Britons Will Never Make Peace With Nazism

Manawatu Times, Volume 67, Issue 109, 11 May 1942, Page 5

Britons Will Never Make Peace With Nazism

HITLER'S DELUSION (British Official Wireless.) RUGBY, May 8. Hitler’s delusion that there are people in Britain who would be prepared to make peace with him was the subject of forthright comment by the British Foreign Minister, Mr. Anthony Eden, in a speecn at Edinburgh to-day. Such wishlul thinking, he said, Was not unknown in Germany. Rudolf Hess, Hitler's deputy, had descended upon Scotland apparently because he was under the same delusion as Hitler. "When will these leaders of Germany understand that the millions of people iu this country and in the British Empire—indeed, throughout the United -Nations—are unanimously determined to have no truck of any kind with Hitler or the Nazi regime?" Mr. Eden asked. "Our peopie are not dulled by propaganda; they are not hypnotised by myth. They have made their resolve as free men women; they have counted the

cost, and are willing to pay it, in order to re-establish the basis of free civilisation and respect for international engagements, without which there can be no lasting peace.” Mr. Eden said that the longer the German people continued to support and tolerate the regime which was leading t-iem to destruction, the heavier their direct responsibility would glow for the damage they were doing. Although Hitler’s speech had sounded the death-knell of the new order, it could not be expected that after the war everything would be the same. He did not think that many people would want to return to the old world as it had been, even if they could. The British people had had good intentions before the war, but intentions were not enough unless they were matched * with intelligence, vigilance, and will.

In thinking of the world after the war, Mr. Eden said, he was thinking of how peace could be kept. That was the fundamental problem for all, because, without peace and stability in international relationships, active co-operation between the peoples of the world, and removal of the constant threat of war, there was no hope anywhere Mr. Eden emphasised the necessity of making sacrifices for peace, and said that the people must realise that they had an Inescapable responsibility which was shared with the other nations of the world.

The world after the war would be a still smaller place, said Mr. Eden. There would be no room for selfish, unneighbourly policies. There would be but one village street from Edinburgh to Chungking."

"Peace is more than frontiers and peace treaties,” he said. "There must be force and will as well, but peace is more than force. You will never have peace on this earth unless you have an economic system in which men and women who are willing to work are able to work and find a reward for their labours. You will not get peace without social improvement. If there is unemployment, malnutrition, animal standards of life, and remediable poverty that Is not remedied, you will Jeopardise peace. “The United Nations together must have sufficient force to provide police to prevent highway robbery and success of gangster methods. We have to aim at a state of affairs in which the four great world Powers, the British Commonwealth, the United States, Russia and China, will together sustain this peace system. In peace they will seek to aid other peaceloving nations as they do not in war, but upon them must fall the main burden of the maintenance of peace and the main responsibility for the economic reconstruction of the world after the war, and what is true of our foreign relations Is also true of our colonial Empire. You cannot run a large colonial Empire well unless you are proud to make the necessary sacrifices to carry through the task.”