THE MATAMATA RECORD. MONDAY, DECEMBER 19, 1927. OTHER PAPERS’ OPINIONS. SECRET DIPLOMACY.

Matamata Record, Volume X, Issue 884, 19 December 1927, Page 4

THE MATAMATA RECORD. MONDAY, DECEMBER 19, 1927. OTHER PAPERS’ OPINIONS. SECRET DIPLOMACY.

The fact that will impress most of our readers about the present session of the League of Nations Council at j Geneva is that all the important questions are settled not in the Council chamber but in the private sittingrooms of hotels or .during boating excursions on Lake Maggiore. Radical comrrientato.rs on foreign affairs always see something particularly sinister in these informal meetings of the world’s statesmen and profess to belieye that if M. Briand never spoke to Sir Austen Chamberlain except in the presence of half a dozen journalists and a microphone most international difficulties would fade away. Yet this post-war belief in the inherent wickedness of all diplomats is much exaggerated. The British Foreign Office recently threw open the whole of its store of dark secrets relating to the origin of the Great War to two historians of unquestionable impartiality—Dr. Gooch and Dr. Temperley —and invited them to publish any selection they cared to make. The : first two volumes have now been published, and they must be a sad disappointment to those who expected a catalogue of iniquity. The impression an unbiased reader must get is that, while our diplomats in the generation before the war acted sometimes stupidly and sometimes deviously, yet on the whole they were men of high moral character with skill and intelligence. The Times Literary Supplement, which is not easily moved to enthusiasm, says of the general effect of the work : “ There may be, and there certainly will be and ought to be, comment and criticism on individual actions or proposals ; but we do not see that there is anything which could undermine the confidence and trust which the people of this country are asked to place in the Foreign Office, or, and this is perhaps even more important, the confidence of other countries in the general spirit by which our policy is determined.” If we consider the importlane* of morality in international politics the tribute is a very high one. It is surely very gratifying and very remarkable that the record of our diplomacy over a period of great difficulty and even peril should be such that the foreign Office has nothing in its archives that it cannot disclose to the world.—Christchurch. ; Press.