WAR OVER A STAMP!

Evening Post, Volume CXXIV, Issue 58, 6 September 1937, Page 8

WAR OVER A STAMP!

Wars ' have often sprung from frivolous causey—or causes that seem frivolous enough to all except the interested parties—but has anybody ever heard of a postage stamp as a casus belli? Yet such is a possibility suggested by a cable-message today from Tegucigalpa,, which, it may be explained without prejudice, is the capital of the Central American republic of Honduras. To the south of Honduras, with a common, frontier running from the Atlantic to the Pacific, is the neighbour republic of Nicaragua. As every philatelist knows, the issue of postage stamps, with fresh designs, has long been a sort of hobby with Latin American States. Normally there used to be a friendly rivalry'in the variety of new issues, but no international complications are recorded as resulting from the designs. This time, however, Nicaragua has resorted to the. familiar-subject of a microscopic map of the country as the .basis of its latest issue of stamps. Australia' had a similar series some years ago ? and there was no complaint. 'But Australia's boundaries are the' circumambient ocean, whereas Nicaragua has neighbours and land frontiers. This is where the trouble arose. The postage stamp map shows Nicaragua as extending to-the north of the Wanks River, which. Honduras claims as the frontier, and therefore, from the point of view of Honduras, into the territory of that State. So the people of v Honduras> are up in arms, and relations between the two republics are, according to the cable hews, "gravely imperilled." To protests from Honduras Nicaragua "coldly retorts that the stamp portrays the official map of Nicaragua." And so Honduras boils over, it is reported, in meetings demanding war, and students in a manifesto declare that "the decisive moment in our history has arrived. We can break faith with future generations, or fight against the dismemberment of the Fatherland." While the great nations of the Old World are moving heaven and earth to keep the peace in the face of the sorest provocation, the volatile little republics of the New World talk war over a postage stamp! The idea furnishes a touch of comic relief in anxious times.