NO MORE BIG WARS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVII, Issue 20480, 4 February 1930, Page 11

NO MORE BIG WARS.

GENERAL SMUTS' OPINIONS.

WORK OF THE LEAGUE. [FEOM r OUE OWN COEBESPONDENT.I VANCOUVER, Jan. 1. General Smuts, who was interviewed today in Ottawa and yesterday in New York, made a striking pronouncement that there would b& no more big wars. There would continue to be, he said, strife and contention, such as the present conflict in China-, but they would not ramify out to involve other nations.

"Even the Boer Waf would be impossible to-day/' General Smuts said. "We did not foresee, .10 years ago, *when the League of Nations was instituted, that it would assume its present form of providing a forum in which, the representatives of the nations could sit around the table and discuss their problems. The League has made that, practice habitual. Once you get people talking out their troubles around the table- the war mentality disappears. "In July, 1914, Sir Edward Grey, even at the last minute, was striving to gat, the nations together. If he could only have got them into a round-table discussion the war might never have occurred. But that was impossible. There was no habit, as there is now. You can see how different things are now. Instead of talking war the nations get together" and deliberate over the matters that affect them, with the result that war recedes more and more into the background. "Many people still believe," said General Smuts, "that the League of Nations was an ideal suddenly conjured out of the clouds. That is not the case. The basis of the League was the British Empire. The Imperial Conferences, which have been held since. the eighties, were the foundations* on which we built. We appreciated the fact that, since the British Empire comprised one-quarter of the world's population, tho practices followed by that body could be followed by the remaining' three-fourths. The periodical conferences held among the members of the Empire furnished the standard we sought to- apply to all the other nations of the wbrld." ' I feel that the last ten years have fully justified our work."