WAR AIMS & PEACE TERMS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 16 December 1939, Page 3

WAR AIMS & PEACE TERMS

AN ARCHBISHOP'S VIEWS. In a further discussion of war aims and peace terms, the Archbishop of York, Dr Temple, said in a recent broadcast:—“l think one may put the question broadly in this way. Is our analogue going to be Paris or Vienna? Shall we go more closely by the procedure adopted at the end of the last war or that adopted at the end of the Napoleonic war, which, after all, did inaugurate a very long period of European peace? There is a factor in this situation which encourages the adoption of the analogy of Vienna —namely, that we are quite specifically fighting an evil Government and the philosophy behind it. In the war against Napoleon we were fighting the French Revolution as it came to be embodied in him, and our statesmen were able to take the view that since the Bourbon Dynasty had been restored and we had been in many ways fighting for the sake of the Bourbon Dynasty there were no enemies left, we were all friends together and could make peace. Accordingly I do no believe that such firm realists as Castlereagh and the Duke of Wellington would have taken that line if they had not also believed it to be good for the future of Europe, and that the introduction of the legitimists was much more an excuse for a policy which they would anyhow have adopted than the real cause of their action. But we have much the same excuse here. Supposing it should become true that the German people would throw off the present Government and introduce something much more fully representative of the longer traditions of Germany, stretching back not only to Bismarck, but also beyond him, we should have a ground for saying that here is a nation with which we can enter into negotiations not as conquerers over a vanquished foe, but as colleagues in the system of Europe. In other words, we could say that, while there can be no peace between this country and the present German Government, between this country and a Germany which has taken to itself a Government of another hue and another tradition, there should be a freely negotiated peace, and not in any sense an imposed one. That. I believe, would bring great confidence to the younger people in our country.”