NATIONAL CONCENTRATION

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXI, Issue 21983, 14 December 1934, Page 12

NATIONAL CONCENTRATION

"Looking at the world through the windows of the Foreign Office, I say that we may have our differences at home as to whether national government has been a good thing for Britain, but there is no difference of opinion abroad on the subject," said Sir John Simon in a speech in London. "The most striking fact in the external world to-day is the position which we hold in the estimation of the rest of the world, and fundamentally for this reason. One of the results of the war everywhere has been that nations have been compelled to seek some method of national concentration, There are only two ways. Most of the world has adopted one, and we have adopted the other. Nation after nation has secured for the time being national concentration by putting all the power in the hands of a single man. The other method by which this national concentration may be achieved is by the method of creating a National Government which works in the name of the whole nation, without the smallest suspension of Parliamentary liberty, or the least sacrifice of individual freedom. We have achieved this, with all its valuablo consequences, while proserving all that is. f .essential in the tradition of a liberty-loving people. Tho ordinary British citizen has given up thinking of politics in terms of a simple classification between one colour and another, and has begun to realise that the modern problem is too complex to be dealt with in the oldfashioned way. The ordinary British citizen is as one in feeling that the age through which we are passing is an age not for conflict, but for cooperation."