Evening Post. TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 15, 1938. PEACE AND HER VICTORIES

Evening Post, Issue 66, 15 September 1936, Page 8

Evening Post. TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 15, 1938. PEACE AND HER VICTORIES

In ,the spring the young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love, and in America the thoughts of the power engineers turn —not nearly so lightly—to a world economic conference which may redeem the fiasco of 1933. At a time when most of the world's thinking—or, at any rate, most of the newspaper space—is devoted to war and to warlike mutterings, the change is welcome; by comparison with portents of Armageddon, an economic conference is humanising and almost poetic. Reconstructional plans issuing from the conference at Washington are to some extent an antidote to the fulminations of Berlin j and it can be imagined that even the New York headliners, after days and days of Russia and Nazism, turn with relief to the new economic conference and to the industrial power engineers. By no means, other than a world gesture like this, could the power engineers have wrested the stage even for a day from Power diplomacy, and all those human beings who are not absorbed in goose-stepping will say: More power to them! Admittedly, the precedent of 1933 is not encouraging. It was one of these international crusades into which the then Prime Minister, Mr. Ramsay Mac Donald, put his heart and soul. He had similarly thrown himself into the Indian Round Table Conference, wfliich produced fruit, but the Economic Conference of 1933, held in London, was barren. Who killed it? The Republican Presidential candidate, Mr. Landon, says that the slayer was President Roosevelt, who failed to seize a great opportunity to lead the way to world peace and economic security when he "turned his back" on the London Economic Conference. Thus a chance to turn the world trend from economic nationalism and war was lost. It is hard to acquit the American President, or to fail to pity Mr. Mac Donald, whose pre-conference pilgrimage to America to consult the President had been given a favourable Press, leading the world to think that Mr. Mac Donald thought that Mr. Roosevelt was coming right into the movement for world stabilisation. Even the American delegation, which helped to introduce to the world the remarkable Mr. Cordell Hull, seemed —on arrival in London—to think as Mr. Mac Donald seemed to think; but, even as the delegates assembled, something happened in America. The result was that a stabilisation that might have been gradually imposed on the whole world through the collaboration of the two branches of the Anglo-Saxon race was negatived through the belated withdrawal of one of them. Continental papers began to laugh at Britain's large faith in world conferences. Today, a fresh faith is invited through this gathering of industrial engineers. Perhaps people would not have been so ready to lose heart in 1933 had they realised that a still worse period of international unfaith was ahead of them. In 1933 the world had barely glimpsed Hitlerism. The treaty-breaking and war-making qualities of Nazism and Fascism were, unguessed. People who said in 1933, after the failure of the London Conference, that internationalism had gone to the dogs, had no idea of the kennel that the Puce and the Fuhrer were preparing for Europe and Africa. Looking back, it will be widely admitted that internationalism in 1933 was not so bad as it has since become. Now, is the drift towards Mars to continue unchecked, or should another effort be made to redeem the 1933 failure and to prove that the world still possesses the key to international reconstruction and a bulwark against brutally frank policies of violence? The power engineers, who may be regarded as humanitarian antagonists of the Power State, answer this question with the suggestion that a new economic conference be convened early in 1937, after the Presidential election. By that time, it is calculated, Mr. Roosevelt will be well into stride in his second term, perhaps with a moral sense of the justice of Mr. Landon's dart. What obstacles stand in the way of a reversion of the Roosevelt policy of 1933? There is the old obstacle of war debts. But the obstacle created by Roosevelt experimentation in 1933 (nascent New Deal, currency manipulation, partial inflation, etc.) has been profoundly modified by the passage of time and by the United States Supreme Court. Installed in March, 1933, President Roosevelt was about to try out, in American domestic affairs, some score of economic expedients, some of which were destined to have short life. He could not anticipate how his experiments in the internal situation would work; and to.tie his hands in the external situation he was afraid. Why he did not. saj^ so to

Mr. Mac Donald when they met at his fishing lodge is not clear; possibly his own mind was not made up. The Brains Trust may have intervened. But today his knowledge of the position in the internal field has been broadened by experience; in the international field, hardly less sc> There is, therefore, some reason to hope that the experimentalist stage in United States internal politics has passed, and that Mr. Roosevelt has had time to classify himself.

As to the Ottawa agreements, can they be called an obstacle? If there had been no Ottawa agreements; and if the Empire units (including the United Kingdom) had given their various tariff plans a much greater extension than is now in evidence, there would be today much greater tariff obstacles to international stabilisation. And if, on the other hand, Ottawa had produced an intraImperial policy of higher colour, foreigners would again have seen much greater obstacles in the British Empire than they today see. So it seems to be fair to assume that the Ottawa Conference, judged from the international standpoint in 1936, has worked out not so badly. The Ottawa agreements, limited in term, are possibly less of an obstruction to international economic reconstruction than any other agreements, or lack of agreement, might have been. But their expiry necessitates action if the suggested World Economic Conference of March, 1937, is to materialise. The situation is liquid. Herr Hitler may advance on Moscow, and Mr. Nash will certainly advance on London with new bilateral tariff and exchange plans. Where Mr. Nash would fit into a World Economic Conference is not clear. And New Zealand's case is probably typical of that of other Dominions. But, complexities notwithstanding, the power engineers, who represent industrial science as against militarised science, have made a welcome gesture. It is at least a reminder that peace may still win her victories.