A NEW SCIENCE

Greymouth Evening Star, 11 May 1931, Page 9

A NEW SCIENCE

INTERNATIONALISM’S PROBLEM It might be asked what good purpose could be served by a chair for the preaching of international relations in an institution which had been practising them, not unsuccessfully, for some 30 generations, said Professor Alfred Zimmern, who has been appointed to fill the newly established Montague Burton Chair of International Relations in a lecture at Oxford, says the “Manchester Guardian.” But the international relations with which the new professorship was concerned were not the special relations between scholars, nor the general relations between nations throughout the past, but the relations between peoples at the present time. The real distinguishing mark of

modern States and communities as ob-

jects of study is not their size, but their inter-dependence, and it is therefore the nature of these relations which to-day, as at no previous time, calls for particular attention. International government woujd have been an appropriate subject for university study at any time since the Persian Empire or the first endeavours at federalism, but international relations asan element of supreme importance are a peculiar feature of our own age. Amid a medley of conflicting forces, individual and national, an attempt is being made to establish political institutions corresponding to the world’s real needs and to breathe into them

the breath of life and authority. >lt is impossible to have a right understanding of the League of Nations unless it is remembered that it is at one and the same time a makeshift in a disordered present aud a gesture, and maybe more than a gesture, toward a more harmonious future. The other which is the goal of our striving is no mere device of political architecture, no palace of the nations With an offiae floor for every continent and a suite of rooms for every people, no mere network of mechanical connections overspreading the world. It is an order resulting from the harmonious functioning of international relationships, of which the better working of institutions will be the necessary result.

“The peoples of the world have been mingled, and badly mingled. What should have been a carefully regulated educational progress has been a gross and wholesale operation. Internationalism has been inaugurated at the wrong end. The traders have preceded the, Governments and the Governments have preceded the universities: For a century past international contracts have been multiplied, but only recently have philosophers begun to see in them material for systematic reflection.

“Surely one may claim that this study of men and cities in their pre-sent-day setting—this new effort of inquiry into modern society and government—should find an appropriate home in Newman’s own university—not so far removed, after all, from the university of his dreams—in an intellectual family where politics and philosophy have always been sisters. We see before our eyes, not indeed new institutions, but the scaffolding set up to shelter their building, and we believe that if they can be sheltered for a generation they will serve the world-wide needs of mankind in a manner undreamed of by the older thinkers. Our main duty- is to teach men to realise for themselves how new conditions have coated new problems, involving a need for new institutions of a type unfamiliar to the constitutional *