Wairarapa Daily Times [Established Over 50 Years.] SATURDAY, 23rd MARCH, 1935. BRITAIN’S PEACE POLICY.

Wairarapa Daily Times, 23 March 1935, Page 4

Wairarapa Daily Times [Established Over 50 Years.] SATURDAY, 23rd MARCH, 1935. BRITAIN’S PEACE POLICY.

The British Government has decided that the moment has come to try another line of policy towards its objective of international agreement for pdaee and reduction of armaments. , To say this of the increased vote for all British arms, and of the statements in the White Paper on national defence can be misleading only to those quite blind in belief of the efficacy of mere resolutions from the League of .Nations in all contingencies. If Britain’s persuasion, pacifist exhortations and patient example of disarmament were alone sufficient to secure every pacifist’s objective, surely there would be some fortifying. result by now, seventeen years since the end of the Great War. But these things have not been sufficient.. They have not established the authority of the League. All feal movement towards peace has been by way of local agreements between nations with authority and possessing strength to assert authority. It would not be difficult to show that Britain’s authority has been steadily declining since the war —judging by the results of diplomatic efforts —and that such decline has sprung from depreciation of strength to support diplomatic action by force if necessary. There is not a voice to deny that Britain’s moral efforts for peace and disarmament by example, entitle those efforts to full credit at face value. How much actual influence that merely moral effort

has exerted is shown by the increasing evidences of international suspicion and friction in both hemispheres. It is high time to declare that, in face of reviving fears of war, grounded or groundless, the impoverishment of Britain’s armed forces has failed to remove such fears—has probably even accentuated them.