A NEW ORDER

Evening Post, Volume CXXVIII, Issue 136, 6 December 1939, Page 12

A NEW ORDER

WHEN PEACE REIGNS

WILL OF PEOPLES

ONLY SOURCE OF LIFE

(British Official Wireless.) (Received December 6, 2 p.m.) RUGBY, December 5. Concluding his speech in the House of Lords, the Foreign Secretary (Lord Halifax) said that earlier in the year we had tried to improve our relations with Russia, but in doing so we always maintained that the rights of third parties must remain intact and be unaffected by our negotiations, and he thought recent events showed that the Government had been right to refuse an agreement with Russia on the terms of formulae goyerning acts of indirect aggression on the Baltic States, since it Avas clear that these formulae may have been the cloak for ulterior designs. The Foreign Secretary then referred to the. terrible acts of oppression perpetrated in Poland and also Czechoslovakia. Turning to neutral protests concerning the extension of thd British Contraband Control to German goods carried in neutral ships, Lord Halifax said that they would be answered in full detail. Britain was trying to alleviate as much as possible hardships on neutral trade and he pointed out that "nothing we have done on the sea has put into peril the life of a single neutral citizen." v In conclusion, Lord Halifax said we did not know what would be the conditions under which peace was made. "It is already being said," he continued, "that a new order in Europe would only come from a surrender in some measure by the nations of their sovereign rights in order to clear the way for "some more organic unions* I do not know that I should go quite so, far as condemning all attempts at a new order, but I do agree that it will only court disaster if we forget that no later plan will be finalised which does not freely spring from the will of the peoples, which will, alone give it vigour and life." Lord Snell, preceding Lord Halifax, said: "It is advisable to think now about the kind of world we want to leave behind us. As I see the present situation we are at the end of an epoch. I believe Capitalism not only ,to be dead but condemned, and nothing whatever can restore it in our time." He suggested that a Ministry of Reconstruction ought now to be set up to make preparations for the time when peace again reigned. , The Archbishop of Canterbury said it vwasnot possible to contemplate without some-shame the recurrence pf war twice in the lifetime of a single generation, and he thought the reason might be that during the last war little thought was given to the terms of subsequent peace. He felt that a younger generation might not be able to put its whole effort into this war unless it knew that not merely freedom would result but that yet another generation would not be daunted by the shadow of war.