ORIGINS OF WAR.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIV, Issue 19765, 12 October 1927, Page 13

ORIGINS OF WAR.

BRITISH OFFICIAL PAPERS. FIRST VOLUMES PUBLISHED. (British Official Wireless.) A. and N.Z. RUGBY, Oct. 10. The first two volumes of the British documents relating to the origins of the war from 1898 to 1914, which have been edited by Dr. S. P. Gooch, the editor of the Cambridge History of British Foreign Policy, and W. V. Temperley, University Reader in Modern History at Cambridge, have been issued by tho Government Stationery Office. Volume I. is called "The End of British Isolation," and Volume 11. "The AngloJapanese Alliance and the FrancoBritish Entente."

The decision to publish this selection of diplomatic documents was made by Mr, Ramsay Mac Donald when he was Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary, and it was subsequently confirmed by the present Foreign Secretary, Sir Austen Chamberlain. Mr. Mac Donald's view was that, as the secrets of the archives of Berlin, Vienna and St. Petersburg (now Leningrad) had been disclosed to the world, it would be in the interests of historical truth that the contemporaneous British despatches and memoranda should also be published. The papers that arc published in the present volumes begin in 1898, when the decision was taken to abandon the traditional British policy of isolation and to substitute for it one of alliances, and they end with the signing of the AngloFrench agreements in 1904, which might more properly be described as the establishment of the entente cordiale.