THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume LXI, Issue 18397, 15 May 1934, Page 9

THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS

(To tin? Editor of the Ht-ruM ) Sir, —A groat mauy of tin' people 1 meet have made uj* their minds. They tell me, “The League has failed. You might as welt admit it.” 11' that is so, what is going to happen to us? Of course I know that a great many people say, “Let us build up a great navy suit-u a.- u;* used to have and a good little army and let us mind our own business. it' other ualions likcto light, let them, but let us keep out of it.” Unfortunately that policy has already been tried and it failed completely; wo couldn’t keep out of it. That was Lord Salisbury's policy ot “splendid isolation” which was very popular for a while in the eighties and nineties, but it didn’t work. Fortunately wo have a book written by the man who was Foreign Minister at the time, telling how thoroughly that policy was tried and how completely it failed. Lord Grey of Fallodon was Under-Secretary for Foreign Alt"airs from ’l*2 to ’95, and Minister in charge from 190 b till 19.16 and he has written a book called “Twenty-five Years,” a wonderful book, everyone should read it, it costs only 7s (id. It was written, he says, “to give a true account of the events that led up to the Great War' and “to present the facts in such a way as to discover, or help others to discover and draw conclusions that may avoid another war. ...” Nearly the Whole of his first volume is devoted to ■ the gradual drift towards war. Lord j Salisbury’s policy, described as “splcn-} did isolation,” was very close to what : is* being advocated to-day, but, says j Lord Grey, “it .was not isolation, and it "was far from being splendid. ’’ j “British Governments had at first pre- 1 forred isolation; the pressure of events brought them to feel first that complete isolation was uncomfortable, and then that it was unsafe. 'The truth of this is .one of the many things that iA retrospect are seen more clearly. The danger of complete isolation was greater than we knew at the time. ’ ’ And looking back on the events that led up to the war he says: “Tlic moral is obvious. It is that great armaments lead inevitably to war.” “The enormous growth of armaments in Eur.ope—the sense of insecurity and fear caused by them —it was these that made war inevitable. This, it seems to me, is the lesson that the present should be learning from the past, the warning to be handed on to those who i come after us.” And that is the system which so ( many people wish to return to. it • was impossible, thirty years ago. To ! return to it now is w.orse than ridi- j culous, the conditions have changed so j greatly. At the beginning of the Great War in 1914, we had the fleet ready, mobilised for the usual summer manoeuvres. Once we got the ships out of the Channel and on their warstations we felt fairly safe, invasion was impossible. That is no longer so. What we have to fear now is a j sudden overwhelming attack from the ! air during the first night of the war. j What is this menace from the air? ! What will it*be like? A few sentences will toll us, taken from a speech by Mr. Stanley Baldwin in the Bouse of Commons on the 10th November, 1 I Jo2. “Any town which is within reach of au aerodrome can be bombed from the air within the first fivo minutes of , war.” “It is well also for the man j in the street to realise that there is j no power on earth that can protedt him ! from being Dombed. It cannot bo done and there is no expert in Europe who will say it can. Whatever people may tell him, the bomber will always get through.” “The only defence is offence, which means that you have to kill more women and children more quickly than the enemy if you want to save yourselves.” What will that air-bombing mean? There are many different kinds of bombs—'high explosives that will leave the stoutest buildings in ruins, incendiary bombs to set fire to the crowded tenement houses, and poison gases of many different kinds that will make rescue or escape practically impossible. That is what modern war will mean and Mr Baldwin has warned us that defence is impossible. The League of Nations is attempting to prevent that, that wholesale and indiscriminate torture and slaughter of men, women and children in our great cities, and at present the man in the street chuckles over its “failure.” One of the reasons for that is that we, the common people, are not sufficiently in earnest, that we have the comfortable feeling that if the worst comes to the j worst, and the League fails, we can get on without it, as we used to do. I have tried to show that this is not true, that to rely on our navy and our army as wc used to do will inevitably bring war, war much more dreadful than the last and even more inevitable. If we realised that, if we all 1 felt that we must make the League succeed or perish, the problem could be solved and would be solved. But -we ignore the League, we starve it, wo i jeer at it, and then we say the League has failed. It is not the League that has failed, it is we who have failed to keep the promise vie made in the Covenant. “But,” says Mr. Baldwin, “when the next war comes and civilisation is wiped out, as it will be.”! If that is so, is there anything of any importance at all till we have made sure that there will be no next war? But, “as it was in the days of Noah,” we are all busy working and planning for the future, and there will be no future if we let things drift a little longer.—l am, etc., THOS. TODD.