NOTES AND COMMENTS

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXV, Issue 23191, 10 November 1938, Page 10

NOTES AND COMMENTS

BRITAIN IN THE CRISIS Great Britain is in the present hour perhaps less rattled, less feverish, more composed than any in the world, wrote the Times at the height of the recent crisis in Europe. The mass of its population is as little susceptible to intimidation as it was in 1914. It is as ready now as it was then to face any peril in a just' cause. If such a call should come, Germany or any other country would find the British spirit resolute, reckless of consequenco and invincible. But the British people is emphatically not prepared to find the occasion of a world war in a quarrel in which it js fiot convinced that one party has all the rights. NEW EUROPEAN COMMITMENT The suggestion that Britain should guarantee the integrity of a Central European Power marks a fundamental departure from the immemorial and well-founded tradition of no Continental commitments, says the Daily Telegraph in discussing the proposed four-Power guarantee of the new Czechoslovakia. It is something which Britain could never offer but in the last extremity, and it could never bo worth while unless as the price of a peace that is truly enduring. This is n matter on which further enlightenment is awaited with unconcaeled anxiety. To Herr Hitler the guarantee is, of course, 110 concession. It may even be "a stumbling-block. But from Britain's point of view it is an immense concession from which the least that we can expect is a completely adequate return. The only return that could bo described as adequato would be the certainty in the minds of its proponents that thero will be an end once and for all of the sabre-rattling diplomacy with which Germany has recently been sotting all Europe by the ears.

AMERICAN NOVELIST'S VIEW America knows, as well as the people of England know, that war settles nothing, and I have no doubt whatever that within a short time American opinion will bo wholly convinced of the Tightness of the course England has adopted in the Czechoslovak crisis, writes the novelist, Miss Susan Ertz, in a letter to the Sunday Times. Amid the tumult and the shouting, amid the threats and the rage and the whole horrible din of preparations for war, there has been, thanks to Mr. Chamberlain, one small point, like the centre of a whirlpool, where the voices of sanity and reason might make themselves heard. The sudden and unexpected antiBritish tone adopted by some of the American papers must be, I am convinced, only a passing thing, having behind it nothing more than a desire to keep American sympathy in these dangerous times at home under lock and key. But, surely, to give to those countries which see as America sees, and cherish the thin as that America cherishes, at least a moral support and, during difficult and necessary negotiations, the benefit of the doubt, involves no risk and in a dark hotij lightens a horizon already grim enough.

FROM DARKNESS TO LIGHT "The fact is that days of crisis inevitably cause men furiously to think, said the Dean of Westminster in a recent sermon in the Abbey. "Amid a welter of ideas it is always hard to distinguish the true from the false, or« the rational from the imaginative; and it is but small wonder if in the midst of a world-situation so grim and menacing as that which faces us today, the apocalyptic cry is heard once more, 'The 'end of all things is at hand.' There are, I suppose (to judge from one's post-bag), some to whom thoso words appear to be literally and absolutely true to-day. I should like to remind such people that there is another apocalyptic sijying in the gospels which we must not forget: 'When ye shall hear of wars and rumours of wars, be not troubled . . . the end is not yet.' Thoso of us who believe in a living God in and behind history, find it impossible to believe that the world is literally going to peter out in the welter of chaos and confusion which confronts us now. To believe that would be to believe in the final triumph of the powers of darkness. We must either frankly abandon* our belief that 'the most high God ruleth in the kingdom of men,', or we must cling, however desperately, to the faith that this dark night through which we are passing now is a night which may yet herald the dawn of a new day, a day which shall bring with it new conceptions of the functions of a State, and of the relation of countries to one another —in other words, that we shall emerge from this ordeal having learned some lessons which will be burned as with fire upon the mind and memory of the nations."

ANALOGY FROM IRELAND In 1919, when tho Treaty of Versailles was produced, I wrote an article in which I said that the only thing which made the harsher parts of the treaty tolerable was tho hope that Article XIX. -of tho Covenant (which provided for revision of treaties) would act as an Ithuriel's spear curing the wounds that tlioy inflicted, says Mr. J. A. Spender in an article on the Czechoslovak crisis. But there is all tho difference in the world between treatyrevjsion at tho point of the bayonet

with a hostile Germany waiting to take advantage of any change and treatyrevision in an orderly and peaceful way', with a friendly Germany co-oper-ating in a general pacification. If we could assume a friendly Germany all manner of things would at once become possible which are now barred by fear and suspicion. Those whose memories go back to 1913 and 1914 can hardly have failed to bo struck by the ominous resemblance of the Sudeten German agitation to that of tho, Ulster volunteers in', those years. Tho TJlsterman insisted that nothing would induce them to live under tho same Government with South Ireland, and after much :tribulation we came to tho conclusion that nothing would meet^the case but the exclusion of the six counties. On the whole Irish case our conclusion was that we could neither force the Southern Irish to remain under tho Imperial Parliament nor force the Ulstermen to come in under an all-Irish Parliament, The problem qf the Sudeten Germans raised substantially the same question, and it was thiii: Was there any means of com-

polling these two peoples to live together which would not prolong the trouble and involve us all in incessant crisis even if it did not mean immediate warP