to allow the concession in Tientsin to be used as a base for activities prejudicial to the local Japanese military interests.” He expressed the view that if the Japanese leaders could be brought to believe that, and if, for their part, they would give proof of their repeated, assertion that they did not aim at the destruction of British interests in the Far East, the Tientsin incident would be capable of satisfactory settlement.