NO MORE BIG WARS

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume LV, Issue 17180, 10 February 1930, Page 10

NO MORE BIG WARS

GENERAL SMUTS' OPINIONS WORK OF THE LEAGUE VANCOUVER, Jan. L General Smuts, who was interviewed to-day in Ottawa and yesterday in New York, made a striking pronouncement that there would be no more big wars. There would continue to be, he said, strife and contention, such as tin: present conflict in China, but they would not ramify out to involve other nations. "Even the Boer War would be impossible to-day," General Smuts said. "We did not, foresee. 10 years ago, whoa the League of Nations was instituted, that it would assume its present form of providing a forum in which the representatives of the nations could sit around the table and discuss their problems. The League has made that practice habitual. Once you get people talking out their troubles around the table the war mentality disappears. "In July, 1914, Sir Edward Grey, even at the last minute, was striving to get the nations together. If ho could only have got them into a round-table discussion the war might never have occurred. But that was impossible. There was no habit, as there is now. You can see how different things are now. Instead of talking war the nations get together and deliberate over the matters that affect them, with the result that war recedes more and more into the background. "Many people, still believe," said General Smuts, "that the League of Nations was an ideal suddenly conjured out of the clouds. That is not the case. The basis of the League was the British Empire. The Imperial Conferences, which have been held since the eighties, were the foundations on which we built. We appreciated the fact that, since ,tho British Empire comprised one-quarter of the world's population, the practices followed by that body could be followed by the remaining three-fourths. The periodical conferences held among the members of the Empire furnished the standard we sought to apply to all the other nations of the world. I feel that the last 10 years have fully justified our work."