TO END WAR.

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume XII, Issue 235, 18 September 1922, Page 3

TO END WAR.

DEAN INGE AND GERMANY. THE WAY OF RECONCILIATION. Dean Inge, in the course of a sermon he delivered at St. Paul’s Cathedral to tho delegates attending the twenty-second International Peace ' Congress, said if the visitors wished to make an end of war—and another war in our time would destroy our civilisation utterly—we ought to have offered the Germans terms which they would have thought unexpectedly generous, and then said to them: “Now we have given you no excuse for pleading revenge; join us in establishing a League of Nations and universal disarmament, and let us all help each other to gather up the dregs that remain” (reports the “Daily Telegraph”). “The Germans,” said the Dean later, “have at least as much to repent of as we have; indeed, 1 still think they have more, and we must help them to show their best selves by showing them our best selves.” The utter futility and folly of war generally had been demonstrated, continued the Dean. Wars were waged, he supposed, for territory, or for plunder. or for trade. As for the first, nothing weakened a country more than unwilling subjects. As for the indemnities. he had heard, on very good authority that Bismarck declared that if he made another successful war, one of the terms of peace would lie that Germany should pay a largo indemnity to the losers. As for trade, if our most energetic competitor and our best customer happened to own the same , head, it was not good business to cut that head off. National bankruptcy, widespread unemployment, starving children, civil war, and revolution, the relapse of civilisation into barbarism—since it was the most highly educated classes who were first ruined—that was what war meant. Perhaps the business community would not again make the mistake of thinking that war could ever he good business. But the liability to attacks of war fever was so great, and the irrationality of human oeings so intractable that they could not rely only on appeals to commonsense. 'The moral appeal must come first, and must mainly take the form of |>enitence and the spirit of reconciliation. In part, no doubt, the horrors of the war were the result of me elaborately engineered propaganda of hatred which ail the belligerents employed. This was one ot the most devilish parts of the whole business, and the poison which was generated had been slow to subside. ‘‘And then,” Dean Inge went on, “We think of the peace. The victors had to consider whether they wished to make an end of war—as we all know, another war in our time would destroy our civilisation utterly—or whether they wished to make a vindictive peace which the losers would think themselves more than justified in tearing up at first opportunity. We say. the Germans showed no signs of repentance. Did we make it easy for

them to repent?” So far as he could gather, the people in Germany were rather less bitter than we should be if we had met with the same treatment. but he would not like to build upon that, because he had no wish to talk politics. He merely pointed out the obvious fact that if one of the pair of gamblers had won and exacted full payment of a heavy stake, and then said: ‘“Now, we will play for love lor the rest of the evening,” his proposal was not likely to find favour with the loser. It was an appalling state of things, but, if it please God, it was not yet too late. '1 he gate of repentance was not yet shut. We had all sinned and suffered together ; we might all repent together. “We English,” said the Dean, “are a sentimental people, and some of us, in our reaction from the hatred fostered during the war and our shame at having given way to the absurd idea that everyone who has the misfortune to be born between the Rhino and the Vistula has a double dose of original sin. have rushed to the opposite extreme, and speak as if our late enemies were amiable and injured innocents.” Justice, common-sense, and goodwill were the qualities which were needed, not sentimentality. The harmony of the European symphony needed the best I notes of all its members.