AFTER THE WAR

Evening Post, Volume CXXXII, Issue 106, 31 October 1941, Page 6

AFTER THE WAR

PLANNING OF PEACE

THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS

PROFESSOR'S VIEWS

"Unless we make a real effort at planning the peace, all the bloodshed and the destruction will have been in vain," declared Professor L. Lipson, Professor of Political Science at Victoria University College, in an address to the League of Nations Union on the future of the League after the war.

Professor Lipson said that in this very week a conference of the,lnternational Labour Office was being held in New York. This office had proved itself to be one of the most valuable and successful organs of the League of Nations. It was maintaining its usefulness now by studying the problems of co-operation between Governments, Capital, and Labour during the war, and by preparing plans for future social reconstruction on an international plane. Affer a war such as this one, there could be no return to normalcy. Indeed, it was impossible to say what normalcy was when the world had been living through a continuous international crisis for 30 years. For winning the war, the democratic peoples were prepared to make gigantic sacrifices, and were making them. Would they also make sacrifices to organise the peace?

"The total capital cost of the buildings of the League of Nations, of the International Labour Office, and of the, World Court was less'than that of; one battleship," said the' speaker. "The' total staff of those international Qrganisations was less than a single regiment of■ soldiers. Will we devote the! same energy, or even a tenth of the j expenditure, to reconstruction that we are. now spending on beating Hitler? Unless we do make a real effort at planning the peace, all the bloodshed and the destruction will have been in vain. ' A NEW ORGANISATION. "The League of Nations will provide the framework for a new international organisation, if we have the will to make it a success. . But the framework i itself will require alterations. The League of 1919 was. merely a League of Governments. The new League must be a League of peoples, organised on a federal basis. The nucleus must be formed out of the English-speaking pesples, without whose continued cooperation any attempts at international reconstruction are foredoomed to failure. Economic plans for the ma3or industries and for production of essential foodstuffs must be devised on an international scale. We shall need an international police force and international control of armaments and munitions factoi | -;s. The independent sovereign State no longer accords with the basic economic conditions of our time, and the bombing plane has made a mockery of political frontiers. "Let us draw the inevitable conclusion from the inescapable facts. In 1919 the- then League of Nations was in advance of public opinion. Public opinion must catch up with that League, and advance beyond it to endorse the I stronger League that'is going to be reI quired for the future."