LORD BALFOUR'S PLEA

Evening Post, Volume CIV, Issue 25, 29 July 1927, Page 9

LORD BALFOUR'S PLEA

ECHO OF 1922 CONCLAVE POSITION SAME NOW AS THEN (British Official Wireless.) EUGBY, 28th July. The difference between the esspntial naval needs of Great Britain and the United States was emphasised in a speech by Lord Balfour at the 1922 Washington Conference, which several newspapers reproduce. Ho then said: "The United States stands solid >md self-sufficient. All its essential lines of communication are completely protected from any conceivable hostile attack. It is not merely that you have 110,000,000 population; it is not rarely that you are the wealthiest country m the world. It is that the configuration of your country is such that you are wholly immune from the i.ai-ti-jular position to which, from the nacure of the case, the British Empire is subjected.

"Suppose, for example, that your "Western States were suddenly removed 10,000 miles across sea. Suppose that the very heart of your Empire was a small and crowded island, depending upon oversea trade, not merely for its luxuries, but for raw material on wtose manufacture its superabundant population live, and for the food upon which they subsist. Suppose it was a familiar thought that there was never a moment of the year when, within the limits of your State, there was more than seven weeks' food for its population, and that that food could only be replenished by overseas commnmca-

"If you will draw this picture, and if you will realise all that it implies, you will understand why it is that no citizen of the British Empire, whether ho be drawu from the far Dominions of the Pacific or lives in the small island in the North Sea, can ever forget that it is by sea communication that he lives, and that without sea communication he and the Empire to which he belongs would perish together."