RESPECT FOR OTHER NATIONS.

Evening Star, Issue 21878, 15 November 1934, Page 8

RESPECT FOR OTHER NATIONS.

The Presbyterian General Assembly yesterday passed a resolution enjoining on ministers the duty of pointing out the sinfulness of adopting a superior or contemptuous attitude towards people of another race. It appears that certain colloquialisms used when reierring to aliens are calculated to produce an attitude of mind favourable to a breach of the world’s peace, given a suitable occasion. British people have a habit of considering themselves the most tolerant nation of all in this respect, and their success as colonisers in many parts of the world seems to support the idea. Since the War there has remained as a legacy a very pronounced restriction on foreign travel. Every nation appears to act on the supposition that every visitor from abroad has some ulterior motive in crossing a foreign frontier, and even so advanced a country as the United States makes permanent residence there a matter of extreme difficulty to the outsider. An exclusive nationalism is to-day a world epidemic. Germany has gone to perhaps the greatest extremes. Her motto in her training camps for unemployed—“ Your nation is everything, yourself nothing ’’—may be admitted in one sense, but it is by no means free from the suspicion that it largely derives from a species of national megalomania, and that respect for other nations, let alone goodwill towards them, is repressed rather than inculcated. Turning to the Far East, travellers report a kind of restriction and surveillance indicative of anything but a fraternity which recognises no colour bar. The Assembly’s resolution may be taken as an indication that it is for the British race to set a better example. In the political world Britain worked genuinely and perseveringly for international disarmament, and herself showed the way. The response was poor—so poor that the task was given up as a bad job, and a fairly complete reversal of national defence policy seems likely in the interests of sheer self-preservation. Other organisations have been actuated by the same motives as the Eresbyterian Assemblj’. In Britain the Labour Conference met recently at Southport, and found itelf in a complicated position regarding foreign policy. Like the New Zealand Presbyterian Assemblj’, Labour cherishes a troublesome idealism which makes it desire to abolish war, and clings to the League of Nations as a foundation whereon to build world peace, even perhaps world government. But Labour is by no means content with the League as it is. Many of the younger element in British Labour declare that capitalist Governments, each clinging to its sovereign rights ,and seeking its individual prestige, cannot ever make the League a reality. There is among them scepticism about purely political efforts to get rid of war without removing the causes of war, and these causes they hold to be almost exclusively economic. It may be that economic reasons are at the basis of the attitude towards aliens of which the Presbyterian Assembly complains. Numbers of our own nationals, most of them out of work through causes beyond their control, tend to become embittered when they see the success of persevering “ penetration ” in certain branches of trade by aliens reputed to be able to secure a iooting because of their contentment with a low standard of living and a certain degree of national co-operation.