BRITAIN AND AMERICA

Evening Post, Volume CIX, Issue 25, 30 January 1930, Page 20

BRITAIN AND AMERICA

NECESSITY FOR FRIENDSHIP

(From "The Post's" Representative.) LONDON, 10th December. . In the course of an adares to the Oxford Luncheon Club, the Earl of Birkenhead referred to Anglo-American relations. "After many years of public lite, ana many visits to America," he said, "I say plainly that there is to-day in these islands almost a complete unanimity of thought upon this question of friendship with America. On the question of international morality, the broad views of the two peoples are identical. I doubt whether in the history of the world there have ever been two powerful nations who so sincerely and so universally detest the horrors of war. The jurisprudence of the United States was founded upon and borrowed from ours. All these circumstances made for a community of thought from which a community of action might easily issue. On the other hand, there were differences which could not escape attention. America's population was enormously greater than ours. It had been recruited over a long period of years from almost incredible cosmopolitan sources.

"When I was in New York nine years ago," said Lord Birkenhead, "the name of Cohen had for the first time displaced the name of Smith for supremacy in the directory. (Laughter.) I express the hope that these two jpeat and proud nations, which have differed so often and bitterly in the past, may have realised as they trod together the bloody road on which the milestones were graves, the secret of immortal and indestructible harmony. The problem of Anglo-American relations will be solved, if solved at all, by;a great resolution among the two peoples that the strength -of civilisation cannot support another and perhaps a graver challenge to the fundamental principles of that civilisation."