PESTIGE OF BRITAIN

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 20103, 23 March 1928, Page 11

PESTIGE OF BRITAIN

“NEVER BETTER” LORIJ ALLENBY S CONFIDENCE. According to Lord Allenby, who has been making a tour of Rhodesia, British prestige in the East was never higher than it is to-day. Speaking to a gathering of ex-ser-vice-men, Lord Allenby urged fhem to stand up for the Empire. “When 1 landed a month ago in Capetown,” he said, “one of the people I met said, 1 Things are not g>ing well with the Old Country, are they/’ I said, 4 Yes, they are very well, indeed.’ Dd not make that mistake. When you hear that the Old Country is in a bad way, do not believe it. The Old Country was never in a better way. “I was through the war from beginning to end. and during the latter years of the war I was in Palestine and Egypt, and after the war I was High Commissioner in Egypt for six years, and I know and can tell you that the prestige of our country never stood higher in the East than it does' now. I do not care what other na-

tions may claim. We make no claims ourselves. Great Britain never docs make claims. I know what the representatives of those nations have said to me and I know perfectly well that the prestige of Great Britain in the East has never stood higher. “We ar© members of a huge family: South Africa, Canada, Australia, India, New Zealand. 'What I want to see some day—not to-day, not to-mor-row, and perhaps not in your lives—is a great nation in South Africa just as you have a great nation in Canada and the United States, and will have in Australia and Now Zealand.

“Th© United States have 90,000,000 inhabitants, a cosmopolitan lot, with every language and every nationality, but they sink them all in their American nationalism, and that is the secret of their great power. I do not say they arc prominent. They db not rule the world. Nor do wo, but we hold together. “Look at the great British Empire as a League of Nations, a brotherhood of nations. We work together, every one of us. By working as one we have nothing to fear from foreign competition. Pull together. Unity is what you must bear in mind. . . We are 'children of the Empire and are all proud of it, the better for us.”