Wairarapa Times-Age SATURDAY, MAY 14, 1938. THE BOYCOTT WEAPON.

Wairarapa Times-Age, 14 May 1938, Page 6

Wairarapa Times-Age SATURDAY, MAY 14, 1938. THE BOYCOTT WEAPON.

TJESIDES being open to the strongest objection on other grounds, particularly that only the legally constituted Government of a country is competent to determine and control its relations with other countries, attempts like those made by the Sydney waterside workers to prevent the export of scrap metal and other materials to -Japan obviously can have no appreciable effect in checking aggression and assisting the cause of international justice and peace. The development of an effective economic boycott of aggressor natioiis, lias, on the other hand, every claim to consideration. It is clear, however, that if such a boycott is to serve its intended purpose it must be developed on an international scale.

Making an. arresting contribution to the discussion of this question in an article contributed recently to the “Sydney Morning Herald,” Mr Philip Noel-Baker, a member of the British House of Commons, observed that without oil the mechanism of modern armament would become an impotent and dangerous encumbrance to troops engaged in war and that: —

Oil, therefore, ought to be the key to peace. For if aggressors were cut off from oil supplies, their wars would end in certain and humiliating defeat.

Going at length into facts supporting these contentions, Mr Noel-Baker mentioned that nine Powers produced among them 96.4 per cent of the total annual oil output of the world. These nations are, in order of importance, the United States of America, Soviet Russia, Venezuela, Rumania, Persia, Dutch East Indies, Mexico, Irak and the British Empire.

Mi’ Noel-Baker maintained that an oil embargo against Italy would have made it impossible for that country to conquer Abyssinia and that an oil embargo would be no less effective against Japan today. Admittedly Japan has reserve stocks of oil, but these would fall far short of meeting her requirements in the long war to which she is plainly committed in China. Mr Noel-Baker dealt with and dismissed the possibility that Japan might seek to satisfy her requirements by seizing the Dutch East Indies. He summed up Ms conclusions in the following terms: —

The governments could stop the war by an oil embargo. The governments of the League Powers eoulcl do it, even if the United States would give no more help than their Neutrality Act allows. If these governments did it, they would revitalise the League, re-establish the sanctity of international law, and end the nightmare of a general conflagration by which all Europe is today obsessed. To dry up the stream of oil is a surer and a cheaper safeguard against aggression than all the rearmaanent programmes in the world.

Even if these claims be discounted in some measure as perhaps too sweepingly optimistic, it seems beyond question that by an organisation of economic resources, of which oil certainly is one of the most important where issues of peace and war are concerned, the leading democracies of the world and nations prepared to act with them might exercise an enormous influence for peace and correspondingly discourage the piling up of armaments even by those nations most aggressively inclined. Moral, rather than material force, must be flic ultimately vital factor in any crusade of the kind, but prospects in such a crusade would be brightened enormously if the nations engaged in it felt themselves possessed of resources which might be depended upon to serve their intended purpose.