GRIM WARNING FROM BRITAIN

Auckland Star, Volume LXX, Issue 152, 30 June 1939, Page 7

GRIM WARNING FROM BRITAIN

STRIKING SPEECH

EMPHATIC WORDS OF LORD HALIFAX

DICTATORS ANSWERED

(British Official Wireless.—Received 1.30 p.m.)

RUGBY June 29. The Foreign Secretary, Viscount Halifax, delivered, before the Royal Institute of International Affairs, an important speech in which he declared the immediate purposes of British policy in vigorous and unmistakable terms. He also entered into a detailed discussion of a number of problems fundamental to the reconstruction of international order, including those issues of living space and expansion which are to-day raised as challenges by the totalitarian States. British policy, Lord Halifax made it clear, rests on twin foundations of purpose. One is its determination to resist force, the other is its recognition of the world's desire to get on with the constructive work of building peace. But to-day the threat of military force was holding the world to ransom, and therefore he insisted that the immediate task for " Britain was to resist aggression. Only in a different atmosphere, and if convinced that all nations really wanted peaceful solutions, would it be possible to enter upon a discussion of the matters to which so much of his own speech was devoted. What was now fully universally accepted in Britain, but might not even yet be as well understood elsewhere, was that in the event of further aggression the British peoples were resolved to use at once the whole of their strength in fulfilment of their pledges to resist it. To that Lord Halifax returned more than