Wairarapa Daily Times [ESTABLISHED OVER 50 YEARS.] SATURDAY, JULY 4, 1925. POSITION OF POLAND.

Wairarapa Daily Times, 4 July 1925, Page 4

Wairarapa Daily Times [ESTABLISHED OVER 50 YEARS.] SATURDAY, JULY 4, 1925. POSITION OF POLAND.

It was stated in a cable'-yesterday that the Get man Government had decided on a counter-measure to Poland’s prohibition of German goods. It is the question of the protection of Poland from possible aggression by Germany that has caused some difference of opion between Britain and France. France stands solidly behind Poland both iu regard to trade and military matters. As far as Britain is concerned, there is one reason at least why she is reluctant to undertake to guarantee the PolishGerman frontier. Bismarck once said that the whole Balkan question was not -worth, tlie bones of a single Prussian grenadier. His successors differed from him, and lived to regret it. Britain wishes all nations well, and trusts that they will live in amity. But there is an influential school of thought in Britain which argues, with Bismarckian

logic, that the whole question of the Polish frontier is not worth the bones of a single British guardsman. If it came to the pinch, they ask, would Britain go to war to maintain an artificial boundary, and secure to Poland a strip of territory of which approximately half the inhabitants are German in stock and language? Moreover, how would the dominions act in such a situation? In 1914 the threat to the Empire was direct and unmistakable. The Sarajevo assassination was plainly a pretext. But would the Empire necessarily be menaced by a boundary dispute in Central Europe? A criticism often advanced against the Covenant of the League is that although members are theoretically bound to protect each other’s integrity, a signatory such as, say, South Africa, might not feel obliged to enter the ring on behalf of Lithuania. The argument would apply with equal force to a pact whieh committed the Empire to intervene in the interests of Poland.