With part of what Mr. Lloyd George said about France
we can agree, but we should be shirking the problem as it really is, in order to deal with a problem which does not and may never exist, if we followed him in arguing as though France could be safely estranged. Mr. Lloyd George himself and Mr. Ramsay MacDonald have often admitted that there can be no peace in Europe unless Great Britain and France are friends. Mr. Baldwin, in his reply, said that conscript countries might conceivably be persuaded into abandoning their doctrine, but they could never be bullied into it. In France consciption happened to be part of the recog- nition of the equality of citizenship, and a guarantee that no military clique could be used by a political clique. The most serious part of Mr. Baldwin's speech, perhaps, was that in which he rebuked Mr. Lloyd George for articles which he has written for American news- papers. Mr. Baldwin quoted from these articles, and if Mr. Lloyd George wrote much of the same sort for his American readers, there is no cause for wonder that suspicion of Great Britain has been growing by leaps and bounds.
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