NO GOOD REASON.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVIII, Issue 153, 30 June 1937, Page 8

NO GOOD REASON.

"SPILLING OUR BLOOD."

INTERVENTION IN SPAIN,

"There seems no good reason for spilling our blood on their behalf" was the conclusion expressed tyy Mr. L. K. Munro at the Creditmen's luncheon to-day in a talk which dealt with various views of the Spanish crisis, and threw light on the international position as far as the speaker had been able to ascertain from various sources the standing of the belligerents.

Incidentally Mr. Munro stated that on July 18 next the war in Spain will have lasted for a year. He explained the intervention agreement of February last year, and dealt with the criticism by the British Labour party and radical Press of the British attitude of nonintervention. Such criticism seemed to be based on two grounds—that nonintervention was helping Franco, and that the Valencia Government was a democratic government being penalised by Britain's non-intervention, while Germans and Italians were getting volunteers into Spain to help the Fascist forces despite the undertaking early in 1936 not to send volunteers.

From what reliable sources of information he had at his disposal, the speaker was inclined to think that the Italian volunteers with Franco had increased from 10,000 to 50,000, but little could be learned of the Germans. His critical reading had strengthened the opinion that the great body of news coming out of Spain was coloured by a highly effective Russian news service, and that the backbone of the Loyalist Government was Catalonia, where the people were frenzied ana"rcho-syndicalist3, really anarchists with whose ideals British people could have very little sympathy. It was extremely doubtful that the Valencia Government was a democracy as we understood democracy. Non-intervention may have helped Franco, but it saved Britain from a dangerous entanglement.