TOPICS OF THE DAY.

Waikato Times, Volume 116, Issue 19328, 7 August 1934, Page 6

TOPICS OF THE DAY.

No European Entanglements. “This country must look at the new situation with thorough common sense and practical grip,” states the London Observer. “ Let us clear our minds of cant. We are perfectly entitled to say, as we do, that, while staunch to our Locarno pledges, we are determined once for all not to undertake any further risks for European security. “That is our business. But not for a moment are we entitled to say that the nations with interests which we decline to guarantee ought not to provide in their own way for their own security. That is their business. So far as wo refuse to he responsible wo must cease to interfere. As that is the wisdom of private life, so it is of public. There is an end of a hopeless procedure. “We cannot again refuse to France what she wants and yet try to press upon her what,she does not want. Wc cannot reject, however wisely, extended Continental commitments, yet try to ram insular formulas down the throats of our friends. It is time to remember that under the Locarno Pact, which no one repudiates, the Entente Cordiale is a basic principle of British policy.”

The Secret of the Enelish. “If wc are to judge by results, by iho test of which kind of niiml attains the greatest measure of practical success in the art of government and so best promotes human welfare, I am disposed io award the palm to the inductive mind as exemplified in the English race,” writes Lord Macmillan, Ihe famous Judge of Appeal. “I speak as a Scotsman whoso national and hereditary proclivities may sometimes render him a little critical of the Englishman’s way of working out his problems. • “ The Englishman’s spirit of opportunism and compromise may ! sometimes exasperate his logical neighbours across the Border and on (he Continent, but we owe lo them Magna Charta and the British Empire. When all is said and done it is the tolerance, the mngnanimilv, the readiness to compromise and to assimilate, (he very illogicality, if you will, that are so typical of the English mind which have always been tho secret of England’s influence and power, and which at this moment, when (he whole of (he rest of (lie world is seething with new theories of government, new theories of economies, new theories of everything, have enabled her to retain a stability 1 which is the envy of every other nation.”