A DANGER-POINT

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 20110, 31 March 1928, Page 6

A DANGER-POINT

MR. WICKHAM STEED, who has done much recently to explain the American mind to Englishmen, and also, one hopes, the. English mind to Americans, put his finger on a delicate spot when he referred recently in London, before a mixed audience of English and Americans, to the “really dangerous situation” which might arise between the two countries in the event of Great Britain being compelled by her obligations under the League of Nations Covenant to cut off an aggressor nation from commercial intercourse with the rest of the world.

It is an obligation which we should always be exceedingly reluctant and under readily conceivable circumstances unable to execute, so far as American trade was concerned. The danger is as great to the League as to Anglo-American rela-

tions, for it would be fatal to the League if the loyalty of its members were strained to breaking point. The whole danger’ would, of course, be removed if the United States were a member of the League. Since that is not now practical polities, the problem is to find a plan which would enable the League to suppress a war-making State without incurring possible American hostility. There is a part} in America which has long urged that the United States could at least go so far as to undertake not to insist upon her neutral rights of trade with a State which the League has declared to be an aggressor, and Mr Wickham Steed urges that the American people should lay down a. peace doctrine which should clearly embody this principle.

In detail it might take different forms, but if the American Government would make it plain that it did not intend under any circumstances to make the sanctity of neutral trading rights an obstacle to the effective pursuit of international sanctions by the League, there can be no douLt that she could, without committing herself to the political entanglements of Europe, remove a grave danger tG peace.