NO MORE BIG WARS

Evening Star, Issue 20410, 15 February 1930, Page 22

NO MORE BIG WARS

GENERAL SMUTS'S OPINIONS WORK OF THE LEAGUE General Smuts, who was interviewed: in Ottawa during his recent visit, made a striking pronouncement that there would be no more big wars. There would continue to be, ho said, strife and contention, such as the present conflict in China, but they would not ramify out to involve other nations., . “Even the Boer War Would be impossible to-day,” General Smuts said. “Wo did not foresee, ten years ago, when the League of Nations was insituated, that it would assume its present form of providing a forum in which the representatives of the nations could sit around the table and discuss their problems. The League has made that practice habitual. Once you get people talking out their troubles around the table the war mentality disappears. “In July, 1914, Sir Edward Grey, oven at the last minute, was striving to get tho nations together. If ho .could-only ■ have got them into a round-table discussion the war might never have occurred But that was impossible. There*, was no-'habit, as there is now. You can seo how different things arc now. Instead of talking war tho nations got together and deliberate' over the matters that affect them, with tho result that war recedes more and more into the background. “Many people still believe,”; said General Smuts, “ that the League of Nations was ah ideal suddenly conjured out of the clouds. That is nqfc the case. The basis of the League was the British Empire. The. Imperial Conferences which , have been hold since the ’eighties were the foundations .on which we built. We appreciated the fact that, since the British Empire comprised one-quarter of the world’s population, the practices followed by that body could be followed by the remaining three-fourths. The periodical conferences held among the members of tho Empire furnished the standard we sought to apply to all tho other nations of the world. 1 feel that the last ten years have fully justified our work.”