PEACE WORK

Evening Post, Volume CIII, Issue 33, 9 February 1922, Page 7

PEACE WORK

RESULTS AT. WASHINGTON

GREAT AVOWAL OF FAITH.

-It is impossible to sum up in a few sentences the achievements of the Washington Conference. After all, it has but touched the fringe of the great question of disarmament. More could not hafve been expected; more was hardly attempted. International disarmament is, indeed, an ideal which this world, in this generation, cannot hope to attain. But in limitation of naval forces the result is greater, probably, than most people would have dared to hope. Britain, the United States, and Japan are pledged to great reductions of their battle-fleets; Italy and France to refrain from enlarging theirs; and a "naval holiday " of fifteen s years is declared. On the moral side, the world has now on record the considered and unanimous verdict of the great Powers rfcpressing abhorrence of the use of submarines save under severe limitations in the interests' of humanity. Gas is "outlawed" in somewhat the same way. LAND ARMAMENTS UNTbUCHED. The Conference was unable to. attack the enormous question of land armaments, and any attempt to deal with aircraft in the same way as with navies ■was crippled at the outset because, unlike navies, military aviation is inextricably tangled at present with commercial flying. It is evident at a glance that, so far as the reduction of armaments in the sense of approaching practical disarmament is concerned, what has been done

is only a IWW.II instalment. Europe is Jeft with the burden of conscription and the menace inseparable from conscripted populations. There is nothing on paper to prevent by common agreement anaerial onslaught by one natiqn on another. But even on the question of naval limitation and of the- proper regulation of submarine tactics in wartime the agreements are merely paper, and as such are superior to verbal agreements only because questions cannot arise as to what -was or was npt agreed. What the world does and must trust isthat " scraps of paper " constructed in such pircumstances will be in the truest sense gentlemen's agreements. The Conference is, in a few words, a tremendous avowal of faith in the honesty of the nations. REMOVING CAUSES OF WAR. From the beginning of the movement for the Washington Conference it was apparent that an attempt to limit fighting forces would be of little avail unless Bide by side with it went an attempt to remove the outstanding causes of possible war. The great Powerß were not likely to be thrown into conflict over small affairs; only , the great problems need be attacked by so vast an instrument.

Looking forward from, say, last November, how many people would have seen in their mind's eye that fateful word " Shantung " that was to appear, day after day, as ■if for that unprepossessing corner of China the wh,ole world was competing? But Shantung, like Verdun in the French campaigns, was the key of the diplomatic struggle for peace in the Far East, upon which depended peace in the Pacific; and upon that again hjnged the whole question of naval policy of the three great Powers. As between Japan, the United States, and Britain the easement of problems apparently peculiar to Japan and China was the greatest problem; and it was' achieved, though with difficulty and only after deep-lying suspicions had been lulled. It is to be noted that European causes of friction were left severely alone —a plain indication that the League of Nations and other European combinations are entrusted with those problems. As Mr. Balfour '.has said: " There are things which must be done apart from the League. There are things that the League could do that, the Conference could not nave done." j . '