BRITISH FOREIGN POLICY

Otago Daily Times, Issue 23353, 19 November 1937, Page 18

BRITISH FOREIGN POLICY

Selfish isolation was always the surest way of endangering British overseas interests: and alliances might serve not merely to achieve a specific purpose, but to frustrate a hostile combination, writes Dr Seton-Watson in his history of British foreign policy from 1789 to 1914. The years that separate Fashoda and Algeciras suggest that if Britain had held aloof much longer from both groups (headed by France and Germany respectively) she would have been risking their uniting against her. There was always one condition attached—the certainty that those to whom British support would secure political predominance were genuinely devoted to peace and nor aiming at territorial conquest. For if there is one fact which emerges from the speeches and actions of all successive Foreign Secretaries from Pitt to Grey, it is the paramount importance which they attached to peace as the foremost British interest. In modern narlance this may be dismissed as the hypocrisy of the “Haves” toward the “ Have-nots,” and it would be idle to deny that those who have most to lose have a greater temptation to shrink from the arbitrament of war. But there is also the much more legitimate and fundamental fact that for Britain territorial ambitions on the Continent have become as inconceivable as a return to villeinage or to legislation in Norman-French, and that she regards designs of racial conquest or assimilation both as contrary to the spirit of the age, and as the surest source of continental unrest.