WOMEN AND PEACE

Evening Post, Volume CIX, Issue 32, 7 February 1930, Page 9

WOMEN AND PEACE

DEPUTATION RECEIVED

MR. MACDONALD'S REPLY

British Official Wireless.

(Beceived 7th February, 11 a.m.)

ItUGBY, 6th February.

This morning Mr. Mac Donald received at St. James's Palace, on behalf of the whole Conference, a deputation from tho Women's Peace Crusade and similar organisations from Great Britain, the United States, Japan, and Franco. Mr. MacDonaJd was accompanied by Mr. Stimson, Mr. Wakatsuki, Mr. Fen ton/ and Mr. Wilford. The Prime Minister said: "This Conference, which marks a very decided stago in the progress to peace, is not the last that is going to be held. We all beg you to continue your good work so that the conference which will succeed tho London Naval Conference will be able to give you much more satisfaction than we shall be able to give you." Mr. Eamsay Mac Donald said: "I think wo are going to get a good agreement. Projected programmes aro just as great a menace to the peace of the world as the actual building that up to the moment has taken place. When an agreement has been reached, there will bo superfluous ships and superfluous programmes scrapped. But there is something invisible, but very, very effectively done at the same time, aud that is that when you have scrapped things, you have also really and effectively made unnecessary a good deal of remnant. The progress to disarmament is going to be a progress mnrked by this characteristic. There will be periodical scrapping, and at the moment of scrapping, tho proportion of that

which is gained will become in tho mind of the people superfluous, and no process will go on. In that way the triumph of universal disarmament will be reached."

Supposing the agreement itself he added, fell short of what the delegations individually would like to get, supposing the compromise which was absolutely essential at any rate for the first stage, did not fulfil all expectations, that was not the only result of conference. To him the greatest achievement of the confereuco was that the delegations of nations came together and revealed tho minds of the various nations to each other, and came to a moral understanding of each other. That was an even greater result than tho material gain of a reduction in one clas3 or another of ships.