TWO ROTARIANS REBUKED

Southland Times, Issue 23443, 25 February 1938, Page 8

TWO ROTARIANS REBUKED

Mr Hall-Jones And Mr Milner SPEECHES DELIVERED AT CONFERENCE OFFICIAL INTERNATIONAL REPRESENTATIVE (United Press Association) CHRISTCHURCH, February 24. There was a sudden conflicting note at this morning’s session of the New Zealand District Rotary Conference, when, at the end of an address by Mr Frank Milner, of Oamaru, on the crisis in the Far East, Mr Angus Mitchell, of Melbourne, the official representative of Rotary International at the conference, said that Mr Milner’s speech, and that of the district governor (Mr F. G. HallJones), were not the type of speech for a Rotary conference. “Paul Harris, the founder of Rotary, laid down the ideal of friendship and co-operation,” said Mr Mitchell. “If these two speeches are broadcast through the world much of Paul Harris’s work will be undone.” This morning Mr Milner, in outlining the Eastern situation, pictured Japan as a menace, and emphasized cooperative action by Great Britain and the United States as the only safeguard. On Tuesday afternoon the district governor in discussing troubled Europe, said the aeroplane was the only effective check to the curbing of German ambition. Aeroplanes and poison gas were ancillaries, not to be spurned, of peace and justice. “The present Sino-Japanese war is not an isolated phenomenon. It is a link in a long chain, of causation. It is an instalment in a long programme of aggression which Japan conceives to be necessary in the attainment of her grandiose objective—domination of Asia and the hegemony of the Pacific.” That was the introduction given by. Mr Milner to his address bn the Far Eastern crisis. Japan would not hesitate to raise the cry of the bolshevization of China, and summon the help of her sister fascist States. The present situation was full of menace; that was why the President .of the United States (Mr Franklin D. Roosevelt) issued his warning to the world, and why Britain celebrated with the fullest degree of publicity the completion of the Singapore base. “Japan has unequivocally declared her sole responsibility for the maintenance of law and order in the Far East, and especially for the guardianship of China. She is fully prepared to vindicate this regional ascendancy by force of arms,” said Mr Milner. “It is certainly not a heartening thought that, whether Japan wins out in China or not, British interests are doomed to go.”