Evening Post. WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 10, 1920. "THE BRIDGE OF PEACE"

Evening Post, Volume CIV, Issue 35, 10 August 1927, Page 8

Evening Post. WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 10, 1920. "THE BRIDGE OF PEACE"

Officially it may be regrettable that President Coolidge did not feel called upon to leave his holiday retreat in the Black Hills of South Dakota for the very brief interval that would have enabled him to take part in the opening of the Bridge of Peace. The importance attached to the ceremony on the British side was shown by the long journey which both the Prince of Wales and the Prime Minister had taken in order to be present, and its happy significance would have been materially increased if die President of the United States had been there to meet them. But though the President himself could not come the Vice-President was there, and so was the Secretary of State, and these substitutes, besides being officially the highest obtainable, were personally most acceptable. Mr. Kellogg, who during his brief term as America's .Ambassador in London made an excellent impression, has now as Secretary of State the charge of her foreign policy. By the experience acquired during the rendering of his unique service in the adjustment of German reparations, General Dawes, the Vice-Presi-dent, may be presumed to have acquired such a breadth of international outlook as is deplorably rare among the public men of the United States. At the same time he is distinguished by a directness and downrightness which, despite the occasional excesses that years ago won him the title of "Hell and Maria Dawes," are better adapted to the British taste than the cautious, chilly, and occasionally condescending correctness of his official chief. With the addition of Mr. "Al." Smith, of New York, the very, popular Governor of the American State immediately concerned, the representation of the United States was strong and highly acceptable. A bridge which commemorates more than a century of peace between the British Empire and the United States, and spans that unique frontier which through its length of 3000 miles is unprotected by armaments on either side, well deserved the title given to it and the honour of its dedication ceremony. The bridge which joins Canada and the United States at the southern neck of the Niagara River and Lake Erie is a Bridge of Peace. It is unfortunate that, probably in all languages, "bridge of war" is a more familiar phrase.

And these all night upon the bridge of war Sat glorying,

says Tennyson in one of his experiments in translation, the reference apparently being to the interval between the two armies. In another sense the bridge of boats by which Xerxes crossed the Hellespont and the bridge which Caesar threw across the Rhine were bridges of war. A third sense of the term, which fits the present context, is illustrated by the Jena Bridge in Paris, which, as it commemorated a Prussian defeat, Blucher would have blown up when the positions were reversed, and by London's Waterloo Bridge. Having had enough for the present of these bridges of war, the world welcomes this Bridge of Peace between the two nations whose mutual goodfwill is .the best security for the peace of all the others.

Anything verging on the controversies of world politics was of course impossible on such an occasion, and of all the speakers the Prince of Wales, as became his position, gave such things the widest berth. But within the narrow limits thus imposed nothing could have been better than his simple and earnest expression of the universal feeling.

May this bridge be not only a physical and a material link between Canada ana the United States, but may it also be symbolical of the maintenance of their friendly contacts by those who are on both sides of the frontier. May it serve also as a continual reminder ( to those who will use it, and to all of us, to seek peace, and ensure this first and highest duty, both of this generation and of those that are yet to come. Mr. Baldwin also was happy in his wish that "the path to international peace were as smooth and as straight as this great highway," and in his declaration that "the first task of the statesman, as of the bridge builder, is to lay his foundations secure." The second of these remarks may well have supplied the "Morning Post" with the text for the interesting argument in which it ascribes the Geneva fiasco to a faulty method and declines to be discouraged by the inevitable result.

_ Those who seek peace by the limitation of armaments begin at tho wrong end. The more hopeful way is to cultivate friendship and goodwill. The meeting is the best possible comment on the breakdown of the Conference at Geneva. It says better than any form of words that there is no substance in the _ failure of these ill-founded negotiations. We aro in a better position to be friends since we have agreed to part rather than coneluda an arrangement which would leave one or the other in a nervous state of fancied or real insecurity.

The argument is surely sound. Goodwill can only be promoted by these agreements if they are the free and deliberate outcome of goodwill. An agreement based upon imperfect understanding and accepted by either party with mental reservations, suspicions, and apprehensions may easily do more harm than good. But from the British standpoint

probably the most gratifying of the speeches is that of General Dawes. It is according to human nature that, in any differences of opinion, we are more confident of our goodwill and common sense than of the other party's. This infirmity of our common nature has been freely illustrated at Geneva, but the most patriotic of British die-hards must be compelled by the frank and manly utterance of General Dawes to recognise that in this case the goodwill and the common sense are not all on one side.

It was unthinkable, he said, that the United States and BritnJ.i should place upon their peoples the burden of competitive naval building because the experts had temporarily disagreed. If under their programmes the United States required heavy cruisers which were not needed by Britain, and Britain needed light cruisers which were not needed by the United States, this was no excuse for the inauguration of competition in shipbuilding which neither needed.

Here is America's official answer to the demand of a section of her Press for a huge building programme, as an answer to British stubbornness at Geneva, and it breathes the very spirit of hope, of tolerance, and of accommodation in which alone the problem can be solved.