THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS. MONDAY, FEBRUARY 27, 1922. THE WASHINGTON TREATY.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LIX, Issue 18026, 27 February 1922, Page 6

THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS. MONDAY, FEBRUARY 27, 1922. THE WASHINGTON TREATY.

♦ " The treaties arising out of the Washington Conference are encountering in the United States Senate some of the criticism which provod fatal to the. League of Nations Covenant. It will not prove fatal to these treaties for two reasons: they are entirely free from ambiguities and the case for them has been presented with discretion as well as enthusiasm. It was against the ambiguities of the League of Nations Covenant that American criticism was first directed, but those ambiguities would have been explained or neutralised by reasonable reservations if the Government of the day had cared to lead instead of attempting to drive public opinion. Later demonstrations of American idealism make it appear at least highly probable that the Covenant would have been accepted with its admitted imperfections if Mr. Wilson had been a little more of a politician and a little less of an idealist, if he had conceded something to the vanity of his tho credulity of his public. But he made the capital mistake of attempting to present the League as an accomplished fact, thereby provoking a constitutional issue in which he was bound to appear at a disadvantage and by which the League was overwhelmed. Mr. Harding has been doubly careful to make no such mistake. He invited the leading Powers to frame their policies under the very eyes of the American people; he made his opponents a party to the conference, in the phraseology of the treaties he has shunned even the appearance of evil, and he has met such criticism as arose more than half-way. In consequence of these precautions he is likely to secure the acceptance of the treaties with a reservation which merely explains the obvious. Sensitive as American opinion is to the risk of entangling alliances, there is little in these treaties to give criticism a foothold. The opponents of the Pacific Pact first seized upon the admission that the phrase "insular possessions and dominions" included the homeland of Japan. Their argument at this stage was that the United States might be pledging themselves either legally or morally to protect Japan against attack in home waters. The more reasonable interpretation of the clause was that it merely implied that the United States would not attack the Japanese homeland without provocation, a pledge most Americans would give very cheerfully not only in respect to Japan, but to any country. However, this aspect of the controversy soon lost its significance owing to the adoption of a supplementary treaty specifically excluding the Japanese homeland from the Quadruple Pact. Since then the 'opponents of the treaty have merely played upon the fear that America had undertaken a moral obligation to go to war in support of the " imperialistic " designs of its co-signatories. The reservation now authorised by the President should finally set these fears at rest. It embodies America's interpretation of the Pacific Pact as one containing " no commitment to armed force, no alliance, and no obligation to join in any defence." That is the sense in which' the Pact has been interpreted and welcomed in other countries. It contains no military or naval sanction and it is obviously not an alliance which specifies the eventual use of armed force for the attainment of its objects. The Austro-German alliance of 1879, the basis of the Triple Alliance, pledged the parties to stand by each other " with their entire armed strength," to wage war and conclude peace jointly. The Franco-Russian Alliance had a similar sense. There is provision in the Pacific Pact only for a renunciation of aggressive intentions and for consultation in a crisis. The Pact is, in effect, something less than an alliance; in.moral force it may prove more than an alliance, but it is, not an alliance. The significance of the Quadruple Treaty is that it removes the AngloJapanese Alliance and creates for a decade at least the framework of an organisation for consultation upon any question that may seem to imperil the peace of the Pacific. It thus gives peaceful diplomacy a new instrument and a new scope, the importance of which is heightened by the naval agreement. It was originally proposed to include in the naval treaty a provision that, if. any of the signatories became involved in hostilities with an outside Power, the five Powers should meet to discuss the emergency. The full text of the treaty has not yet reached New Zealand, and there was no reference to this clause in the cabled summary, but the probabilities are that there is some such provision, If only to allow of the. Power involved in war expanding its naval armaments by consent. Assuming there is, a threat of war automatically brings the principal Allied and Associated Powers into conference. Whether it arises as the result of a Pacific controversy or by reason of a dispute elsewhere, there is the safeguard, under one consultative provision or the other, of a conference—a conference which will explore all the avenues to a peaceful settlement and may then in its discretion consider means of shortening or lccalis-

ing the war. That is not exclusively an American plan for maintaining peace. It was the very plan suggested, but suggested in vain, by Viscount Grey to avert war in 1914. It is a plan which has worked well on many occasions and requires only a modicum of goodwill to succeed on most occasions. It is a plain, commonsense plan, free 1 from the risks of alliances, and the great achievement of the Washington Conference, apart from the limitation of armaments, is that it has made tho operation of the plan automatic and concentrated behind it the moral purpose of all peace-loving peoples.