LEAGUE OF NATIONS

Southland Times, Issue 20940, 25 November 1929, Page 3

LEAGUE OF NATIONS

ITS AMS- AND WORK SOUTHLAND TIMES COMPETITION Each Monday there will appear in the Southland Times under this heading, articles and letters and other information about the League of Nations, explaining how it came to be formed, when it was established its aims and the work it is doing in the world. This weekly section of the Southland Times will serve as the basis of the competition initiated by the Southland Times, with the endorsement of the League of Nations Union, and the approval of the education authorities. It will appear until Monday, December 9, and in the week ending December 13, an examination will be held synchronously in the schools in the Southland Education District. The competition is open to pupils in Standards V and VI o/ all primary schools, and to all pupils of secondary schools, whether public or private in this district.

'MINORITIES. A DIFFICULT PROBLEM. Before the Great War there were in Europe millions of people who were dominated over and ruled by another people from whom they differed in race, language, and religion. The most glaring example was the ramshackle empire known as the Austrian Empire. It had within its territories Germans, Magyars, Poles, Czechs, Roumans, Slovenes, Ruthenes, and Italians. The two races that, possessed the governing power were the Germans in Austria proper, and the Magyars in Hungary. You will at once understand that under the rule of the German and the Magyar the other peoples were unhappy, and dreamed of-the day when they might some day achieve independence and govern themselves. After the War. When the delegates met in Paris at the close of the war they made a noble effort to put matters right. Their aim was to draw the boundaries so that as many people as possible of one race might be placed in a single State. In many parts of Europe a vote was taken in' order to allow races to name the State to which they wished to belong. This work entailed endless trouble and many months passed before the boundaries were agreed upon. It will be at once apparent, when one considers how much the various races, are mixed in central Europe, that it was impossible not to leave many people in States with which they had neither race, religion nor language in common. Minorities.

As examples of this, there are to-day, approximately 520,000 Turks in Bulgaria, 3,123,568 Germans in Czecho-Slovakia, 57,000 Czechs in Austria and 16,000 Serbs in Austria. It was impossible to draw the map of Europe so as to include these scattered peoples in the lands of their own race. They form what is called a minority. From what has been said you will gather that a Minority is made up of “inhabitants of a State who differ from the majority of the population in race, language or religion.” There are still existing in parts of Europe bitter memories of years of oppression and misrule under "foreign” governments. In order to prevent harsh or brutal treatment of minorities by governments, a system of minorities treaties was drawn up after the war and it is these treaties that the League is called upon to administer to-day.

A Standard Treaty. The Standard Treaty is the treaty signed between Poland and the Allied Powers on June 28, 1919. By this treaty, Poland assures protection of life and liberty and free exercise of their religion to all inhabitants of Poland without regard to birth, nationality, language, race or religion. The treaty also makes clear which persons are Polish nationals. Further, all the people are to be equal before the law. They may use any language. They may establish and run at their own expense, religious institutions and schools. In fact, to be brief, they are not to be persecuted on account of their birth, their language, or their religion. In case of injustice they may appeal to the League Council. Any member of the Council has the right to draw the attention of the Council to an infraction of the minorities treaties.

An Achievement of the League. A War Prevented. The Balkans have always been a source of worry to European statesmen. It has been very difficult to preserve the peace there. One morning in October, 1925, a Greek sentry was found shot on the Bulgarian frontier. The Greek people were enraged and three days later their troops invaded Bulgaria. The Bulgarian General Staff, relying on the League, sent this astonishing telegram to the comlhftnder of the Bulgarian forces: "Make only slight resistance; protect the fugitive and stricken population; prevent the spread of panic in the Struma valley; and do not expose the troops to unnecessary losses in view of the fact that the incident has been laid before the Council of the League of Nations, which is expected to stop the invasion.” The Bulgarian appeal to the League to intervene reached Geneva at half-past six the next morning, Friday. Telegrams were five hours later sent out from Paris (M. Briand was acting-President of the League Council) summoning a meeting of the Council for the following Monday. Other telegrams reminded Greece and Bulgaria that they were members of the League, and called upon them to stop their armies until the Council of the League should meet. The telegram to Athens was just in time to prevent what would have been the first battle of the war. '

When the Council met on the Monday, all but one of the members were present. They included the British Foreign Secretary, the French Foreign Minister, and the Foreign Minister of Sweden, who had flown from Stockholm in order to be in time. The Council ordered the Greek armies to be withdrawn in three days time. By Friday of that week the last Greek soldier had left Bulgaria.. The League had stopped the invasion.

