NOTES AND COMMENTS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVI, Issue 20254, 14 May 1929, Page 8

NOTES AND COMMENTS.

COLOURED MAPS. "How far, I wonder, are the prospects of peace in the world diminished by the prevailing practice of publishing maps coloured instead of plain ?" asks Mr. H. Wilson Harris, in the Daily News. "The problem for nations and individuals is to keep the two in right relation. It is much more interesting to think of Europe as consisting of a score or so of nations with populations markedly different from one another and a little predisposed to be suspicious and hostile, than to think of it as one continent inhabited by several hundred million people tilling fields, building houses, selling clothes and food and boots, keeping ledgers, nursing babies, digging coal and iron. The coloured map 'has it' against tho plain map all the time. That is as it should be, if tho coloured map denotes only distinctions and not antagonisms. So long as the coloured- map denotes economic conflict between jellow and green, red and blue, orange and violet, over an area smaller than the single customs unit represented by the United States, so long tho coloured map threatens prosperity and even peace not because it is but because of what the cdlours mean."

AMERICA'S RIGHTS. "American opinion is, in my judgment, profoundly unconcerned with the consequences to Great Britain of its insistence upon the right and the power to defend its privileges as a neutral. We are building our fleet with the deliberate purpose of°being able in a new crisis to say to the British, "Win or lose, you must respect our rights," says Mr. Frank H. Simonds in the New York Saturday Review of Literature. "If the British can persuade us to pledge ourselves not to use our ships to defend our neutral rights, whenever such use would compromise British security, then they will, in reality, have preserved their situation and we shall have embarked upon a vast expenditure for ships for nothing. Any such arrangement is, however, in my judgment, utterly outside the range of possibilities because at bottom the campaign for ships results from a very deep American desire and resolution to be totally freo from all possible restraint. No matter what the circunistancs attending the entrance of Great Britain into war again, no matter who her antagonist or what her case, we want to be in a position to compel her to respect our rights. What very few Americans see is that the effect of our policy must be to expose the British to very grave dangers, to destroy the old form of British security. But, on the other hand, what few Britons perceive is that the purpose of American public opinion is to possess tho power to do this without regard to the consequences. And, unmistakably, these two policies are irreconcilable."

INCOMPATIBLE VIEWS. "Our fleet is not a challenge to Britain, but tho policy which tho fleet expresses is the most deadly challenge Britain has known at least since Trafalgar, provided British defence still remains dependent upon the use of sea power." Mr. Simonds continues. "If wo have an equal fleet and an independent policy tho right arm of Britain will bo paralysed. London will have to conform its actions to the decision of Washington, and that decision may bo inimical in the extreme for British interests or even necessities. Tho effect of that resolution is to shako the very foundations of British position in tho world and to compromise British security at homo. But how 011 earth can you compromise such a quarrel, which is, in fact, the consequence of tho collision of tho deepest political instinct in each country ? Each of us sees our position in tho world in terms which are incompatible with the vital interests of the other. Agree upon naval parity and there remains the real problem as to what we mean to do with parity. In this situation if war remains unthinkable, present adjustment is equally unthinkable. Solution must wait upon tho recognition by one or tho other of two nations that it is incapable of abolishing the purpose of the other and must accept it, with all tho disquieting implications,"