THE PROTOCOL AND AFTER.

Wairarapa Daily Times, 30 March 1925, Page 4

THE PROTOCOL AND AFTER.

Though it is true that the Council of the League of Nations, which met at Geneva, possessed no authority to dispose of the protocol of arbitration and disarmament, the fate of the document was determined by Mr Chamberlain s speech. The protocol is dead. No treatment at the hands of the Assembly in September next can revive it. There will be protests, of course, against the attitude of Great Britain and the Dominions; but obviously enough these cannot affect the simple fact that the League has again failed to devise a satisfactory method of preventing war. This does not mean that the task is beyond the wit of man to accomplish. It merely makes more ample than before man’s knowledge of the difficulties. Just as tho Treaty of Mutual Assistance, sponsored by the League at the invitation of Viscount Cecil, was rejected by the Administration of Mr Mr Ramsay Macdonald, so now has the rather more famous protocol, of which Mr Macdonald, M. Hcrriot and Dr. Benes were the architects, been found unacceptable to British and dominion Governments. That the virtual destruction of the protocol by Mr Chamberlain was no wanton act of sabotage, •but, rather, the result of determination to -avoid entanglement of the Empire in commitments which would yield no relief from the burden of preparation for war, has been conveyed to the world in phrases of the most complete justification. The existence of powerful communities outside the League, and the embodiment within the protocol itself of the disastrous principle of compulsory arbitration upon issues arising out of domestic policy, made it impossible for the British Empire to ratify the obligations involved in the acceptance of the scheme. With the general intention of the protocol all the peoples of the world are probably in sympathy, theoretically, at any rate; hut at no time has there been even the slightest indication that any material number of them were prepared to endorse such transformations as had been contemplated. As Mr Chamberlain has very properly reminded the world, theso suggest the League of Nations being eventually driven to making organisation for war, on perhaps the largest scale, its main activity, instead of the promotion of peace by friendly co-oper-ation. The view that this would be deplorable —that anything leading up to tho idea of war becoming the business of the League instead of peace w r ould weaken its status and authority—is practically unchallengeable.