BRITAIN’S WAR AIMS.

Ashburton Guardian, Volume 60, Issue 28, 13 November 1939, Page 6

BRITAIN’S WAR AIMS.

DESTRUCTION OF HITLERISM. EUROPE’S ECONOMIC FUTURE. LONDON, November 11. The -Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Information (Sir Edward Grigg), in a speech, said: “The Hitlerism which we have nledged ourselves to destroy is something much stronger and more- penetrative than the mind and character of a shigle man.” Ho added that there; would be no Hitler to-day if the German people were not susceptible to the crude and brutal leadership of the type he; represented. There Avould be no Hitler to-day if there had not been in every German town and village a number of men ready and"" willing to inflict upon their owjn compatriots the -awful cruelties and tyrannies which mark his regime.

Evil things in Germany at present dominated the good, and thei only one means toy which that Satanic spirit in Germany could toe destroyed was by the arbitrament to which it toad itself appealed —the arbitrament of the sword. >

“Destroy it we must and will, hut what then? The queston is being asked all over thei world. Britain has no territorial ambitions of any kind and she has no desire to maintain the position of exclusive privilege under which the great resources she commands will be denied to the rest of the world. It is time;, and more than time, that the nations of Europe regarded their civilisation in Europe and elsewhere as a common charge, and we want no exclusive control of the wealth iotf other continents for ourselves. “We seek no dictated peace, hut peace by agreement in which all peoples, including the German, will play their part. We seek a peace which is guaranteed, by general acceptance, not a peace guaranteed by the strength, of two or three dominant Powers while other people remain weak and disarm. There must be force behind all law, but the wider the consent on which the law is based, the less the danger that force will have to be used.

“The third principle is that we si) all strive for the economic welfare not merely of the victorious countries, but of Europe as a whole. The greatest weakness of the Treaty of Versailles and its sister treaties was their blindness of the economic needs of the various new States which they set up. The States of Europe will, I hope, come to realise that without co-operation, on a scale unknown in the past, they cannot hope to be either safe* or prosperous. “We must strive to .bring that about by making every possible contribution to the common good. It is being said by Germany and Russia that we entered this war to maintain imperialistic domination over Europe and other parts of the world. That is a lie. We want nothing but extending freedom, a higher standard of living and an ample and abundant life) for our own people and for all peoples.”