TO SEEK AND ENSURE PEACE

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume XVII, Issue 211, 20 August 1927, Page 5

TO SEEK AND ENSURE PEACE

This Generation’s Highest Duty

THREADING STEADFASTLY in the footsteps of King Edward VII. along the road which gave to him the title of “Peacemaker,” the Prince of Wales ,on Monday, at the opening of “The Peace Bridge,” which links Canada and the United States at the southern neck of the Niagara river and Lake Erie, carried the good work into the New World, and there indelibly inscribed a message on a new milestone marking an extension of the highway leading to world peace. Although this message was addressed to a Canadian and American assemblage, it resounds through the whole world with a special appeal to the peoples. of all nations. Speaking of the bridge in symbolic terms, the Prince said:— May it serve as a continual reminder to all of us to seek peace and ensure this as the first and highest duty both of this generation and of those who are yet to come.

Words like these, broadcasted abroad, live. They are as seed sown. And they will fall on good ground, for the soil in every country has had its ploughing and its harrowing during the four and a half years’ war. Associated on the British Empire side with the Prince at the Peace Bridge opening were Mr. Stanley Baldwin, the British Prime Minister, and the Prime Ministers of Canada and of Ontario. With equal determination in their purpose for international friendship and goodwill there stood with them the representatives of the United States in the persons of the Vice-President, Mr. Charles Gates Dawes, whose authorship of the Dawes Plan lifted him high in the estimation of the world as a worker for world peace, and Mr. F. B. Kellog, U.S.A. Secretary for Foreign Affairs, who won the affection of the British people during his two years’ occupancy of the U.S.A Embassy in London, from 1923 to 1925, where he carried on the great work of promoting lasting friendship between the two English-speaking nations which was the life aim of Mr. Walter Page. These two American representatives may be regarded as leaders in a friendship with England movement, and drawing power from the high positions they hold in American statesmanship, they can act as a leaven in influencing public opinion throughout the States towards a better understanding between the two nations. It may be taken as a good augury that they were selected by the President to represent him at the ceremony. Later, it may also be hoped, they will appear more prominently in the eyes of the world as the American ambassadors of goodwill, working shoulder to shoulder with our Prince, and those on this side who are associated with him, in the endeavour to bring peace on earth. The preaching of the doctrine of peace to the masses is far more likely to reach the goal than all the disarmament conferences that may be called. For months and months there have been meetings at Geneva on disarmament, and if their purposes were analysed it would be found that the one or other of the nations concerned has been manoeuvring to get the advantage, to disarm the other one, and retain the supremacy itself. The spirit of peace and the spirit of disarmament have thus been shown to be two distinct things as wide apart as the Poles. That they are so was evidenced in the breakdown of the recent cruiser limitation conference. Whatever motive, if anv, for the good of the world may have spurred President Coolidge to call the conference, it never showed itself in the course of the discussions at Geneva, but it was revealed there that the convening nation was bent upon wresting from Britain, or, failing that, placing herself on a parity with Britain, in the maritime supremacy which she has politically exercised for a hundred years. Germany, in a different way, played the same game once before, with the same object, world supremacy, in view, and all know what that led to.

Clearly it is not by the diminishing of armies or the limitation of navies that world peace can be ensured. It is within human power of achievement, it will be by the enthronement of public right in the world and that enthronement will take place when the peoples of all nations build spiritual Peace Bridges that will remind them that their first and highest duty is to seek and ensure peace.