The Auckland Star WITH WHICH ARE INCORPORATED The Evening News, Morning News, The Echo and The Sun. MONDAY, AUGUST 26, 1935. AN AMERICAN EMBARGO.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVI, Issue 201, 26 August 1935, Page 6

The Auckland Star WITH WHICH ARE INCORPORATED The Evening News, Morning News, The Echo and The Sun.

MONDAY, AUGUST 26, 1935. AN AMERICAN EMBARGO.

For the cause that lacks assistance, For the wrong that needs rcsistanoe, For the future in the distance, And the good that we can do.

While members of the League of Nations are considering whether penalties should be imposed upon Italy if she defies the League— and Mussolini says to-day that such application would be an act of war and would be resisted —Congress of the United States has reversed traditional American policy by enacting a temporary embargo on supplies for all belligerents in foreign wars. This means that if war breaks out between Italy and Abyssinia citizens of the United States will be forbidden to supply arms or munitions to either party, and it is possible that the wording of the Act includes raw material for war as well. The United States, the most powerful nation outside the League, has taken a step similar to that which is being urged on the League, though there would be this vital difference between League action and the present development, that the League would penalise the party that refused to arbitrate, which would be Italy. In view of American policy during the World War, the action of Congress is extraordinarily important. Then America claimed, as she always had claimed, the right to trade with both sides in a war, and as a result of Britain interfering with American trade with Germany, Britain and America came almost to blows. In reply to critics who contended that the blockade should have been tightened, Edward Grey himself said that if it had been Britain would have lost the war, the plain inference being that the United States would have come in against us. But Britain and her allies, while preventing supplies from America reaching the Central Powers, were able, owing to their command of the sea, to draw freely from the United States for their own purposes, and it is probable that without access to American goods an,d American money—the money being borrowed to pay for the goods—they would not have been able to achieve the victory they did. Had the American Congress been in to-day's mind in 1914 and the years that followed, these supplies would have been denied to Britain and her associates. Command of the sea would have been deprived of much of its value, because the Power with the greatest navy would have been prevented from using it to obtain sea-borne supplies. Temporary though this American action is, its implications are very far-reaching. For one thing, it does not discriminate between belligerents. The innocent is subject to the same penalty as the aggressor, and a primitive community like the Abyssinians is put on the same footing as the highly industrialised Italian society.