Hope For The League

Dominion, Volume 29, Issue 274, 15 August 1936, Page 20

Hope For The League

“Even in this dark and humiliating time, I see a certain progress,” writes Professor Gilbert Murray in the “Evening Standard.” “Before the League, any gangster nation made war as it chose and no one interfered. “Under the League, many wars were prevented, and when one did break out in the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, it so happened that the three Powers who might, at the beginning have insisted on peace, Britain, Russia and the U.S.A., could not act together, and two of them were not members of the League. “Still, the whole conscience of the world was roused and made a formal condemnation of the crime; it also showed in detail how the genuine grievances of Japan could have been met by peaceful and friendly co-opera-tion with China. That was something never done before.

“This year not only has Italy’s base action been formally condemned by the whole League, but over fifty nations have submitted to considerable sacrifices in order to prevent the crime being successful. “Thtey began too late, they hesitated, they chose the wrong sanctions, they did not quite know how to apply the new technique, and they seem at present to have failed. “Still, that fifty nations should have made the attempt is a further step forward. Next time they will know to begin sooner and do better. It takes more than ten, or twenty, or thirty years to build a world of secure peace.”