DIPLOMACY'S TEST

Evening Post, Volume CXVI, Issue 146, 18 December 1933, Page 9

DIPLOMACY'S TEST

FRENCH-GERMAN ISSUE

METHODS OF THE MOMENT

CONFERENCE WAITS

(British Official Wireless.) RUGBY, December 16. The Disarmament Conference will continue to engage the closest attention of British Ministers during tho next few days. The British Ambassador in Berlin, Sir Eric Phipps, who was in attendance at .yesterday's meeting of the Cabinet Committee on Disarmament, is remaining in England over the weekend and was engaged today in further conferences at tho Foreign Office. He will leave London to spend the weekend in the country with Sir John Simon. The British' Government's continued efforts to end tho deadlock were referred to in. a speech by Sir John Simon at Chester last night. He said that the withdrawal of Germany from - Geneva, had added greatly both to the complications and the anxieties of the foreign situation. Last month the Executive Committee of the Disarmament Conference resolved that the work of the Conference would at this , stage best be assisted by parallel and supplementary efforts between various States, with full use of diplomatic machinery. The British Foreign Office had been.at work ever since in accordance with the terms of that decision. A detailed report of the progress of those efforts must clearly await the time when tho full use of this diplomatic machinery had resulted, as he hoped it might, in a degree of progress that would justify summing up the results. Tho methods now being employed were tho best suited to tho circumstances of tho moment.. The object was not to make an isolated pronouncement or to produce a noble gesture. The object was.to get, if possible, agreement between a great number of States. No Government could, by its own single declaration, produce a solution of the Disarmament Conference problems. Britain had gone a long way in reducing armaments, and he often wondered if her own isolated action had really made disarmament easier today. Again, no machinery could by itself, alter.the fudnamental difficulties of the situatipn. The gravest and most stubborn of those difficulties, at any rate so far as Europe was concerned, consisted in the divergent points of view of France a.n% Germany—the -French demand for security and the German demand for equality. Reconciliation of those two points of view had been the. greatest difficulty since the Conference began. The Government would spare no effort to solve that.