APPRECIATION OF RADIO EXPRESSED BY STANLEY BALDWIN

Manawatu Times, Volume LIV, Issue 6844, 23 February 1929, Page 7

APPRECIATION OF RADIO EXPRESSED BY STANLEY BALDWIN

Speaking recently at the Lord Mayor of London’s banquet, the Prime Minister of England, the Eight. Hon. Mr. Stanley Baldwin, paid a remarkable tribute to tho spirit of international ism and goodwill created and sustained through the medium of wireless. "There are two things to-day,” he said, "that I believe will help materially to peace. I came down one Sunday morning at Chequers a few minutes beforo my breakfast was ready and I went to the wireless set and tried nil round Europe to see if anything was coming through at nine o’clock in the morning. By chance I struck some exquisite music in Berlin, and heard shortly the singing of a hymn. I thought immediately that when the day comes when one can switch on to any station in Europe and hear the peoples of Europe at their music, their dancing, hymn-singing, and prayers, what a bond that is throughout tho world. "Look back on your own childhood. Look back at tho people in tho country you used to talk to. We in England regarded everyone who lived across the sea as savages, pagans. We knew nothing about them; we were not interested in them; they were those foreigners, and when most of tho people realise that, in whatever country in Europe man lives, he is a human being like himself, with a family and family life, a wireless set, with his service on Sunday, his dancing in the evening, and with his lectures, war presents a very different aspect, and I believe that wireless —ordinary, common, or garden wireless—is going to be one of the greatest bonds between tho common people of the whole world, and it is the common people who in the long run will decide whether there will be war or not.”