EAST AND WEST

Greymouth Evening Star, 31 May 1946, Page 7

EAST AND WEST

TWO POWERFUL GROUPS DEVELOPING GENERAL SMUTS’S VIEWS LONDON, May 29. “The more we understand that great world Power the United States, which is marching to the foremost position on this globe, the better this world will be and the belter co-opera-tion there will be,” said General Smuts at a dinner in honour of the new United States Ambassador to London (Mr. Averill Harriman). “The greatest service we can render to our human cause to-day is that the Great British and American groups should understand each other. They are now near understanding each other. ‘There is'another great group east o f us —the Soviet Union—who understand us still less. There is a far more difficult task of interpretation and understanding in that direction, but it will have to be done if we are to pull through the stretch which lies ahead of us. Those great groups must understand each other. ‘The world to-day is being shaped on these lines—a powerful and almost impregnable group in the east and another vast group in the far west. In between you have ourselves, this British group—not so powerful and not so concentrated, but ‘ with immense imponderable assets. “We have the experience of a human outlook and a knowledge of affairs. These things are an enormous asset which weigh up against all the hundreds of millions of people m (he other groups. I regard the British group as just as essential as the United Nations, and all the vast organisation we can devise for world peace are no greater and no better than our groups’ potentiality for world peace and security.” _