"CAN THE LEAGUE BE REAL?"

Evening Post, Volume CXX, Issue 111, 6 November 1935, Page 8

"CAN THE LEAGUE BE REAL ?"

The fascinating yet almost alarming novelty of suppressing war by a sanction-using League of Nations must be ever borne in mind when considering the myths and slanders which have thickened round Geneva, and which may continue to thicken. The League is more than a decade old, yet only in the last three or four months has the world begun to know the real League. League sanctions, formerly a phrase, have materialised overnight. The apparition is so sudden that many sceptics still affect to regard it as a ghost; an altruistic shadow of a substance that is not really altruistic at all, but sordid and material; or, if not a mere shadow, then a gun possessing such a recoil that the League itself will break down on the shock and resolve into the old diplomacy. The sceptics think they see several moves ahead in the present struggle between the League and Dictatorship. They know that this issue covers more than Abyssinia and more than Italy. They know that success in bringing Italy into a mood to make terms would lead to fresh complexities of negotiation. What terms could Solomon himself draw up that could not.be criticised as in some ri'.spects unfair to Abyssinia or unfair to Italy? And if criticism of fairness can enter, then libels on the motiv;s of the League, and slanders on i :s influential big units, 1 can also enter. This vicious circle is easy to draw, A price can be assigned for evnry move, inside or outside the Leagv: c, of every Power, however disinterested. Dishonesty is easy to imputi: because a quite honest settlement firnly imposed by a quite honest League of Nations is a mere Woodrow Wi son dream that began to walk abrosd in Europe only yesterday.

To refute seriatim each particular libel and slander is not a very pleasant task, but it is a very necessary one. The four denials of Sir Samuel Hoare are anti-submarine tactics of a kind that will need to be reechoed in all other countries if the League convoy is to be protected against this form of under-water attack. A story that the League weapon, having been used successfully against Italian expansion, will then be blunled so that it may be adapted to the service (not the restraint) of oth ;r expansionist nations, flows naturally from the pen of any anti-League propagandist, because he knows, having regard to diplomacy's past, hat he can appeal to the public's incredulity towards a policy of self-restraint by Powers that are, or lave been, classed as Imperialist. Vothing is more certain than that any attempt to get Germany into the League, and any attempt to k:ep her out, would equally and alike become the subject of plausible stories of pulls, counter-pulls, prices, compensations, and sordid d(; aling. These attacks can be met only by denials, and by a constant ar.peal from hypotheses back to facts, as when Sir Samuel Hoare cites what happened at Geneva, and shows tin: incompatibility of an overt policy of strengthening the League with the alleged covert plans to weaken it. In short, faith is shown by works. "Cabinet has considered no plan of League reform," and if Cabinet were planning to hamstring thf: League in 1936 it would be risky policy (putting it mildly) to give the League in 1935 a physical a:id moral force never possessed by it previously in its considerable history. Against the background of pessimism prevailing till lately, the new League in shining armour appears as "a fairy story." To discredit it is not difficult. To slander its units is easy. Always across the psth of progress stands the Spirit of Denial.