BRITAIN AND FRANCE.

Auckland Star, Volume LVI, Issue 183, 5 August 1925, Page 7

BRITAIN AND FRANCE.

MUST PULL TOGETHER.

FRENCH AMBASSADOR'S FEARS.

(From Our Own Correspondent.)

LONDON, July 3

While the Government, backed by a solid majority is carrying everything before it—the Finance Bill through and unemployment debate eafelyover—with just that sufficiency of yielding which has helped it to avoid alienating supporters for a web so wide cast was bound inevitably to disturb some interests. In the Department- of Foreign Affairs the pact continues to be the preoccupying subject, and there is not quite so much self-congratulation as there was when Mr. Austen Chamberlain came back from Paris. A notable contribution to the discussion is provided this week by the publication in the "Revue dcs Deux Mondee" of an article by the Count de Saint Aulaire so long French Ambassador in London. He is fearful of developments in Germany presaged by Hindenburg's return. He suggests many combinations to meet such a menace, such as a collaboration of all the Continental countries which fought against Mittel Europa during the war, but he seems to find in the Entente with this country, of which he writes with knowledge and affection, the best guarantee against the jeopardising of world peace by Berlin. He fears Germany and regards the Pact as intended by that country to be a trap. "It tends to substitute the disarmament of France for that of Germany. What is the use of maintaining an army if we take the German guarantee seriously? And how can we insist on the disarmament of Germany if we have confidence in her?"

He goes on to say, however, "the trap is too patent, too gross for the Allies to fall into it." Consequently the proper thing to do is to twist it against the Germans themselves. "If Germany's guarantee has to be accepted with England's endorsement and with reserves in favour of our Polish and Czech allies, the essential thing is for Uβ not to confound appearance and reality "They offer us Alsace-Lorraine as if we had not got it already, and they are tempting us towards a marriage of the heavy industries of the two countries, a marriage which through the menace of a Continental hegemony of coal and iron would consummate our divorce from England. It is a case where we should remind ourselves of the English aphorism, "When you sup with the devil you need a long spoon." He does not forget the new importance of the British Commonwealth of Nations, vis a vis, the part played by the United States of America. Britain, he asserts, must range herself with France, despite the fact that their interests appear so often to pull in different directions—fear of a EuropeanAsiatic bloc, directed from Berlin and Moscow, will operate inevitably in that direction. To England, the Dominions are indeed a difficulty, but, after all, are they not a bridge, says Count de Saint Aulaire, between their Mother Country and the United States, and are they not really a guarantee of Anglo-Saxon solidarity when the crisis comes —of course, again on the side of France? Germany's entrance to the League of Nations will only whet the appetite of this natural bird of prey. After the Polish hors-d'oeuvre and the Austrian aperitif she "will turn her eye upon something more substantial, the piece de resistance, the British Empire. Aspiring to become once more a world Power and to recover her industrial hegemony, Germany will collide in the end more fatally with England than with France. That is why France is the Continental rampart of Great Britain."