WINNING THE PEACE

Otago Daily Times, Issue 24912, 11 May 1942, Page 6

WINNING THE PEACE

POST-WAR RESPONSIBILITIES

NEED FOR SOCIAL IMPROVEMENTS

RUGBY, May 8,

"The world after the war will be a still smaller place," Mr Anthony Eden said in a speech at Edinburgh. " There will be no room for selfish and unneighbourly policies. There will be one village street from Edinburgh to Chungking. Peace is more than frontiers and peace treaties. There must be force and will as well, but peace is more than force. You will never have peace on this earth unless you have an economic system in which men and women who are willing to work are able to work and find a reward for their labours. You will not get peace without social improvement. If there are unemployment, malnutrition, animal standards of life and remediable poverty that is not remedied, you will jeopardise the peace. "The United Nations together must have a sufficient force to provide police to prevent highway robbery and the success of gangster methods. We have to aim at a state of affairs in which the four great world Powers—the British Commonwealth. United States, Russia and China —will together sustain this peace system in peace. They will seek aid from other peace-loving nations as they do now in war, but upon them must fall the main burden of the maintenance of peace and the main responsibility for the economic reconstruction of the world after the war. and what is true of our forei<m relations is also true of our colonial Empire. Yon cannot run a laree colonial pmn're well unless you are proud to make the necessary sacrifices to carry through the task." Sacrifices for Peace Although Hitler's speech had sounded the death knell of the "New Order," Mr Eden stated, it could not be expected that after the war everything would be the same. He did not think many would want to return to the old world as it had been, even if they could. The British people had had good intentions before the war, but intentions were not enough unless they were matched with intelligence, vigilance, and will. In thinking of the world after the war, he was thinking of how peace could be kept. That was the funda-

mental problem for all, because, without peace, stability in international relationships, active co-operation between the peoples of the world, and the removal of the constant threat of war, there could be no hope anywhere. Mr Eden emphasised the necessity of making sacrifices for peace, and said people must realise that they had an inescapable responsibility which was shared with the other nations of the world. Germans' Wishful Thinking Hitler's delusion that there are people in Britain who would be prepared.to make peace with him was the subject of forthright comment by Mr Eden. Such wishful thinking, he said, was not unknown in Germany. Hess had descended upon Scotland, apparently, because he was under the same delusion as Hitler. "When will these leaders of Germany understand that the millions ot people in this country and in the British Empire—indeed throughout the United Nations—are unanimously determined to have no truck of any kind with Hitler or the Nazi regime? Our people are not hypnotised by myth; they have made their resolve as free men and women. They have counted the cost, and are willing to pay it in order to re-establish the basis of free civilisation and respect for international engagements, without which there can be no lasting peace." Mr Eden said the longer the German people oontinupd to support and tolerate the regime which was leading them to destruction the heavier their direct responsibility would grow for the damage they were doing.