LEAGUE OF CONCILIATION

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LXXI, 24 June 1937, Page 5

LEAGUE OF CONCILIATION

PACIFIC IDEALS When four out of seven great Powers in the world stand aside from the League of Nations there can bp no League in a sanctionist sense, asserts the London “Observer ” What, then, can there be? An ineffective sanction is worse than useless. It is itself a danger to the peace, as experience has proved, if proof were needed. But the pacific ideals of the League are not only right and valuable. They can be made to serve the cause of peace even in the hands of an incomplete League. But on one simple condition. The condition is that the means as well as the end be recognised as pacific. Geneva could be made into the world’s centre for avoiding war by conciliation between the parties, by the open examination of grievances, by the agreed removal of the causes of war. It might not, would not, always succeed If it*succeeded once it would justify itself; and, success once achieved would breed further success. The alternative thesis of a coercive incomplete League is a proved means, not of peace, but of war.