WHY THE DIFFERENCE?

Evening Post, Volume CXX, Issue 122, 19 November 1935, Page 11

WHY THE DIFFERENCE?

ABYSSINIA AND AGADIR

THE DUCE AND THE KAISER

(By "Student.")

In "Australia and War .Today" the Rt. Hon. W. M. Hughes, former Prime Minister of Australia and one of the signatories of Versailles, contends that belief in war-prevention by the League of Nations might lull some people into a false sense of security; therefore he points out that sanctions may cause war rather than localise and end it, and that Australia must be armed. Also, the further the disarmament of Britain (futile unilateral disarmament) has gone, the more must Australia look to her own defence. His case, appears to apply as much to New Zealand as to Australia. A GESTURE STOPPED GERMANY. Mr. Hughes points out that in prewar Europe, where the Dual Alliance (France arid Russia) balanced the Triple Alliance (Germany, Austria, and luke-warm Italy) the British Navy held the balance of power. One British gesture could then stop an act of violence; of potential war. He instances the Agadir incident in 1911. The Kaiser sent a warship to Agadir in Morocco with intent to forcible action; Britain forced his hand, and the result was no-German seizure of anything; instead. Morocco became the subject of the Algeciras Conference. In 1935 the Duce goes in force to Abyssinia but is not stayed by a League of Nations gesture. The Duce makes war in defiance of the League in 1935, but in 1911 the Kaiser—at that time Europe's only equivalent to the Duce, but yet a Kaiser with a responsible Reichstag, and not a Hitler —had to back down (and some people say would have backed down again in 1914 had he known positively, a month before, that invasion of Belgium meant intervention by Britain). Comparing the Kaiser at Agadir and the Duce in Abyssinia, Mr. Hughes finds that the reason of the difference is that 'before the war the British Government had a free hand to use an all-powerful navy, but in 1935 the British Government had passed in its hand to be played by a League of Nations, and the Navy had ceased to be all-powerful. LEAGUE'S LACK OF ARMED FORCE. In short, the gesture of a Government controlling decisive naval force could keep the Kaiser out of Morocco; but the gesture of a League of Nations having no armed force of its own could not keep the Duce out of Abyssinia.

It will be seen that Mr. Huehes's argument is frankly rooted in force. He says that whether the case calls for military force or for police force, there must be force. The man in blue and the man in khaki are both based on force. And the old diplomacy using Government-directed force could get results much more rapidly and surely than can the new diplomacy using League resolutions. The League can never guarantee protection unless it also commands (which it does not, and declines to do) its own effective forces Reduction of British armaments, modern revolutionary improvements in offensive arms, the new aerial and chemical warfare, have all helped to accentuate the weakness of Geneva diplomacy, the real weakness of which is far greater than the slow-moving minor war in Abyssinia indicates. Any sense of security is false. Now, has Billy "made out a case"?