OVERSEAS OPINIONS

Dominion, Volume 29, Issue 226, 20 June 1936, Page 18

OVERSEAS OPINIONS

The Pressure of the Sanctions. “Despite the powerful hand which the Duce holds,” says the “Daily Telegraph,” '“there are ominous gaps in its strength. Economically, Italy s position is weak, and grows steadily weaker. The Economic Sanctions now in force against her have hit her hard. They have not, indeed, made it impossible for Italy to continue the war, but they have greatly weakened net economic and financial position for the time being, and if the present Sanctions ceased to-morrow it would be a long time before her trade position recovered. The statistics on this head just, published by the League °t Nations deal only with the four months from November to February. During the last two months of this period there was a fall of one-half m the volume of Italy’s exports to the countries making returns, and a much larger fall in her imports from the same sources. Italy has natura j maintained great reticence on the subject of her gold reserves, but the heavv drain on them has been officially admitted. This does not mean that exhaustion is within sight, but it does mean that the Sanctions are subjecting Italy to great, and increasing embarrassment.”

France Has Lost Something. “The half-hearted action of France about the Italian-Abyssiniah war has .gravely chilled our friendship. We do not like the way the French treat the League as a sort’ of particular umbrella, valuable for keeping France out of the wet, but when not so needed to be rolled up and used only for gesticulation. France has been shortsighted. as in history she has ever been. Had she thrown her whole heart, into maintaining the authority of the League against Italy, the League would have succeeded. It would have been vastly strengthened, and from its strength would have come new security for France. Our feelings, too, would have been warmer and kinder towards the French, as having acted loyally to the League and like true allies. But France has been halfhearted, lukewarm, laggard, dilatory, ineffective in her support of the League against Italy. So France has fallen between two stools.’’ —Lord Hugh Cecil, in a letter to “The Times.”

1 The Rights of Native Peoples. “After all, the fate of the colonies is not onlj’ of interest to the white peoples of the world, but to the inhabitants of these colonies themselves. Besides, changes of territory and redistribution of colonies seem to me to be of less importance than the-equali-sation of benefits which come from the possession of colonies. What we must strive for is to find a programme which - will help-not only the white people to settle their quarrels but the less de velopcd populations to prepare themselves for an independent part in the government and economic life of their own countries. It is a sad commentary on the state of international affairs that all these problems which have been in the background of our international life for over a decade, in fact, since the end of the World War, have not been studied systematically either by public or private institutions which presumably exist for such purpose.”—Mr. Lewis L. Lorwin, Economic Adviser of the International Labour Office in a recent speech.

France Will Not Let Go. “France will not return her portion of the former German Cameroons and Togoland. These territories have been extensively developed by French planters, and the French' Government has spent millions of francs in development. Before the war Germany exported from the Cameroons about 35,000 tons of products, while the French now export 125,000 tons. The great majority of the planters are French. There are very few Germans, and apart from a few disaffected headmen in the villages, the great majority of the natives wish to remain under the French mandate. Should Germany ever make a formal demand for the return of the Cameroons or Togoland, it is ray personal opinion that France would reply with a resounding ‘No.’ ” —M. Louis Truitard, French Commissioner for the. Mandated Territories of the Cameroons and Togoland. ' ' , “We Had an Obligation.”

"We had an obligation, a signed Covenant obligation, to play a part. We have’sought'to play that part to the full, and, so far as we have done this, we have nothing to reproach ourselves Avith, nothing to apologise for. We have played our part, not on behalf of any Imperial interests nor for any selfish motives, but because, as members of the League and- signatories to the Covenant.' we had an obligation which we shared with all other members of the League. Whatever the lessons of the last seven months, we must ho prepared to learn them, and to profit by them in a spirit of realism, keeping steadily before us what remains the constant purpose of British foreign policy—the maintenance of peace.”— Mr. Anthony Eden.

Passing It On. “There is an old saying, ‘What has posterity done for us?’” said Sir A. Powhall; M.P. “We have done a great deal for posterity. We are leaving a little matter of £6.000,000,000 or £7.000,000,000 to posterity. We are certainly paying off £10,000.000 to £15,000,000 each year, but the war debt will not be paid off for at least three generations—that is, presuming there is no major conflagration in the next 50 years, which may be a rather optimistic surmise. The war debt will not be liquidated until the year 1082 —that is. in the time of our grandchildren, and that we should in times of peace borrow large sums for wasting assets provokes my financial ire.”

Too Much! “A twelve-year-old niece of mine told me a story that she had met in her reading, which appealed to her because she had lived several years in Switzerland and is familiar with problems of foreign pronunciation. A Frenchman, she told me, visiting over here for the first time, had been having the usual difficulties in learning to say such anomalous words as through, plough, though, rough, and had grown to expect almost any absurdity in the E'nglish language. But the last straw, she said, was when he saw a sign on a moving picture theatre: ‘Cavalcade, Pronounced Success.’ At this he fell in a swoon and decided it was impossible to learn how to speak English.”—Christopher Morley, in the “Saturday Review of Literature.”

