SPEECH BEFORE LEAGUE

Otago Daily Times, Issue 23516, 2 June 1938, Page 3

SPEECH BEFORE LEAGUE

“POLICY THAT WOULD LEAD TO WAR” CRITICISM OF MR JORDAN Maoriland will have to do something about its Mr Jordan (states the Sydney Bulletin of May ; 19). Diehard champion of the now completely discredited League of Nations, upholder still of that hopeless experiment “ collective security, he has committed himself so far that he cannot go back on his declarations, and compromised his country in the process. Even at this date Mr Jordan is all for the British Empire pursuing a foreign pplicy that would lead inescapably to another world war. He is one of the diminishing few who refuse to be influenced by the most stubborn facts. His preference is for high-sounding formulas, to be maintained whatever the realities may be. .. Thus in the world’s most public place he declaims such absurd rubbish as that “ there is no material fault with the Covenant as it stands, the fault lying with the failure to apply it.” What earthly use, then, is it, when the “ failure to apply it remains certain? There never has been ‘ collective security,” and until the world achieves a greater change of heart there never can be. A trouble with the League all along has been that it could only have succeeded as a League of All Great Nations, and it never has been anything like that. To-day, with more great nations out of it than in it—to say nothing of the unnatural relationships of those that are in it—it is the sorriest ox farces. Because he has simply opened his mouth wider than any statpman would have done, Mr Jordan has to go on declaiming that this farce is something worth endangering the Empire to uphold. It makes Mr Jordan look very foolish, but that is unimportant. It also makes Maoriland lock foolish, and that should be important to Maoriland.