THE FAMILY OF NATIONS.

Manawatu Standard, Volume LVIII, Issue 95, 21 March 1938, Page 7

THE FAMILY OF NATIONS.

(By Colonel Maurice Spencer, C.M.G., J.P.) The title is that of an interesting document emanating from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace at New York. In some years on Armistice Day addresses have been delivered from New York and important places in Europe by representatives of their respective countries and we have here the messages sent on November 11, 1937. Nineteen years ago the order was given to ground arms, and Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler sees no hope of peace until the world-wide economic war comes to an end and the signal is given to ground eronomic arms. He looks to an international police to do for the world’s order precisely what the municipal police does for the order of the neighbourhood. To call this police work war, he says, is a fiat contradiction in terms. It is the instrumentality for the rule of law, and to the rule of law there is absolutely no alternative but the rule of force. There must be protection for the smaller nations.

Dr. Wellington Koo (China) inquires, if such lawlessness and violence ns exist in the Far East to-day should prevail in the world, what assurance is there that they will not spread to destroy the tranquillity, and endanger the safety, of other nations? He reminds those countries who love peace, observe law and respect treaties that any concerted plan on their part for moral, diplomatic and economic restraint will have a deterrent effect upon the forces of violence and disorder in international life. AVe must make it certain that war does not pay.

Dr. Rappard, of Switzerland, sees the cause of political liberty to bo hardly less threatened in many quarters to-day than that of peace itself from which it is inseparable. Aggression is not to be feared from democratic countries or from governments which believe in the ideals of the League of Nations. He welcomes the utterances of President Roosevelt that nations should accept certain .fundamental decencies in their relations with each other, and that international law should be subsituted for international anarchy, so that none will with impunity disregard these funadamental decencies.

Signora Sarfatti, speaking from Paris for Italy, manages, in an eloquent address, to avoid mention of Abyssinia. The League of Nations, she says, should have been universal or soiely European, but she does, not say that it would have been better for. Italy to have striven to remedy its alleged defects than deliberately to flout it. She urges that we should build up a more far-sighted, less selfish, world policy, taking into account the needs and actual necessities of every country, both from a point of view of ideal justice, and of realistic, practical caution against the causes of war. Oi this, apparently, Italy is to be the sole judge. . Count Tel eld, of Hungary, regards civilisation as a form of war. Competition, hatred and egoism are stronger to-day than ever before. Other factors arc the armament industry, the Press, secret societies, class interests alia class internationals and the oppression of minorities in many states. A fundamental change is' required in the mentality of men and of nations. Lastly the Marquess of Lothian finds that, while we want peace, we are not really prepared to pay the price ot peace. A\ 7 ar continues to plague mankind because there is no such tiling as government or law in the world as a whole. Peace is a problem in world government to be solved as the thirteen American colonies solved it when they formed a» federal union. Europe is about the same size as the United States; and might well make a start in setting up a government of the several states to legislate in common matters from the standpoint of the well-being of the whole. I his is an idea to which we need to get climatised. Tt obviously goes further than the scheme of Dr. Butler. Dr. Butler asks in conclusion: \\ ho are the dreamers? Who are the theorists? Those who appeal to the rule ot justice or those who appeal to the rule of brute force? The answer should not be in doubt.