PEACE BETWEEN PEOPLES.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LVII, Issue 17380, 31 January 1920, Page 1 (Supplement)

PEACE BETWEEN PEOPLES.

A DREAM OF CENTURIES. BX MATAKOA. Ideas are like trees;, % n , !e d good foothold, deep and broad, fto give there place and power to shelter men. "Ute idea of a League.cf Nations cannot escape this necessity. ,F ttle s it have favreachin root, and draw its life from remote sources, it come to no enduring utility. : Down Mm the first : fierce blast of inhuman hate it will go/without such foot- : wig,- but if human nature has longed for it for Ejanyhidden years, and wants it to-day witn ■} any widespread eagerness , it -will - likely enough lift its loftiness to gome pur; pose and weather many a storm. .'vf'Tfe ' j That it "'^^ idea of far-steetching root is aspecisl reason for hope of its coming to lasting strtmgth. Its sinuous footing gets ever-broacening grip upon the earth, and (more significant still) if« great tap-root goes-deep into that past whence iol ; human good gets its beginning.' ; ; The'' American pother over President Wilson's connection with ; the League's initiation is more than' a little amusing. Mr. Wilson is powerless to create the League if human ,nature dowrrt really. want it and as for initiating the scheme he has had no more to dci with that than the ex-Kaiseror Gharlie Chaplin. / '■. l;y Greek and Roman. '' As a matter of fact, some genUemen of the old worlds-by name Epictetus and Zeno, did a little earnest work for a real brotherhood of man j and there was a philosophically inclined thinker, one Plato, who fashioned J in I hiii mind an Atlantis, 1 where peace"was never broken. Not that these grandees of the ancient cults did the spadework for the coming Leaps of Nations: others— s, ; host that; no man can- particularise—had done that in diligent obscurity through wen the generations that, seem filled with nothing but .wars and rumours of wars. Nor did these Grecian thinkers for the coming time convince many of their swashbuckling compatriots of the virtues of concord j ; their days had strife of Greek with Greek as well as clashes with the bad barbarian. Yet did they bring to defiriiteriwn a timeless longing among i. men for mutual understanding. ; . -''. .. . The Romans achieved something in the .way of a League. Greeks arid Latins, Jsws and Egyptians, Phoenicians and Moors and Celts, a motley crew, wern hound together—" bound" is just the word, in view of the enforcement that achieved the union—in the Pax Itomana.v. , Despite its compulsion, the League that the Roman legions kept by brandishing their flashing swords was much better than the ceaseless squabbles ; that disturbed Hellas. i'"' i' } It was still too early in history's morn-, ing for national aspirations to arise; and th». only peace possible was better than no peace. The trail for the ! Hague' Conference Mud the -League of Nations was being surely biased. ''-... 1 •;• i V.*',/ * j r ' light in the ; Dark Ages. .'" S Thoughtful men in the much-libelled Dark*and :; Middlo - Ages, through ,- their knowledge of the peace.- that r old, Rome teade,' found'more in it' than a desolation; and from, the, eighth ;,, to , the , seventeenth centuries, there - : .jrere valiant attempts to form .world alliance*!, more or less like the, Pax Bomana. C&aiiflWagne and Otto,- .the Hohenstaufeha and the Hapsburgs, all tried it. » ! -Tb^new"l^Be~!ui'-lae shape, of the medieval Church--disciplined the rougher tribes, fashioned, fystems of law, and drew peoples of varfavi cults into fellowship. All this had in it the old feudal notions: Modern' Europe could "not be born until those notions died. Still, the notion of a federation of States was a commonplace of medieval thinking.- . ''[,-. t Then the Reformation, with its emancipation of the intellect, and the Thirty Years' War, with its disrupting effect on the old Empire, prepared the way for a new experience. The discovery of the other half of the world across the Atlantic added its influence; and great ' national States— England, France, Spain, 'Poland, Holland, Denmark, and Sweden— Vim The New World's Dim Dawn. National patriotism, as distinct from parochialism on the one hand, and bludgeoning imperialism on the other, came as a new force destined to change the whole situation. That the new force did not bepoind. immediately and fully effective is seen in 'the mad designs of Wilhelm Hohenzollern.and.his military myrmidons injpur own day. He had predecessors not far removed in time, too. But a new sense of alliance on the basis of hunun kinship had arisen : the day of a League Democratic Nations'had dawned, howtver dimly. ; Even' amid the hubbub of the Thirty Years' War there were voices calling to a "Christian Republic," in which a European confederatiw of fifteen States should join hand*, if not hearts, and legislate by deputies for each other's quiet. 'the voices were those of France's HenrylV. and his minister, the Duke of Sully. William Penn published in 1693 an Essay Towards th Resent and Future Peace, of Europe by the Establishment of an European Dyet, Parliament, or Estate*;" and soon after, wards the Abbe Saint-Pierre issued an enticing revision of "the project for perpetual peace invented by King Henry .the Great " The Abbe went four better than the King: he proposed a permanent union of nineteen States" These alliances were a 1, however,., to be between rulers, not monies: and it was well .they had no Si existence, for they might have stood in the way of the greater good to be introduced later The People's Peace. That good came visibly nearer at the 6 J of the eighteenth century, the heyday ofrevo luions g The French Revolution so Idified the State-system of Europe as to Kin h transfer of-political power from the monarch to the people Th riX self-determination and proved : =? 9 ft - iU the gobe and brought «k£^bf^ USA of war has served to make it radiance more attractive. : Sopher of Konigeberg, whose, rest 'ft perpetual Peace" aimed thes four conditions of international undei i standing-popular government in place c uncurbed monarchy, the backing of .in i "aUonal law by a federation of free states ' freedom of rights of travel aviated w,t I localised right, of ownership, and prate . of constitutional right, from foreig ■ tvrannv The ex-Kaiser would have foun [ the £om>berg philosopher comfortin 1 as an ou'.raged conscience, had the tw ' been contemporary. ~ , To make an end of the long story.-th ; notion of a Blague is nothin . new. It has grown in definiteness. J i has had a Snely obstinate survival eve t many things less noble. I's roots go deef - I deep. Mayhap its sheltering leafage wi yet bring healing, to the nations.