THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS. TUESDAY, DECEMBER 14, 1926. UNDERSTANDING AT GENEVA.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIII, Issue 19510, 14 December 1926, Page 12

THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS. TUESDAY, DECEMBER 14, 1926. UNDERSTANDING AT GENEVA.

As was hoped, the way to a clear and complete understanding among former foes in Europe has been opened at Geneva. It has been difficult to find. Exploratory steps were taken long ago. They led into a thicket. There seemed a likelihood that the war might provoke another war, at all events that it would leave but a shadowy peace, full of spectres and alarms. Light has come slowly and painfully, with a few gleams revealing enough to make dangers measurable. There is left to-day a sense of perils avoided rather than of a sure progress triumphantly made. Yet the way out, although its passage has still to be undertaken, has been found. As often in difficult issues, it is a way of compromise. Not that anything of worth has been sacrificed; there has been a yielding of lesser interests to those that matter most. One after another, obstacles to understanding have been overcome. The Dawes report illumined, if it did not wholly solve, the puzzle of reparations and Europe's economic recovery. The Locarno treaties gave a practical answer to the anxieties of certain nations about territorial security, as the Pact that gave rise to these treaties fostered a more pacific spirit. Germany's admission to the League, an event explicitly anticipated in the making of the peace, followed thereupon in logical procedure, though not without misgiving and opposition. Then, transferred to Geneva, the problem had its most baffling phases declared. There have been months of grappling with them, and at last a solution appears. It may not fulfil the hopes that are raised, but there is a large measure of assurance that it will.

The focus of recent anxiety has been Germany's intention. Was it wholly honourable ? Had she given sufficient proof of good faith to be trusted in the League any more than out of it? Could there- be whole-hearted collaboration with her in efforts to safeguard a peace but partially won at a terrible price? These questions centred in the inevitable inquiry as to whether she had carried out, in the spirit and to the letter, the undertaking to forswear belligerency to which she had put her hand solemnly at Versailles. Even her initiation and sharing of the Locarno agreement was regarded as insufficient to do more than justify evacuation of part of her territory under military surveillance, for she herself had postponed that measure of relief by her tardiness to fulfil her promise to disarm. ■ Since she entered the League, to press with ill precipitancy a claim to stand in all respects the equal of her partners there, as if she had no particular sins to expiate and no particular honour to regain, there has beeii room for misgiving still. The Inter-Allied Commission of Military Control has produced evidence of her protracted reluctance to disarm, to dismantle fortresses and potential munition factories, and to set her house in order as expected. The Ambassadors' Conference has made investigations and found against her. Geneva could not ignore these precise and emphatic judgments. It has very properly insisted on their value, and in their light has reached a decision.

Germany has asked that she be freed from the direct oversight of the Allies and given only such surveillance as the League of "Nations may think fit to exercise. There is provision in the peace treaty for this transfer of authority, but the time of the change is not specified. Although in the League, Germany has no right to ask, regardless of anything else, that she must at once enjoy the less humiliating status which the transfer of oversight implies. This defect in her claim the League Council has acknowledged. Germany herself has been constrained to admit it. It had to be admitted, or a deadlock would have occurred. By the compromise now reached, the case for the Commission of Control and the Ambassadors' Conference has been accepted as sound, but provision is made for the League's taking up the task at the beginning of February next. In the meantime, Germany has to submit to the Inter-Allied Commission fresh proposals concerning her eastern fortifications and her export of partially-manufactured war materials, and to suspend military work on her eastern frontier. If in this interval, long enough to serve, she satisfies the demands to which she is justly liable, the fully international control so naturally preferable to her will be substituted for the "partisan" supervision against which she has chafed. The compromise amounts to a modification of her probation, not an ending of it. Paris, after much discussion, has agreed. The decision does France credit. To it, more than to Germany's persistence, the new solution is due, although in Berlin this fact may have meagre appreciation. Of Geneva it may be said that once more, although full assurance of success is lacking, it has established itself in international regard as a promoter of understanding and peace*