MERITS OF OCCUPATION

Evening Post, Volume CVI, Issue 36, 11 August 1923, Page 7

MERITS OF OCCUPATION

MR. ASQUITH'S STATEMENT.

LONDON, 9th August. Mr. H. H. Asqnith, in a valedictory address at the Liberal Summer School at Cambridge, said that last year he had believed in the prospect of a prac- . tical settlement of the reparations problem, but his hop?s had been disappointed. A new and worse complication had been added by the French occupation of the Ruhr. Some people (not many) imagined that if Britain had supported the occupation, Germany would long li? MMMjy&te&ts!},* fig £eli<ffi<id Jbai,

overwhelming opinion in Britain would rightly have opposed British support of the occupation, not on the ground that iho occupation was lliegal or immoral, but that the policy was wholly impolitic and calculated not to accelerate the securing of reparations, but rather to retard or frustrate its own purpose. Some now imagined that a crippled and impoverished Germany was to the interest of Britain, as it would remove a formidable industrial competitor. It was neither to the interest of Britain, of the Allies, of Europe, or of the world to leave Germany a bankrupt and dismembered outcast from the community of nations.