ARGENTINE MEMORIAL TO BRITAIN

Southland Times, Issue 23378, 9 December 1937, Page 5

ARGENTINE MEMORIAL TO BRITAIN

FORMER FOREIGN SECRETARY (British Official Wireless) RUGBY, December 6. On the unveiling at Buenos Aires of a memorial statue to Mr George Canning, a former British Foreign Secretary, by the President of the Argentine Republic, King George sent a message to the President (General Augustin Justo) expressing “warm appreciation of this happy manifestation of the personal interest which you take in common with myself in the maintenance and steady cultivation of the valued historic friendship between Britain and the Argentine, which Mr Canning may justly be said to have inaugurated.”

George Canning, one of the greatest of British Foreign Secretaries, was born in London in 1770. He held a series of posts in Pitt’s Administration, achieving a reputation in the House of Commons as an orator, and among the public by his witty contributions to the pamphlet Anti-Jacobin. In 1807 he joined the Portland Ministry as Foreign Secretary. It was at this time that Canning forestalled Napoleon by seizing the Danish fleet at Copenhagen in spite of the neutrality of Denmark, his defence of this act being the definite knowledge that unless he struck at once the fleet would be turned against Great Britain.

In 1822 Canning was Foreign Secretary again in the Liverpool Ministry. He followed Castlereagh in recognizing the independence of the South American States which had revolted against Spain, and resolved that the intervention of France on behalf of the Spanish Monarchy, in 1823, should not extend to America. His interest in South America, it has been said, did not cease with his recognition of its independence. From ihe beginning he had never sought any territorial gain, though it would have been easy to have carved an empire, hardly second to India, either in wealth or extent, out of the old Spanish dominions. With Bolivar, the South American liberator, he had a bond of sympathy, and their personal relations were not without influence upon the policy of their respective countries. Almost the last act of Canning as Foreign Secretary was to advise the creation of an independent Uruguay as a buffer between Brazil and Argentina.