PREVENTION OF WAR

Evening Star, Issue 19328, 14 August 1926, Page 11

PREVENTION OF WAR

ADDRESS BY REV. DR GIBB The speaker at the University Club’s luncheon yesterday was the Rev. Dr Gibb, of Wellington, who took as bis subject the ‘ Possibility of Prevention of War by the League of Nations.’ Dr Gibb said that when’ it was asked whether the League of Nations could prevent war, it was usual to reply that the league had already on several occasions prevented the outbreak oi hostilities between European nations. There was, he said, ample warrant for the statement. But for the League war would almost certainly have'taken place between Sweden and Finland over the possession of the Aaland Islands. Poland and Lithuania were on the verge of fighting over a question of frontier, when the League took the matter up and eventually settled it. Upper Silesia was seething with all the elements that bred war ; and the League disposed of the dispute—Germany and Poland wore the contestants —if not to the entire satisfaction of both parties, yet so as to bring peace at least for the time to that troubled region. Yugo-Slavia bad actually invaded Albania when the League intervened, and a lasting peace was secured. Of this transaction Lord Balfour declared that “no corporate body, no nation, no statesman in the world could have carried out what had boon effected, except the League of Nations.” Mr Baldwin was witness to the fact that but for the League the Italo-Grxco outbreak would have resulted in a dangerous war. And only a few months ago, the last and most dramatic intervention of the League put an end to war between Bulgaria and Greece almost before it had begun. Eleven days after shooting had commenced the contestants had both retired within their respective frontiers, indemnities wore .arranged, and steps taken to prevent similar occurrences in the future. The League could stop war, Dr Gibb asserted, because it had already done so. It might, of course, be said that these five wars, or imminent dangers of war, were small things, and that except in the case of Italy and Greece none of the Great Powers were involved. But small wars, its they knew to their bitter cost, had it in them to become great wars. If, in the recent omeute, instead of Greece and Bulgaria, the combatants had been Britain and France, could the League have compelled the withdrawal of military forces and imposed terms of peace upon the conflicting nations? The answer was exceedingly doubtful. But these methods did not exhaust the League’s powers of preventing war. If a dispute likely to issue in war broke out between Wo Great Powers, members of the Leagno, they wore hound by their pliffhtoa word to submit the dispute to arbitration, or to the council, and it either or both of them failed to be satisfied by the decision of the arbiters, a period of three months should pass before the commencement of hostilities. The League, however, was growing daily in power and prestige, and it was hardly open to doubt that ere long it would he so consolidated and so entrenched in the esteem not only, of the Governments it represented, but of the people behind the Governments—and in the last analysis it was the people, not the Governments, that mattered—that it would bo able to preserve peace everywhere by the exercise of the authority with which the free nations had themselves clothed it.