WAR AIMS.

Evening Star, Issue 23726, 6 November 1940, Page 6

WAR AIMS.

It is a groat incentive which Captain H. H. Balfour, Under-Secretary for War, sete before the youth of the Empire when he tells them they are “ fighting to win a war which must secure the shape of the world to come.” The suggestion is that that world, even those parts of it that have enjoyed the advantages of British freedom and respect for the individual man, should not bo such as they knew till a year ago. It should be the task of youth to make it something better. While the war is still nnwon it might be

thought that a sufficient incentive to fight it with every ounce of strength and at the cost of any sacrifice would be found in the necessity for preserving; national existence, with the continuance of those liberties which arc almost confined now to English-speaking countries, and their restoration to countries where they have been lost. But no goal can be too great for the human spirit, and so long as they are not allowed to interfere with the first requirement, of seeing that the war is truly won, there can be no harm, hut only, for those who require it, an additional inspiration in plans for the improved world that should follow it. There will be changes, even in the democratic countries, whether they are willed consciously or not. The mixing with evacuees and the fact that during the air raids, which have been continuous, everyone’s house in Britain is now open to whoever may require its shelter—an Eng-lishman’-s house is no longer his castle —ensure, in the further weakening of class barriers, one change which is amongst the most desirable of all. A new world order, for the safeguarding of peace when it comes, is, however, the main need to be considered by planners of post-war programmes. It is surprising how much attention, even in the travail and uncertainty of war, has been given to those problems. Hitler’s programme of slave States, in which all non-Germans and most Germans would be helots, certainly will not meet the need. What is required is something as unlike that Babylonian or Assyrian conception as possible. What is to be done with the Germans in a new world order? The concentration camps and thousands of refugees ■are a witness that not all, even of those, prefer political serfdom as a condition. A German writing in ‘ Headway,’ the journal of the British League of Nations Union, claims to believe that in his country, when Nazism has been banished, there will be a foundation on which to build up a democratic structure and the instruments for free self-government. German towns and villages, districts and provinces, he insists, have never lost their capacity for the conduct of local affairs, both public and cultural, and in these will bo found the real sources of strength and reformation. Herr Otto Strasser, who has been described as Hitler’s No. 1 German enemy, has ideas for the future which are alike comprehensive and detailed. They include first of all the partition of Prussia—then other changes, of which some may seem not so promising as strange to a British mind. And what satisfactory dispensation can ever bo made for the minorities of Europe, who in hundreds of years have not learned to live together? It is all tremendously difficult, but there is still among the best minds a great consensus of opinion that the conception of the League of Nations showed the right way to a new order, and cannot be abandoned because, as it was first constituted, the League failed. -Meanwhile the most urgent need is to win the war.