FRIENDSHIP WITH FRANCE.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVI, Issue 20218, 1 April 1929, Page 8

FRIENDSHIP WITH FRANCE.

It is fitting that the twenty-fifth anniversary of the entente cordiale binding Britain and France should have ceremonial notice. Time tends to make these bilateral undertakings of less moment, for the present tendency, definitely initiated last century, accelerated by post-war events, and particularly established by undertakings such as the Washington naval agreement, the FourPower Pacific Treaty, the Locarno understandings and the Kellogg Pact, is to substitute for them undertakings between groups of nations. Nevertheless, the entente cordiale with France, long a rallying-point for Anglo-French sympathy, was a very notable achievement. It gave clear expression to a growing realisation that the interests of these two countries need never be antagonistic, although there had been enmity in many things during many centuries. "Whenever friction arose in recent years between these two Powers there was always the entente to remember as an embodiment of peaceful desire, and it proved again and again a steadying fact. The moral of this has not been lost: every year of the twenty-five has made it more difficult for these "dear neighbours," as Max O'Hcll loved to call them in genial but admonishing irony, to break the peace between them. Nor can there be ignored the moral to be drawn by all peoples as it applies to post-war days. Every year added to the peace now more widely obtaining, whatever the incompleteness of the peacemaking itself, proves that it is possible for nations to dwell together in unity, and strengthens the argument agafnst renewal of conflict. The entente cordiale may be absorbed in a more comprehensive union, but it did much to prepare the way for this, and may profitably be recalled.