JAPAN AND THE LEAGUE

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 76, Issue 83, 8 April 1933, Page 13 (Supplement)

JAPAN AND THE LEAGUE

Tho Japanese Government’s decision to terminate Japan’s membership of the League of Nations has aroused no surprise and significantly few recriminations. The Japanese public has been encouraged so successfully to believe that the League has “trampled ou Japan’s honour and prestige’’ (the words of a Government spokesman) that the Government’s own. safety would be endangered by a conciliatory course. Now that the break has come, nothing can be gained by outbursts of moral indignation against Japanese policy in the last 18 months. That policy has been condemned outspokenly by tho Lytton Commission, by the Committee of Nineteen, and, more discreetly, in resolutions passed by the League Council and the Assembly. Nor can it be doubted that these official judgments have the support of a large part of the civilised world. What should now engage the attention of those who have hoped against hope that the League would settle the Manchurian dispute is not the reckless immorality of the course pursued by Japan but the failure of the League States to prevent Japan from taking that course. It. is not sufficient or ever true to say that the League did all that its founders intended it should do in such a crisis. The purposes of the I.eague are clearly defined in the pre amble to the Covenant; and in the Manchurian dispute those purposes were defeated not once but many times by ambiguities and loop-holes in the Covenant itself. Japan’s actions will confer at least one benefit on rhe League if they result in a thorough and realistic overhaul of its constitution and of the procedure of the Council and the Assembly. But defects in the Covenant wore not the only or the main cause of the League’s failure to restrain Japan. Had the European Powers and the United States been fir.n end united in the early stages of the dispute, it is probable that the Ma.t--i hukuo Government would not now exist. As it was, Washington blow hot and cold, France wavered between her regard for the sanctity of treaties and her desire for an understanding with Japan, and Sir John Simon was “very happy to think that British policy, whatever may be its shortcomings. . . . has kept us on terms of perfectly friendly relations both with China and Japan.’’ Tf these, are the. guardians of international justice, it is not. surprising that international justice, has been flouted.—Christchurch Press.