NAVAL ARMAMENT.

Manawatu Standard, Volume XLIX, Issue 236, 4 September 1929, Page 7

NAVAL ARMAMENT.

EVERY PROPOSAL BEING EXAMINED. PRIME MINISTER’S STATEMENT. (British Official Wireless.) RUGBY, Sept, 2. In his address to the journalists at Geneva after the opening of the session of the League of Nations Assembly, Air Ramsay MacDonald, the Prime Minister, stated with regard to naval disarmament: “Conversations are still going on between General Dawes, the American. Ambassador in London, and myself. We are examining every possible proposal which is likely to bring the conversations to a successful termination. The result of. our conversations up to Saturday, when I left England, is to make us believe that the difficulties will be overcome and an agreement will be reached.” Tho Prime Minister added that- the problem was not between America and Great Britain. If America and Great Britain came to a most magnificent agreement over armies, ! navies, and air forces, the problem of disarmanient would only have been touched. Neither Mr Hoover, the American President, nor he himself was out for an agreement which meant nothing to the rest of the world. They were both out for an agreement that meant as much to the rest of the world as to themselves. Therefore, the proposal was that any agreement should be pursued with other Powers and that anything to which Great Britain and America might agree separately between themselves should he purely provisional until the other Powers had fitted it into their needs and from a conference with other Powers a wider and more comprehensive agreement had been reached.