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and hardship to very many thousands of worthy people, and that the best that could be done, and the least that should be done, was to decide upon that solution which offered the least injustice, the least departure from principle, and the least practical difficulties in the circumstances as they had arisen during the course of the past thirty years. The New Zealand Government believed then that partition was the best solution, and it believes the same thing to-day. It is our view that the Assembly decided to do the right thing in the wrong way, and I am not expressing that view only now, with all the advantages of hind sight. On behalf of my delegation and my Government, I expressed the same view when the matter was being considered last November, and if my colleagues will do me the honour of recollecting or reading what I said then they will find that throughout the whole course of the discussion the New Zealand delegation took the view that while partition with economic union was the best course to adopt, nevertheless if the Assembly assumed the right —as we believed it should —to divide that country into a Jewish State and an Arab State, the Assembly must at the same time assume the duty of ensuring an orderly and peaceful implementation of that decision. And up to the very last moment I expressed New Zealand's grave and anxious apprehensions as to the efficacy of partition without enforcement and called—unhappily without avail —on the members of the United Nations and particularly the Great Powers, to face this question of enforcement. Up to the very last moment I asked whether the Assembly was prepared to gamble with the lives of innocent people in Palestine. The appeal fell on deaf ears. You were prepared so to gamble; we did gamble, and we lost. But we do not pay. You know to-day who is paying. The gambler's loss is being paid by the people of Palestine ; it is being paid in part by British boys dying at their post of duty, but for a much greater part it is being paid, and will continue to be paid, by the people of Palestine, be they innocent or guilty, be they Arab or Jew. And the situation that has arisen to-day, incredible and disgraceful to us as it is, was, to any one who faced the facts and who was not deaf and blind, as clear and as obvious and as inevitable as night following day. There were many in November who professed to believe—they will allow me to doubt whether they did believe—that enforcement would not be necessary. That is an order of simplicity which is quite beyond my comprehension, and if there were such as did in fact believe this to be a possibility then they must certainly have paid no heed to the protests and warnings of our Arab colleagues. Nobody who heard these debates, as I have heard them, could fail to be impressed with the warmth and the emotion and the conviction with which the representatives of the Arab States expounded their cause and warned the Assembly of the consequences. Nobody could have failed to realize the justice of much of what the Arabs represented to us. Nobody doubted that whatever decision was arrived at in connection with the Palestinian problem it would inevitably bring some degree of hardship, some degree of injustice, to a substantial number of people. The problem, I repeat, was susceptible of no perfect solution. But if there were in this room any who believed that the partition of Palestine could be accomplished peacefully and with good will on all sides and without enforcement, then I must say that that is a degree of naivete which did them little credit. But, of course, in human affairs, there is always an inclination to hope, which in turn leads to a belief, that all will be well. Quite often it is well, but