LEAGUE OF NATIONS

Otago Daily Times, Issue 21650, 21 May 1932, Page 12

LEAGUE OF NATIONS

GOSPEL OF EXPEDIENCY LORD DICKINSON'S INDICTMENT. (From Our Own Correspondent.) LONDON, April 15. At the closing session of the annual assembly of the National Council of the Free Churches Lord Dickinson, of Painswick, spoke on the subject of “ The Christian and the International World.” The League of Nations, he said, had machinery quite capable of-' exerting influence throughout the greater part of the world, and the inclusion in the League of America and Russia and one or two more States would make that influence universal. ' • , “But the League of Nations has not been successful,” continued Lord Dickinson. “ Its failures are due to the fact that the members of the assembly and the council have not the courage to do a thing simply because it is right. It is the gospel of expediency that rules at Geneva. If the League, or any new body, is to be really capable of action over the whole field of human affairs we must devise, not only a different organisation, but some means whereby moral forces may be brought to bear upon it more effectively than at present. The international Court at The Hague also is limited, and has not shown itself to be as pure an instrument of justice as one would wish it to be. “We shall have to build, if not on new foundations, at any rate with a new facade and perhaps with better materials, but the real question is whether men are ready for so great a change, I rather doubt it. I believe it will require a great deal of Christian international propaganda before the world attains a system whereby all complications between nations which now give rise to war are disposed of by peaceful methods. To got this we must extend the range of human thought that men may be ready to accept the verdict of others in questions far removed from any that an ordinary court of justice can adjudicate upon. A GOSPEL OF COMMON SENSE. “ There are questions in which nations will not listen to nay suggestions that they should abandon their freedom of action; for example, the disputes about the Polish Corridor, about the frontier of Hungary, the position of the Austrian and Slav minorities in Italy. It would be to the benefit of the whole of Europe if a just settlement of these disputes could be arrived at, but in the present state of opinion in the countries named it is useless to suggest referring the disputes to any tribunal. It is not that in these particular countries the Governments are specially unreasonable. It is the same everywhere. I have no doubt that if, in our own country, any statesman were to agree to refer to a committee of foreigners the question whether we should return Gibraltar to Spain he would be hounded out of ofhee. “We are not ready for such a change in our ideas, and yet some system must be discovered for the settlement of questions such as these’if war is to be fully excluded. Where can we find it better than in the Gospel of Christ, which, after all, is a Gospel of common sense and in the second commandment of which is_an international.law? Where can we find codes of conciliation better than in the New Testament? Christians have in their hands all that is needed for reconstitnting the world, and it can be done without that armed force to' which too many friefids of peace are pinning their hopes at this moment.”