LEAGUE OF NATIONS

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXI, Issue 21910, 20 September 1934, Page 13

LEAGUE OF NATIONS

CONSTITUTION CRITICISED CAPITALISM AND PEACE Jocularly describing the League of Nations at one stage as "a somewhat uneasy alliance of gangsters," Mr. H. D. Dickinson, of Leeds University, exchange lecturer in economics at Auckland University College, delivered a criticism of the League last night at a meeting arranged by the League of Nations Union.

"The League is valuable as a rallyingpoint for peace-loving people." he said. "It is a symbol of peaceful co-opera-tion, but I feel that an even better Bymbol is the Third International." The constitution of the League had an essential flaw in that it proceeded on the assumption of national sovereignty. Like Mr. H. G. Wells, he believed that the citizen's exclusive loyalty to a sovereign State was one of the greatest stumbling-blocks in the way of a reasonable national regime. The only way to get rid of this incubus and to make the League more than a caucus of Foreign Ofßces was to create an organisation which would appeal to peoples over the heads of Governments. The speaker criticised the League's record in detail. The main point, he said, was that it was unreasonable to expect an international organisation to establish world peace unless it dealt with the underlying causes of national antagonisms. Political antagonisms rosted on economic causes, all of which could be traced back to the working of the capitalist system. This argument Mr. Dickinson developed at length, discussing tariffs, foreign investments and the development of capitalistic imperialism. A merely political constitution for the League, he said, was useless; it must create new economic groups. The only genuine League jvas a League of Socialist nations.

In reply to a question, Mr. Dickinson said he did not think that Russia had been converted from hdr former critical view of the League, but was seeking to join it for her own ends, which were the postponement of armed conflict while she was building up internal prosperity. He considered that the Third International was in a sense an alternative to the League, but it did not command any large measure of support in some countries —New Zealand and Britain, for example.