EUROPE IN DISORDER

Otago Daily Times, Issue 21539, 11 January 1932, Page 9

EUROPE IN DISORDER

THE PERIL OF WAR In a book published on November 30, under the title “Can Europe Keep thePeate? ” Mr Frank H. Simonds, the: American historian declares that the purpose and policies that made the World. War inescapable survive unmodified today. Only the accommodation of seem-" ingly irreconcilable policies, he writes, can prevent a new war. [ “In 1914 war came not because any I people desired it, but because the policies,. !which all people were pursuing and the objectives which they were seeking,' could be realised only through victorious conflict. In 1932 the situation ia Mr fjimonds reaches the conclusion that war debts and reparations will never bo' paid, and that President Hoover is unwittingly responsible tor their cancellation; that the League of Nations, has', failed; that Germany committed suicide, with American money; that France caused '* the downfall of cue first MacDonald ministry and the English financial collapse, and that France has exploded all disarmament conferences. While the Young Plan, collapsed concomitantly with world-wide depression,U he writes, the collapse was not the sequence of depression because Germany nefer intended to pay war reparations, t/ “ In June, 1931,” he says, “ the Germans f ! afforded the incredible spectacle of a people on the edge of bankruptcy and„ triumphant. What had happened amounted in effect to a deliberate undertaking on the part of the Germans to , commit suicide. . . . Hoover did not save Germany from bankruptcy or the world from the consequences of that disaster. Nevertheless, as a result of the Hoover moratorium all of the war debts,.,and at least the greater part of reparations are dead. The moratorium must ba r extended automatically, not for one year,, but indefinitely. “Seventeen years of almost continu- . ous conflict, interrupted only by incomplete truce, have reduced the whole ; (European) continent to a state of economic and social disorder unparalleled since the 30 years war. Nations arc bankrupt, trade is reduced to barteiv, money has lost its value, even the pound sterling has faltered. The unemployed ' millions are meagerly fed by public treas-, r uries, themselves inadequately filled by taxation which is extortionate. The,;-, miseries of the so-called peace of to-day, f miseries reaching to every human being, within national limits, defy exaggeration. It is clear that what has been going on since 1914 cannot continue.’