The Press MONDAY, OCTOBER 16, 1933. Germany Stands Out

Press, Volume LXIX, Issue 20987, 16 October 1933, Page 8

The Press MONDAY, OCTOBER 16, 1933. Germany Stands Out

| Over the week-end millions of 1 Europeans read in their newspapers that Germany had decided to withdraw from the Disarmament Conference; and many of them, no douDt, felt that they were reading their death-warrant. There is, perhaps, a faint hope that the sight of the abyss now confronting them will cause the governments of the world to recoil back to sanity. There is, perhaps, an even fainter hope that weight of public opinion will thrust aside the barren subtleties of the Geneva discussions and demand that realities be faced. But the overwhelming probability is that the armaments race will begin again, that the nations will seek security where they know there is no security, and that over the present generation there will fall a cold shadow of disaster. In the next few days the statesmen at Geneva and Berlin will be busily explaining why the Disarmament Conference broke down, and why they are not to blame. No one will be very much interested now; and to the historian of the future the controversy will be as empty of meaning as the war-guilt controversy. For the main cause of the present impasse is abundantly clear. It is that efforts to bring about disarmament have been pushed far ahead of efforts to create a system of world government. Because of its urgency, the problem of war has been artificially isolated and simplified. The common view that excessive armaments are themselves the cause of war is only part of the truth; and to attempt to abolish war by reducing armaments is to treat the symptoms instead of the disease. War is inevitable so long as nation states retain, in theory and in practice, their unfettered sovereignty, as long as international anarchy is tempered by nothing more effective than desultory bargaining, as long as there is no international authority, "with sanctions at its disposal, to settle international disputes. The League of Natrons, for all its .imperfections, might have become such an authority; but its development has been stunted, first, by the insistent emphasis of the nation states on the letter of their sovereign rights and, second, by the attempt to keep indefinitely in subjugation the nations vanquished in the Great War. In 1918- there was enough idealism and goodwill in the world to bring about a peaceful transition to an ordered world community. Because there were no leaders bold enough to seize the opportunity, because easy optimism replaced conscious striving, that goodwill has trickled away like water into sand. These are truths as obvious as they are unpleasant; but they have been faced at Geneva only within the last few weeks. If, as a result of the failure of the Disarmament Conference, they are faced throughout the world there may still be time to avert disaster.