TO KEEP PEACE

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume LXIV, Issue 19227, 20 January 1937, Page 6

TO KEEP PEACE

AIM OF FREE PEOPLES

WORLD HARMONY WISHED

WARNING IN SPAIN

ANTHONY EDEN’S VIEW

(British Official Wireless.)

Reed. 1.15 p.m. RUGBY, Jan. 19. Opening m the House of Commons a debate, on the international situation, the Foreign Secretary, Mr. Anthony Eden, referred to the. larger place taken in recent years by loreign a flairs by the nation and the greater time devoted to foreign interests by Parliament, He suggested that it was an expression of tho ordinary people’s desire for and anxiety -about peace. Unfortunately, the phenomenon was not universal. By that he did not mean that certain peoples desired peace any less than (lie British, or others, but only that the absence of complete freedom of expression and intercourse between all lands prevented world opinion from exercising to the full its inllucuco for peace. That was a state of affairs they deplored, because they were convinced that so overwhelming was the desire of the world for peace that, were all the barriers to freedom of intercourse and freedom of speech broken down everywhere, then the threats Lo peace which existed would largely he allayed. Over.shadow.ing all other events in. the international situation, Mr. Eden declared, was the present position in Spain. Intervention ill the civil war by other nations would prolong the horrors of that conflict and increase tho sufferings of tho unhappy Spanish people. For that reason and others, the British Government had from the first opposed intervention, and still opposed. If anyone believed that as the outcome of the civil war any foreign Power, or Powers, were going to dominate Spain for a generation, to rule its way of life and direct its foreign policy, that man, in Mr. Eden's judgineiil, was wholly mistaken.

Mr. Eden said that that was of all the oulcoine- least likely. Great Britain would, of course, he. strongly opposed In any such happening, and it would not he' alone in ils opposiliou, because 24,000,060 of Hie Spanish people themselves would he opposed likewise.

In the long run. intervention was not only had for humanity. It was had policy. Britain had its own .interests in Spain, hut they were not that Spain should have a particular form of government. whether of the right or the left.

For Britain to take up a championship of that kind would he to enter into a war of rival idcalogism which the British had themselves condemned. For that reason they had discouraged, and would continue lo discourage, outside intervention.

Here the Foreign Secretary interrupted his argument lo make clear a matter which lie recalled had already been raised at question time in connection with the principle of non-intervention. He staled, with emphasis. “There is no word, no line, no comma, in the Anplo-ltalian declaration which could give any foreign Powers anv right whatever to intervene in Spain.”