EUROPEAN AFFAIRS

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXIV, Issue 22777, 10 July 1937, Page 22

EUROPEAN AFFAIRS

REVIEW OF SITUATION ADDRESS BY MR. H. J. D. MAHON A comprehensive review of European affairs was given to members of the Auckland Grammar' School Old Boys' Association at a luncheon this week by Mr. H. J. D. Mahon, a former headmaster of the school,* who • returned recently from a tour of Europe. Mr. Mahon described Europe as the Treaty of Versailles had left it, and touched briefly on consequent troubles. He mentioned the powerful German minority in Czechoslovakia, and the potential powder magazine present in t,he Polish Corridor. Most of the speaker's address concerned different aspects of modern Germany. He said there was a feeling that German eyes lay to the east of Europe; that Hitler wanted to absorb first Austria, a large proportion of whoso population was German, and then the 6,500,000 Germans in Czechoslovakia. If that wpre done, Hitler would be dominant in Europe. / While Mr. Mahon thought that the policy of Hitler constituted one of the greatest dangers present in Europe today, he was not unmindful of the great good that the leader of Germany had done for his nation. He had given it a national pride, and a unity which it had lost after the war, but he had taken away the last vestige of freedom. The speaker said he admired the way in which the two Churches in Germany, the Roman Catholic and the Evangelical, were standing up for the rights of Christianity against the tyranny of Hitler. Had it not been for Hitler's un-Christian attitude, he thought that Austria would have been absorbed long ago. Mr. Mahon 'concluded by remarking that one historian had said of Spain that its decline could be traced from the time it had thrust out its intellectuals in thevshape of the Jews. One wondered if in the long run the banishment of Germany's intellectuals would not be harmful to the country.