LEAGUE OF NATIONS

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXV, Issue 23072, 24 June 1938, Page 13

LEAGUE OF NATIONS

PROSPECT OF SURVIVAL ADDRESS BY PROFESSOR The question whether the League of Nations can survive was the subject of an address given by Professor W. A. Sewell at the League of Nations Union luncheon yesterday. Mrs. Kenneth Gordon presided oyer a large attendance. The problem of whether the League of Nations could survive in the world to-day was becoming "more pressing than ever, Professor Sewell said. "Is man good enough for the world order of which the League might have been the he asked. "I shall leave the question in doubt. I very otten think that man is not good enough. But 1 am certain of this, that if the League does not survive we shall have a relapse into the kind of barbarism which to-day we are seeing in Barcelona and Madrid and in China." If the League of Nations was to survive Professor Sewell said there were two things that would make it survive. The inescapable logic of events would make it survive, because members of the League would have to return to it for their own security. And it would survive because in the end idealism was more practical than the realism of which so much was heard to-day. "Out of our very insecurity, out of our terrible dread of war, out of our feverish design for peace, there might arise—and if we were to be saved there would arise—a renewed structure, a structure which nations would take seriously because they would fail to do so at their peril, a structure rooted in idealism and rooted in realism," he concluded.