MORAL DISARMAMENT

Northland Age, Volume 3, Issue 14, 5 January 1934, Page 7

MORAL DISARMAMENT

IF disarmament is to be the world’s road to a stable state of peace there must go step by step with the reduction in the personnel and materiel of armed forces the “moral” disarmament of the peoples. For peace to be secure not only must swords be beaten into ploughshares and spears into pruning hooks, but the “will” to aggressive war—so ready to flame up in the human mind—be converted into a passion for international justice. It is onfe of the strange facts of the present world situation that France, the most heavily armed nation of today, is disarming “morally” more completely than any other nation, and that its neighbour, Germany, practically disarmed in a material sense, is morally arming her youth to the highest pitch. These conclusions are drawn from a report issued by the International Institute of Intellectual Co-operation, a branch of the League of Nations. The report emphasizes the primal importance of the problem of school textbooks in accordance with the action of the Assembly of the League of Nations which in 1930 approved a proposal for “the revision of textbooks affected with a view to the correction of passages harmful to a mutual understanding of the peoples and to a spirit of international amity”; and it shows clearly that of all the great powers France has made by far the most important progress in this form of moral disarmament.