RUMOURS OF WAR

Dominion, Volume 27, Issue 108, 31 January 1934, Page 8

RUMOURS OF WAR

According to M. Stalin, "all countries are. steadily moving toward war.” It is unhappily true that many of them arc. For the last few years Europe has been moving toward the brink, slowly it may be, but steadily. One by one the brakes have either worn out or been deliberately tampered with. Inaction by the League of Nations in Manchuria and defections from its membership have combined to weaken the international- ideal, and to drive nations back to the old practice of taking sides. In the East, both. Japan and Russia have . reached the stage •■■• here they are willing, if not indeed eager, to “fight to the death” if they are attacked. This morning there is word of a boom in Chilean nitrates, presumably for making munitions. It would be absurd to imagine that the stage with a few more moves will not be set for war. The excuse that starts the next war may be as trivial as the excuse that served, in 1914. There has never, been any difficulty in finding a way to start war, although civilisation has utterly failed to find a way to. prevent it. The Alabama incident nearly precipitated America and England into a war in 1873. In 1654 the omission of a courtesy title in an official dispatch was deemed sufficient excuse for war between Sweden and Poland. A broken teapot once started a war in China lasting many years. If the stage be set for war and excuses so readily found, it is pertinent to ask what there is to stop war. Fortunately the war of 1 1914 to 1918 is not yet totally forgotten. The only thing that can prevent war is knowledge of war. Statesmen who are considering leading their peoples into conflict should pause to contemplate the Great War to end war, which cost, directly and indirectly, The lives \ of 40,000,000 people and £40,000,000,000. If that money had been used to good purpose it could have supplied a house and furniture for every family in America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Great Britain, Ireland, France, Belgium, Germany and Russia. It could, moreover, in addition to this, have endowed a one-mill ionpound library, a one-million-pound hospital and a two-million-pound university to every town in the world with a population of 200,000 or more. That done there would still have been a balance sufficient to buy up all the land in France and Belgium, and to endow a quarter of a million teachers and hospital nurses with an income of £2OO a year. No country in the, world can lightly rush into war without considering these facts,-which, after all, are not yet a generation old.

Whether there will be war or not, it is only too true that the liabilities of the last-war and the war before that have not yet been met. At the moment it requires 2,000.000 workers, year in, year out, to produce the means to pay Great Britain’s war debts. Threequarters of the burden of taxation in England, as well as in many other countries, is absorbed not for purposes of peace, but in paying for past wars and preparing for—or preparing to avert—more wars in the future. It has been reckoned that the nations of the world are spending something like £5OOO a minute for war purposes. If only that sum could be applied to solving the problems that cause war, there would be no more war.