ALLIANCES DANGEROUS

Otago Daily Times, Issue 23517, 4 June 1938, Page 29

ALLIANCES DANGEROUS

Referring to the danger of military alliances, Viscount Samuel in a speech in the House of Lords said:— “In time of war, no doubt, it is necessary for alliances to be made, and, if war is to be regarded as inevitable, no doubt it would be a wise course for us to secure as many friends as we can and to connect them with ourselves in the most intimate fashion possible. But I submit that we should be very slow to come to so grave, so tragic a conclusion that another European war is, in fact, inevitable, and that we must straightway provide against it by uniting with ourselves as many allies as we can. Often before it has been thought that wars were inevitable, and the course of history has shown they were not. In the time of Napoleon 111 it was currently believed in this country that a war between Britain and France was inevitable. Lord Grey of Fallodon mentions in his memoirs that at a moment of great strain between France and Britain over Fashoda, when he was Under-secretary for Foreign Affairs in the ’nineties, it was urged upon him . that, a war between France and Britain being inevitable, it was well to get it over as sneedily as might be. It is always a mistake to wage war to prevent war. A preventive war is always wrong in principle.”