South American Way
The prevailing British ignorance of Latin American history has in the past been enlightened by one fact—that revolutions there have been frequent, seasonal and catching. The energy which has previously been devoted to this recreation seems recently to have been transferred to attempts to antagonise the British Government. The scene of these attempts now extends from unmapped and un- charted wastes of the Antarctic to the forests of British Honduras. It threatens to extend to Mexico, where a not completely unsuc- cessful attempt has been made by the Guatemalan representative to enlist sympathy with the revived claim to Belize ; to Washington, where the State Department has received a Guatemalan note on the same subject ; and to Bogota, where an attempt may be made at the forthcoming Pan-American Conference to secure a pronounce- ment against all European possessions in the Western Hemisphere. The one point which this rising tide of protest seems unlikely to reach is The Hague—which is also the one place at which all the issues can be legally settled and at which the British Government is willing to discuss them. In these circumstances the United States, whose attitude to these claims cannot be ignored, has apparently decided that the right attitude is to ignore the claims. The British Government is precluded from ignoring them altogether and as a consequence it has had to send cruisers and troops to British Honduras and to spend a certain amount of time and trouble in denying Argentinian claims and Chilean " annexations " in the Antarctic. It is doubtful whether ever before there has been so much activity in the Antarctic to so little purpose.
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