"I can only assure Lord Snell," declared the Foreign Secretary, "that as these several incidents arise, we do our best to see that British interests—and by that I mean the interests of British subjects, as well as the material interests of British Subjects—are accorded due respect."
Lord Snell, the Foreign Secretary went on, had referred to what recently passed at Geneva with regard to China, and was good enough to say he had formed a particularly unfavourable judgment of the quality of the sympathy in Lord Halifax' speech when the matter came before the Council, "Dr. Wellington Koo (the Chinese delegate to the League) formed a different view, and when he spoke he thanked me for the sympathy with.which I had spoken.
Lord Snell, therefore, will forgive me if I say my conscience is not particularly wrung by his reproaches."
Initiating the debate, Lord Snell said the situation in the Far East seemed "very unsatisfactory."
British ships, he declared, were stopped and searched, officers were arrested and detained, and people apparently were "stabbed to death."
Without making any attack on Lord Halifax, it would seem that his reply to the appeal was "disturbingly unsympathetic."
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.