THE WORLD OUTLOOK

King Country Chronicle, Volume XXXI, Issue 4566, 8 November 1937, Page 8

THE WORLD OUTLOOK

A PRESS SURVEY. “TJie alarming thing is not so much that the robber nations openly flout international law and decency, but that nobody seems to mind very much when they do,” says the London NewsChronicle. "People say we should be thankful for the fact that none of these ‘incidents’ has led to war. If bandits occupied London and neither the police

nor the citizens lifted a finger, ought we to be thankful that there was no fighting ? “The central truth in the whole matter is quite simply this, that the safety and integrity of the British Commonwealth of Nations depend absolutely on the maintenance of a certain minimum of international law. In a world of naked force we are lost; we have too much to defend and not enough to defend it with. “If we do not save the law now, the law will be too weak to save us when we need it.

“Plainly, one of the chief reasons why the shooting happened,” asserts the Yorkshire Post, “was the fact that neither Japan nor China has declared war. Had they done so, a neutral Ambassador would have had ground for notifying his movements to the belligerent authorities, as, in the circumstances, he had not.

“This pretence was first practised in 1931-2 between the same combatants. Then, as now, the Civil Government of Japan had been hustled by her military ( leaders into a campaign which it probably did not desire but felt itself powerless to prevent. Then, as now, the informalities of the struggle seem partly to have reflected its irregular origin. “But there was also another reason for them. The Kellogg-Briand Pact had then but recently been signed, whereby virtually every nation in the world, including Japan and China, had solemnly adjured war. When you want to do something which you have just solemnly abjured doing the simplest course, naturally, is to pretend that what you do is really something else. “Japan proceeded to make war in China, but she felt that the rose would smell sweeter by another name. Nor has she been alone in that notion. Since the Kellogg Pact was signed, quite a number of wars have occurred in the world, but none has been called war. officially. It is time a stop was put to these rather clumsy hypocrisies.”

Referring to the activity in the air at Shanghai, the Manchester Guardian says: —

“Mussolini may build roads and mass troops in Tripoli for an invasion of Egypt, but Egypt, so long as she had a strong ‘air fleet in being,’ could make an overseas invasion through Tripoli almost impossible; Australia could lay aside her fear of the Japanese; and England perhaps could not again send her armies across the Straits of Dover.

“For the first time a struggle for contrql of the air is being fought out before our eyes on a large scale. In ten years’ time Japan might have found it impossible to establish such a control, and by so much her freedom of movement on the sea would be embarrassed. “If we could see into the minds of Japan’s leaders we should find that they do not intend that China should ever possess an air force which could threaten their mastery of the sea whether they were making war on China herself or on Soviet Russia or any other Power in the Far East.” .“The white nations have great interests in China to safeguard,” says the Sunday Times. “Can they hope to safeguard them unless they combine? In many quarters that is being realised. Even in Germany, in spite of the anti-Bolshevist ‘axis’ established between Nazidom and Japan, commercial circles are beginning to see the threat to Germany’s Chinese trade. But, of course, it is opinion in the United States that alone can be decisive. Without American cooperation the other white Powers are helpless in the Pacific.” “The picture of our world is, indeed, gloomy,” says the Economist; “but the gloom is not quite unrelieved. The paramount fear of the retreating democracies —that of a joint and simultaneous execution by the three partners in last year’s ‘Anti-Commun-ist Front’: Japan, Germany and Italy —has been exercised by the dilemma in which the Japanese have now involved themselves. Japan’s militarists have had to spring their mine ahead of their desired zero hour.