Evening Post. MONDAY, FEBRUARY 11, 1935. GENERAL SMUTS AGAIN

Evening Post, Volume CXIX, Issue 35, 11 February 1935, Page 8

Evening Post. MONDAY, FEBRUARY 11, 1935. GENERAL SMUTS AGAIN

General Smuts was prevented by illness from delivering the expected speech at the opening of the Imperial Press Conference at Cape Town on Monday last, and we learn today that he was still too unwell on Saturday to speak at the inaugural meeting of the South African branch of the Royal Institute of International Affairg which appears to have been attended by the Press Conference delegates in a body. But he had fortunately not been debarred from putting his address on paper, and the manuscript was read at the meeting. It is just three months since General Smuts submitted to a meeting of the parent Institute in London one of the most comprehensive and illuminating of recent surveys of the Empire's foreign policy. A passing.regret may perhaps be , felt, said "The Times" (November 13), . that a statement so .perspicacious and so wise, at once so imaginative and yet so plainly derived from hard ex- ; penence in politics and war, should ■ not have come from the lips of a member of our own Cabinet. But no one who ,was born and bred in the United ! Kingdom could in the nature of things ■ have seen the British Commonwealth • irom so many points of view as i ueneral Smuts, or have come to serve it with the same detached intelli- i gence.-. . -; From being a leader i on1 the smallest of stages he has be- . come a great Imperial thinker and a ' man whose word counts not only with f the British peoples but far abroad in ' the world outside. , ] So far-as our highly condensed ■ report of General Smuts's Cape Town speech enables one to judge— and it is not .likely that on this point anything material has been omitted—it includes no new depart- t ure from the broad lines of the s London address. The domination of ] Europe by a fear complex, the } necessity "that . the nations,' both i victors and vanquished, should be I cured of their Freudian obsessions," t the supreme value of the League of c Nations in applying . the Freudian £ remedy of bringing the mischief into ( the open and exposing it to the light t of day, the importance of the t Locarno principle to the collective ( peace system, and the need for ex- i tending it, the cloud in the Far East r "far more dangerous for the future I than these present and passing differ- j ences in Europe," and the recogni- i tionthat "the future policy and associationof our great British Common- c wealth lie more with the United < States than with any other group, in t the world"—these were the outstand- t ing points of the speech of three \ months ago and they can all be re- : cognised in today's'report from Cape Town. He described the League \ of Nations as "a pathway of destiny t which could not be deserted without j disaster." He advocated, rather more t definitely than in . November, an t Eastern Locarno qn similar lines to r those projected by M. Barthou, and { considered that such regional conven- { tions would serve as "half-way houses r to a future all-embracing collective { peace system which would follow the , disappearance of the fear complex.", { Japan's action in Manchuria" General | Smuts described as "profoundly dis- j turbing" and her denunciation of the c Washington Naval Treaty, which j has taken place since he spoke in ( London, as "still more significant." One omission from the Cape Town speech, which can hardly be ascribed \ to i the reporter, is to be noted with regret. "The most significant j feature of world relations," says • General Smuts, "is the vast national ' experiments in Russia, Italy, and " Germany." But these experi- \ ments we have with us always. The youngest of them has just celebrated its second birthday and they are all ( pursuing the even tenor of their way \ with nothing special to record. The \ most significant new feature, if not of world relations, certainly of Euro- i p.ean'^relations, during the last three months is the manner in which the danger threatened to the whole of Europe by this Nazi experiment has been checked by a peaceful diplomacy, which almost simultaneously ( removed another capital danger from * the path of peace. This double j event is described as follows by Mr. ( D. Graham Hutton in his article on j "Europe Breathes Again" in the j January number of the "Nineteenth c Century":— ' " The spectre of. war had been raised ' by the Saar dispute, by the introduc- ] tion-of "revisionism" into the Hungar- ', ian-Yugoslav dispute, by the danger that Italy and France might separate ' after their recent "rapprochement" < over the integrity of Austria. But the sudden and bold initiative of the Brit- ', ish . Government at Geneva had ' changed all that. It had accom- ' plished two notable achievements. It I had dissipated the fear of war, by re- ■ conciling national disputants as an , honest broker, on two occasions. Most ' important, it had only done so by' act- '. ing within the framework of, and as a member of, the League of Nations. ] Without such action through the . League any efficacious intervention of the British Government would have been, and would have been immedi- ■ ately interpreted abroad as, equivalent ; to a declaration of partisanship or al- '. liance in two international disputes. Thus the year of 1934 closed with the stocks of the League and the British Government standing at higher levels in the political market than for years past. • ; '■ It is astonishing that, either, as

Imperial statesman or as League statesman or even as a detached friend of peace, General Smuts, in a speech which emphasised the danger of "the fear complex," "the decay of the spirit of liberty in Europe," the value of the League, and the collective peace system, and the readiness of the world to respond to a "wise and courageous leadership," should have been able to refrain from a single word about the'wise, courageous, and brilliantly successful leadership which, as Mr. Hutton says, enabled the year 1934 to close "with the stocks of the League and the British Government standing at higher levels in the political markets for years past." Even a formal acknowledgment of this inestimable service, would have relieved the almost unqualified gloom of his speech, and supplied a welcome antidote to the strange Imperial gospel which General Smuts's colleague, the South African Minister of Defence, preached to the Press Conference. _ Mr* Pirow said that the Navy's function was not to protect South Africa, but quite rightly to protect British shipping trade. The British Navy got a substantial benefit from being in African waters, a benefit which would greatly increase if the Suez Canal at any time became unavailable. The obligation is really on the part of the British Government, whose ships-are generously' allowed to come inside South Africa's threemile limit, and no questions. asked! Mr. Pirow's. doctrine is said to be receiving keen attention in Whitehall, where "the tendency is'to regard the speech as directed towards native policy" and as "altogether consistent with Imperial defence obligations." Official or semi-official ingenuity is obviously in a bad way when it is reduced to such shifts as those. A few generous words of sympathy and jippreciation from General Smuts, in which he need not have given his colleague away, would have been more to the point. A more serious omission is shared by this speechwith the one that he made in November. "Even the Dominions" are admitted to be in danger, but there is not a word of positive suggestion as to what action, if any, they should take to defend themselves. It is cheaper, to advise the old man to bestir, himself.