EUROPE TO-DAY.

Auckland Star, Volume LXV, Issue 69, 22 March 1934, Page 9

EUROPE TO-DAY.

"FREEDOM IN CHAINS." NEW RACE OF ARMAMENTS. ADDRESS BY MR. E. PHIEEIPS. A graphic picture of Europe to-day was given by Mr. Louis Phillips in speaking to the Chamber of Commerce at their monthly luncheon to-day. The title of his address was "The Present State of Europe." In pre-war Europe, the speaker eaid, political institutions were being broadened and deepened in their scope. Liberal conceptions were becoming steadily j in the ascendant. Yet what was the picture of Europe to-day? Democracy had yielded to dictatorship, and the sovereignty of peoples to their subjection. Three great movements, Bolshevism, Fascism and Hitlerism, had abandoned the conception of liberty as a basic factor in political life, and had subordinated the rights of the individual to that of the party exercising supreme power. Freedom was in chains over half Europe. Three hundred millions of people out of 500,000,000 of the inhabitants of Europe were living under some form of dictatorship. Freedom of conscience and speech, which the British people had long learned to guard and prize, was, in the greater part of Europe, denied to every opinion which was not in accord with the dominant conception of the State. Hie Press as a free and independent organ of opinion had ceased to exist. Since the Nazi Government had come into power, 1248 daily papers had .been suppressed in Germany.

Control of Thought.

Mr. Phillips said the control o: thought had become the function of th< State. Propaganda had been for education, and whether the Stati was cast in a Fascist, Communist o, Hitlerist model, the minds of its youth instead of developing naturally ant spontaneously within the only propel limitations, 'the boundaries of know ledcre, were being directed into channel! of "thought coincident with the preva lent political creed. Nationalism, i noble sentiment, had inflamed the mind: of peoples till it had become liysteris and an emotional extravagance. Econo mics had become the handmaid of poli tics. Higher and higher rose the tarif walls, till the free flow of trade was stifled. There were 7000 miles more oi Customs frontiers in Europe to-daj than in 1914. Mr. Phillips said that a new race ir, armaments was about to begin, unles; the hopes of a disarmament convention were fulfilled. Europe was at the parting of the ways, facing its gravest crisis since 1914. The crux of FrancoGerman relations was the reconciliation of the German claim to equality in armaments with the French desire for security. The disarmament of GerI many was under the peace treaty to be

a preliminary step to the limitation of the armaments of all nations. Armaments did not prevent war. They provoked it. Revision of Treaties. The speaker proceeded to deal with the revision of the peace treaties and the attitude of each of the countries of Europe. Germany would never be reconciled to her eastern frontiers. In concluding a broad survey of the political and economic problems of Europe, the speaker said that nationalism could not solve them. It only aggravated them. The nations had yet to learn the lessons of international cooperation. If European civilisation was not to perish in another war, its peoples must learn to live and work together.