LEAGUE OF NATIONS

Manawatu Standard, Volume LV, Issue 158, 4 June 1935, Page 12

LEAGUE OF NATIONS

AMERICA AND MEMBERSHIP. CHANGING PUBLIC OPINION. According to informed London opinion, the question of United States membership of the League of Nations will be raised shortly (states the London correspondent of the Sydney Morning Herald). It is stated that Senator Pope has announced his intention to propose a resolution that the President should be empowered to commit the United States to membership on certain terms. Messages from New York and Washington indicate that there is a marked and favourable change in the attitude of Americans generally towards European and League efforts to maintain world peace. The League has suffered from the fact that the United States, whose President played so large a part in bringing it into being, did not itself become a member. The United States has a strong isolationist tradition which has been sedulously fanned by a widely-read section of the Press. The people are constantly reminded of the advice given by George Washington to avoid “entangling alliances”* and the ignorance of world affairs which prevails among the farmers of the Mid-dle-West is played upon to encourage isolationism. There is, however, a growing demand for closer co-opera-tion with the rest of the world in the work for peace. When the question of the United States joining the League was first raised, 49 Senators voted in favour and only 135 against, but the measure was defeated because a two-thirds majority is required for ratification of a treaty. When, recently, the question of American adherence to the World Court at The Hague was raised, a majority was similarly in favour of this step; but the majority was again insufficient, 52 against 36. Not long ago, Mr Stimson, formerly Secretary of State under President Hoovdr, pleaded eloquently for closer American co-operation with Europe. “Gigantic economic and social changes have produced a feeling,” he said, “that some collective or co-op-erative actions by the nations of the world are necessary to prevent or minimise war in the modern world. It is more important to prevent a war anywhere than to steer our own course when it has broken out. The theory that we can save ourselves bv isolation is wortrv of the ostrich, which believes that it is hidden when it buries its head in the sand.” Uncertainty about the United States attitude might seriously jeopardise the efforts of the League to prevent war by economic measures. In the past, she has often adhered strictly to her right as a neutral of trading with nations which are at war. But Mr Stimson and manv others have insisted that the Kellogg Pact has fundamentally altered the United States’ attitude to neutrality. Mr Stimson pointed out, “one can hardly he neutral in thought or in action between the sheriff s posse and the breaker of the peace, and, in domestic law, to assist a felon is in itself a crime.”