Evening Post SATURDAY, APRIL 15, 1939. THE CLEAR ISSUE

Evening Post, Volume CXXVII, Issue 88, 15 April 1939, Page 8

Evening Post SATURDAY, APRIL 15, 1939. THE CLEAR ISSUE

If there is any satisfaction to be gained from the ordeal of suspense and anxiety through which the world is passing, it is that out of the artificial fog that propaganda has cast over facts and events a clear issue is emerging on which the nations and the individuals who compose the nations may take their stand. The issue now is clear as night and day. It is the issue between the politics of power and the politics of peace. On one side are nations who pursue a policy of power at any price; on the other side are the others who pursue a policy of peace almost, but not quite, at any price. It would be no rhetorical exaggeration to describe the former nations, or at least their leaders, as powers of darkness, against which, by contrast, with all their faults of common humanity, the other nations are powers of light. They at any rate stand for the preservation of those liberties of thought and action of individual man, the rights and privileges of civilisation, which mankind has fought to win through the centuries. The others would precipitate us back into the Dark Ages. There can be no mistake about it. When nations wantonly, on the flimsiest excuses, rob other nations of their independence and freedom by force of arms or threat of force, there is no safety or security any longer in trusting to the code of decency in. international relations. The only thing left to do is what the individual has to do when the community loses its forces of law and order—protect himself and combine with his neighbours in a voluntary police force to maintain the peace. Such was the position which Mr. Chamberlain had to face when it became obvious that the dictators of the totalitarian States, Herr Hitler and Signor Mussolini, were impervious to any sense of obligation towards their neighbour States and were ruthlessly, in the face of all appeals to decency, pursuing their policy of power at any price. The forming of a peace bloc by Britain and France has been described— erroneously, we think—as a new policy. This is due to a narrow interpretation of the term "policy," which might more correctly be defined as the guiding principles and objects which determine a course of j action. Mr. Chamberlain's principles and objects remain the same; it is only the method and the plan that are changed. If the object of forming j connections with different States were aggression and aggrandisement, in other words, the pursuit of power, then it could justly be said this was a new policy on the part of the British Prime Minister and the British Government. But Mr. Chamberlain and his Government are pursuing no such aims, despite what spokesmen in Berlin may say in their talk about encirclement. Neither the British Parliament nor the British nation would stand almost unanimously, as they do, behind the "new policy" if those were its aims. Mr. Chamberlain, as he has always averred, even since the change of method, is still the "man of peace" he always was. The policy ,o£ "appeasement" may have gone, but not the policy of peace. This is perfectly clear from the discussion in the House of Commons, the references in the House of Lords to i a similar declaration by Lord I Halifax, and the comments in the British Press. The purpose of the Government was well expressed by Lord Halifax as "a determination to bring together all nations which might be found on the side of respect of international law." It is collective security in another form.

Mr. Chamberlain has been blamed for his earlier plan of approaching the dictators directly in the cause of peace, and not least in the United States. But the method of "appeasement," though it failed, had an immense moral value in the eyes of the world. It made it clear that the Prime, Minister, at the risk of humiliation, was making a personal sacrifice for the sake of peace. Britain and the democracies were at least not after their own ends. They emerged from the crisis with clean hands and a good cause. It is still true, the old adage, "Twice armed is he who has his quarrel just," though the dictators believe in getting their blow in first. The tradition of "perfide Albion" and American suspicion of subtle methods in British policy no longer hold. The reaction may be seen in the vitally Important pronouncement of President Roosevelt, in a Pan-American Day speech, received by cable as we write. As this speech was broadcast in six languages it should "tell the world" emphatically where America stands.

The appeal is to the peoples of all lands even more than to their rulers. Comparing the peacefulness of the Western Hemisphere with the sanguinary conflicts of the Old World, he asks:

What has protected us from the tragic involvements which at present are making the old world a new cockpit of old struggles? The answer is easily found. A new powerful ideal— that of the community of nationssprang up at the same time. Thej Americas became free and independent*, i We hold conferences not as a result of wars but as a result of the will to peace. Elsewhere in the world, to hold conferences similar to ours, it is necessary to fight a major war until the exhaustion of defeat at length brings the Governments together to reconstruct the shattered fabrics. The President then recalled his declaration at Buenos Aires in 1936 that "a great war in another part of the world would affect us and threaten our good in a hundred ways and the economic collapse of any nation or nations must necessarily harm our prosperity. I am confident that we can help the old world to avert the catastrophe which impends." I still have that confidence, he said. There is no fatality which forces Europe towards a new catastrophe. Men are not prisoners of fate, but prisoners of their own minds, and they have within themselves the power to become free at any moment.

The reference to the individual citizen of the different communities of the world is vital. It* may be construed, as the message implies, as an invitation to the plain people of the totalitarian States to "break their bonds." Mr. Chamberlain's reception both in Germany at the time of the Munich Conference and later in Italy at Rome made a profound impression on the "plain people" of those States. He was obviously, with his now famous umbrella, a "man of peace," and the plain people of the totalitarian States no more want war than the plain people of the democracies. It is the plain people who make the backbone of a nation, and all the superficial pageantry and pomp of public occasions and the parades of the panoply of war will not alter their deep desire for peace. It is to these that Mr. Chamberlain and President Roosevelt—and M. Daladier too —specially appeal, and what the plain people think constitutes public opinion, which even dictators cannot neglect.