PEACE MEETING

Otago Daily Times, Issue 21602, 24 March 1932, Page 13

PEACE MEETING

CHURCH LEADERS AT ALBERT HALL (From Our Own Correspondent.) LONDON, February 4. At a great public meeting held in the Albert Hall leaders to the various churches made a plea for disarmament. The meeting was arranged by a committee of the League of Nations and the World Alliance for International Friendship through the Churches, The Archbishop of Canterbury, who presided, said that the Geneva Conference was beyond question the most momentous gathering in the world since the end of the war. . . “As we meet,” he said, there is this sinister and menacing portent of acts of war —they are little else- —taking place between two nations. It is evident, too. that there is still rife in Europe the old spirit of jealousy, distrust, even selfish nationalist ambition. “ Wei must, therefore, be patient, he said. “At conferences of this kind it often happens that things have to get worse before they get better. 'lt may even be at the end that the result may not fulfil our highest hopes, but at least it should be our most firm conviction that this conference must not part until there has been a clear and definite step towards general disarmament.” “ Our own Government will go into the conference with a good record, but that is no excuse for hanging back. It is only a reason for pressing forward. — (Cheers.) “It gives our Government,” he said, “an opportunity of so directing things that armaments may at least be reduced to the necessary purpose of defence, and all aggressive weapons—two particularly barbarous ones, the bombing aeroplane and the submarine—may be eliminated. “ We are bound by honour,” the archbishop added, “ to implement the pledges given at Versailles and to stand by the Pact of Peace. If the nations who signed it are prepared to make such declarations mere scraps of paper it will be_ a pitiful and humiliating confession that civilisation cannot honour its own word.” READINESS FOR SACRIFICE.

The Archbishop of York said that whether it would be right that we should further disarm at this moment he had not the knowledge to say. But those who thought that wo had already disarmed to the limit of safety for the Empire must not imagine that there rvas nothing left for us to do. We must be ready to pledge our resources for the security of our neighbours. “ There is a real danger about our propaganda for the League and for disarmament,” he said. “At the moment we stand to gain by international cooperation, but it is hot obviously so for all our neighbours, and it may not be always so for us. If our advocacy of cooperation is selfish at the root we shall fail when any great test of our loyalty arises. There must be readiness for real risk, real sacrifice.” The Rev. W. Charter Piggott (chairman of the Congregational Union) said that the Disarmament Conference met under conditions which emphasised _ its difficulties as emphatically as its obligatons.

“We want security,” he said, “ and there is no security that does not leave us bound in the fetter of our armaments unless we can approach one another in a spirit of trust and goodwill instead of fear. There is, however, among the nations to-day a stronger body of antiwar conviction than in any previous period of modern history.” SERMON ON THE MOUNT. The Rev. Leslie Weatherhead, of Leeds, speaking on behalf of the youth of the Free churches, said that armaments meant that we were sitting down to tea with out neighbours and putting on paper a number of treaties swearing that we would never fight them, while in our hip-poeket we liked to feel the bulge of a six-chambered revolver, fully loaded. He stated that in Leeds during the war a man printed 20,000 copies of a leaflet which he began to distribute. A magistrate ordered that they should be destroyed as seditious literature, and he sent the would-be distributor to prison for three months’ hard labour. _ The pamphlet, however, contained nothing but the words of Jesus taken, without comment, from the Sermon on the Mount, “ But when a Christian country fights a Christian war the words of Christ arc seditious literature,” added Mr Weatherhead. A JUST AGREEMENT. Father Bode Jarrett said that what they aimed at in advocating disarmament was what Pope Benedict XV urged on belligerent nations on August 1, 1917: “A just agreement of all for the simultaneous and reciprocal diminution of armaments.” They did not ask for total disarmament, for the State was obliged to protect its citizens from invasions from without and disorders from within. As to the degree in which disarmament was possible, it was necessary to consult the experts; soldiers, sailors, airmen alone could specify what was the minimum necessary to self-preservation. The Bishop of Llandaff said that what was wanted above everything was a new spirit to enable the nations to utilise the new machinery for the settling of international quarrels. The nations could never be frightened into disarmament; they could never be taxed into disarmament. Disarmament could only come progressively as the nations recognised the fact of the solidarity of the race. That we were members one of another was not a pious platitude; it was a biological fact. The day would come when it would be recognised that one nation could not hurt another nation without hurting itself; that one class could not hurt another class without hurting itself; that one individual could not hurt another individual without hurting himself. But the nations would never drft into fellowship; fellowship, like freedom, could only be achieved through sacrifice.