Rebuilding the League.

“The easiest and most logical policy is to regard the League, for all practical purposes, as dead; to go back, as quickly and as decisively as is decent, to 'power polities.’ That is what 1' rance seems to expect. The hardest policy is to say that the proper remedy for League failure is not to abandon the League but to strengthen it —by strengthening simultaneously Article XVI, which resists aggression, and Article XIX, which provides for treaty revision. Between these two is a compromise policy, attractive —and, to our mind, dangerous. It is to strengthen the League but to narrow the scope of its activities. That policy js attractive because, on the face of it, it is practical. Why do we think it is dangerous? Because it seems to us a mere endorsement of the French plan of using the League as servant while repudiating it as master. Because, unless France is prepared to concede treaty revision, it commits Great Britain to support of a 1918 settlement that to-day is practically and morally indefensible. Because it seems to us to drive a wedge between Great Britain and the Dominions—whereas the League, so far, has fended to bring them together. Because, finally, by confining effective League action to Europe it abandons the ideal of a League.”—“Birmingham Post.” Legal Reform.

“Aloofness is a virtue when it means that, the Bench cannot .be approached in underhand ways, but it is not a virtue when it means that the Bench does not know of the faults in the judicial system.” says a writer in the “Quarterly Review.” “Why is it, for instance, that our judges do not as a rule include among their immense virtues a realisation that the machinery they work is in many respects out of date, that severe complaints are being macle about this in responsible quarters.’’ Such complaints are not confined to those whose spiritual home is Moscow. They are to be heard among solicitors of eminence, among commercial magnates, among trade unionists and. indeed, wherever legal administration is discussed. Yet few who have read the evidence given by the judges before the Royal Commission on the King's Bench Division can have failed to be struck by their apparent ignorance of the prevailing discontent. Judicial ignorance of criticism and judicial complacency are not to the public advantage. Both are all the more serious since it is becoming almost an axiom in this country that legal reform is possible only if it can be passed with the goodwill of the judges.”

A Forecast of the Future. “The world must somehow hammer out a new technique which will remove the frictional contacts between Capital and Labour, and set up,, instead of a spirit of competition, a new spirit, of co-operation. It is not possible in the limits of this short article to outline the manifest injustices of our present competitive system, which —successful though it has been in the early development of the industrial age—is showing signs of breaking down all over tim world,” says Mr. Angus Watson in “Discipleship.” “But it must be envious that any system which provides a relatively small number of the world’s citizens with a far larger share of the world’s wealth than they need, while millions of other citizens, as capable and as worthy as themselves, are faced with periodic or constant unemployment, has the seeds of dissolution in it and must finally come to an end. The coming change will not, U' my view, be brought about either through Communism or Socialism, but by the recognition of a spirit of. World Brotherhood and by the determination that this will increasingly express itself through world co-operation.”

“Concussion-Apprehensive.” “The other day a motorist friend of mine was complaining to me bitterly, even violently, about the behaviour of pedestrians,” said Mr. Max Beerbohm, in a broadcast speech. “They were abominably careless and stupid, he insisted. I hate to see anyone agitated by a grievance, and I tried to soothe my friend by an. appeal to reason. I said, ‘No doubt we pedestrians are very Irving.’ But you must remember that, after all, we were on the roads for many, many centuries before yon came along in your splendid car. And, remember. it isn’t- we that' are threatening to. kill you. It is you that are threatening to kill us. And if we are rather flustered and occasionally do the wrong thing you should make allowances.’ We are constantly told by the Press that we must be ‘trafficconscious.’. How could we be otherwise? How not be concussion-apprehen-sive, annihilation-evasive and similar compound words?”

South Africa and the Mandates. ‘•‘Under the treaty made between General Smuts and Reich delegates in 1924,” asserts the Cape Town correspondent of the “Daily Telegraph,” “Germany voluntarily acknowledged that the future of South-West Africa lay with the Union of South Africa. There is no doubt that South African public opinion, irrespective of party, would unanimously oppose any cession of the mandated territory, and it is believed here that Germany does not desire to raise such a problem for the Union. Union opinion inclines to the view that, whenever the mandatory question is raised, it will not affect the South-West mandate, but is more likely to concern the British and French West Central African territories. The cession of Tanganyika to Germany would place a foreign Power on the line of British communications through Africa to the Mediterranean.”

Rewritten History. "History is always being rewritten, because our judgment of it varies -with each generation in the light of consequences,” writes the Rev. W. K. Lowther Clarke, D.D., in his book, "Divine Humanity.” "Can there then be any assured verdict of history, except as regards names and dates? So much of the past has gone beyond our ken. What remains is difficult, because we do not know the motives of the actors; we miss the imponderabilia, the multitude of things necessary for our picture which were so much a matter of course that they were never recorded at all; and, above all, our own point of view is continually shifting. The telescope by which we view the past may he improved continually, but the observer’s eye is changing all the time.”