UNIVERSAL PEACE.

Otago Witness, Issue 3031, 17 April 1912, Page 77

UNIVERSAL PEACE.

By Roxana. i At least once in the life of each person who has in his hand the destinies of a nation has come a rosy vision of a future, j when all international troubles shall have ; ceased to exist, wars be done away with, and jealousy and strife between the nations, a thing of the past. Alas for the dreamer, , and alas for the dream! for, as the world is at present constituted, it is not to oe. Unless men's natures can be utterly and completely changed, it can never be. \\ hil e man is what he is, the mere fact of another . man possessing better lands than he will be the signal for him to find a plausible | excuse for twisting it out of the others grasp. The reason given for the action is believed by neither party, but what matters 1 that? Nations are the same. A country I (in the war sense of the word) is merely a collection of individuals whose aims are j more or less united by the idea of a com- | mon gain from a war of aggression; or, on the other hand, united by the risk of com- : mon loss, should they not defend" them- j ■elves from the invader? This idea of universal peace appeals to | ua all in a greater or less degree. There , is something supremely comforting in the thought that, when this thing came to pass, w e need never trouble ourselves how many ships Germany or Russia or Japan was building; they would not be used to convince us of the soundness of their arguments and to try to make us subjects of the Kaiser, the C*ar, or the Mikado. Soothing thought, isn't it? Has it ever occurred to any of you, though, how unnatural such a state of | affeirs would be? Look into the evidences of Nature around you; look into the swarm- | ing life of the insect world; study the life history of the wild creatures of the woods. Pass a summer afternoon in the stillness of the bush. Do we not find peace* there? Truly it is peaceful, the silence broken only ! by the buzzing of the insects, the darting of a lizard, or the occasional passing of a startled rabbit. Peaceful, do you call it? Look again. Birds killing insects, the | lizards catching flies; even the rabbit startled at the nearness of a weasel or hawk. ' | Look at the vegetable kingdom. How many plants there are that, having once got a hold on the ground, choke off all ( other plants from growing on that ground. Take, for instance, the Canadian thistle and the prickly pear. I shall not bring forward any further instances; let us look at those j we already have. Now, which of the in- I sects gets on the best? Obviously the one that can take care of itself befit. There j we have it. It is merely a case of the eur- | vival of the fittest. I can hear you say, though, " It is not the fittest who survive j in war. The fittest are in the thick of the fray, and are therefore the more liable to be killed." Not so. The man who overcomes his opponents by lawful means—he is the better man, isn't he? Well, if good | men are overcome, the better men are the ones who have beaten them, always supposing that they were beaten in fair, fight, j Of course, if you hold that war is not right, I have nothing more to say than I this: it seems to have been regarded as ', the correct thing from the earliest-known times, and ther e is such a thing as creating a precedent. Now for the good derived from war. For one thing, it clears the political air, just as a thunderstorm after a close, muggy day. Two schoolboys fall out on som e small matter. They snap at one another when they pass, muttering vague threats of what each is going to do to the other. At last a blow is given, the inevitable fight follows, and at the end they vhake hands, and are, in the long run, all the better friends for their recent quarrel, while each has learned to respect his late opponent's power of taking care of himself. Before the fight, each of them had a sneaking feeling that he was the better man of the two ; now it has been definitely decided, and the victor finishes up with enough respect for his opponent to avoid taking liberties on the score of. his late victory. War causes the nations to respect one another. It lias been pointed out that the various periods of literary activity noted in our history have occurred in almost all cases toward the end of, or immediately following, a state of warfare involving our nation. Take, for instance, Chaucer. His best work, "The Canterbury Tales," was written about 1364, in the interval between two great wars with France. Shakespeare, Ben Jonson. and the other Elizabethan writers —their finest writings date from the ending of the war with Spain. Longfellow's work was written just after the end of the American war. Other eases might be cited, but these will suffice. We find, therefore, that another gain by war is the adding to our store of literature, poetry in particular. Following close upon all wars we also find an astonishing increase of inventive effort in all lines—but, of course, more especially in the direction of self-protection. During the recent war it has been found that the enemy's new gun would carry further than ours j inventors immediately set to work to neutralise that gain, and, if possible, put the advantage on our skle —if not in range, perhaps penetration, perhaps effect of impact. Therefore I think I may safely assert that war has the effect of stimulating the inventive faculty. Besides these benefits that come to a nation from engaging In war, there are, if you take the trouble to Book Into the subject dispassionately, many and many other ways in which we gain some-

thing, at least, from war. I leav e to the other speakers to tell of the advantages of universal peace. For my part, I give my vote on the side of war, because I believe that through it a nation becomes robust and strong.