TOPICS OF THE DAY

Waikato Times, Volume 124, Issue 20727, 10 February 1939, Page 4

TOPICS OF THE DAY

Seeds of Wor “The habit of mind,” says the Times, London, “that gambles with the peace of the world is that which refuses to interpret the results of any negotiation except in terms of victory or defeat. If it were true, as the malcontents among our own politicians proclaim, that what happened at Munich was the diplomatic defeat of the democracies by the totalitarian Powers, then their conclusion legitimately follows that the seeds of war were sown. With equal logic, if the dictators had gone home with the sense of diplomatic defeat, a long step toward war would assuredly have been taken. The consensus of opinion, in and outside the four nations directly represented, is that there was no victory and no defeat, but a definite achievement of co-operation among the four in removing old injustices that threatened the peace of Europe. . . . What Mr Chamberlain really did was to bring into the forefront of polities a force to which all Governments, the totalitarian as well as the democratic, are bound, in the long run, to defer. His appearance in Germany, and the dramatic, circumstances that surrounded it, brought home to the German imagination for the first time thf nature of the abyss that lay ahead.”