But this was not all. The Council was not content with stopping the war. It was determined, if possible, to remove .the cause. So it -sent a neutral commission under Sir Horace Rumbold to examine on the spot the origin of the quarrel, fix the blame, and suggest how to prevent the same thing from happening again. All this was done without a hitch. And when the Council met again in December, the Commission’s report was accepted all round, and Greece agreed to pay £45,000 in damages.

THE FUTILITY OF WAR. THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS AND THE FUTURE. Dr. A. G. B. Fisher, who was the speaker I at the weekly luncheon of the Rotary Club in Dunedin last week, took ‘The League of Nations and the Future” as the subject of his address. The marked interest aroused by recent war literature, English, French, and German, with its emphasis on human interests, was, Dr. Fisher said, a satisfactory indication that people were being more and more impressed by a sense of the futility of war. War involved suffering and waste, but the most profound tragedy associated with it was the sense of futility experienced by men in the grip of an impersonal machine, over which they had no control. It was quite good that such thoughts should be roused, but this was merely the first step. Mere abhorrence of war did not carry us very far. We could not order peace or war at will as we ordered a meal at a restaurant. We must also go into the kitchen and superintend the cooking. Some progress had been made since the signature of the Kellogg Pact, but the international situation was still far from satisfactory. The League of Nations had established a remarkable place for itself. The cynics had been astonished, and in some cases discomfited, but we could not yet be perfectly confident that the League would gain the strength and prestige necessary to maintain permanent peace. The fate of the League in the future depended largely pn the attitude which we and others like us adopted towards international questions. Did we still regard war as part of the natural order of the universe? Did we still dislike and distrust people of different race and language? It was entirely admirable that we should utter friendly sentiments and make friendly gestures, but we must go much further than this. War had been a fundamental part of our social organization, and it would be surprising if in uprooting it we did not find it necessary to scrap much of the mental furniture to which we had become accustomed and if in the process of scrapping we did not encounter distrust and opposition. We must come, for example, to understand that in the main the last war occurred not because certain individuals were wicked but because the international system was wrong. If we wished to prevent war, it would not be enough to denounce wickedness; we must change the international system. Governments found themselves at war not because they liked war, but because they went on doing .the things that led to war. War was like delirium tremens. Nobody liked it, but men suffered from it because they kept on doing the things that inevitably led to it.

The old idea of the independent sovereign State must be recognized as obsolete and out of touch with reality. We must abandon the point of view which found expression in criticisms of the Optional Clause, because it enabled backward States like Guatemala or Abyssinia to summon a mighty nation like our own before an independent tribunal which we could, not ourselves control. We <fught to be as proud of fhis as we sometimes were of the fact that no person, however insignificant and poor, was denied the right of seeking justice against the wealthy and influential. Much depended on what the young people of to-day were thinking on these subjects. It was difficult for those who remembered the pre-war period to appreciate the point of view of those who had no memory of it. But in most cases their thoughts were largely coloured by the casual comments and suggestions that they had heard from their father at the tea table. Formal instruction was much less important that the atmosphere within which people grew up and which unconsciously moulded their ideas. Feeling in regard to foreigners had much I improved, and many people must be rather ashamed to recall what they said and thought during and immediately after the war. But we were still far from feeling that active co-operation and association with foreigners were things to be welcomed. Nearly everyone in New Zealand rejoiced because our population was said to be 98j per cent. British in origin. But though New Zealand was in many respects a pleasant place to live in, and had much of which it could be justly proud, the fact that it was also a rather dull place, not a country to which one looked for great activity of thought, or an eager response to the urgent needs of changing conditions, was probably partly due to this excessive homogeneity of origin. Actually we owed a great deal in New Zealand to people who were not British, and it would be a good thing if we had more of the stimulus which would arise from a population more ■ diverse in outlook and temperament. New Zealand had only a small population, but it was an illusion to suppose that the ■ million and a-half here were any less influential than any other million and ahajf taken at random in Europe or America. In fact, it was more influential, for people in Great Britain listened with great respect to qur expressions of opinion. The feeling had been largely justified that New Zealand was willing to back without asking any questions any reactionary movements of foreign policy suggested by Governments at Home. Recent questions in England had shown that we must guard against the danger of allowing the admirable practice of dominion consultation to be used as a lever to check the adoption of more liberal policies. New Zealand ought to be a stimulus to further progress in this direction, rather than remain, as she often did, merely passive or, worse still, act as a wet blanket. We could not afford' to leave these matters to the Prime Ministers or the Ministers of the Crown, for nowhere more than in New Zealand were these, people so sensitive to the pressure of public opinion.