TO AVERT WAR

Evening Post, Volume CXXV, Issue 84, 9 April 1938, Page 26

TO AVERT WAR

In "War Can Be Averted," published by Gollancz, Miss Eleanor F. Rathbone, as befits an Independent M.P., distributes impartially the sharp shafts of her criticism. What her denunciation of British foreign policy loses in familiarity it gains in vigour, and those who believe that the' League system was progressively lost in Manchuria, in Abyssinia, and now in Spain will not quarrel with her indictment. She turns, however, with equal heartiness on the Labour Party and on the whole peace movement, trouncing the one for urging on the Government a policy of risks and yet (until late in the day) refusing the armed means to meet the risks, and the other for having encouraged the dictators in aggression. A popular peace demonstration, she writes tartly, "resembles a secondhand clothes shop where the faded fashions of several years ago are displayed in heaped disorder"—so remote are the speakers from present realities. Miss Rathbone's own remedy is persuasively argued. Fear (which, she says, the peace movement has done so much to spread) must be combated and the will for peace through collective security encouraged. She rejects the idea that a more courageous policy must wait on the coming into power of the Labour Party (of which she sees no immediate prospect). She wants a non-political united front on the broadest basis formed in this country now and a group within the League of Nations pledged to resist aggression.