OUTLAWRY OF WAR.

Waikato Times, Volume 103, Issue 17365, 29 March 1928, Page 6

OUTLAWRY OF WAR.

The efforts being made to bring about a reduction of armaments are welcomed by all thinking people, for there is no doubt that competition in the building of battleships and other instruments of war is likely to foster a warlike spirit that may result at any time in an open breach. "There never was a lime in human history," writes Lord Thomson in the Century Magazine, "when public opinion was more; ripe for the outlawry of force and violence. Already mechanisation has robbed war of much of its old glamour; its bloody splendour is an exploded fiction; the men who fought and the civilians who suffered know it for what it is. No glorification by historians and novelists can restore its lost prestige. The ilame of war is not only fed by national budgets, but it is also shielded by international law; and thus no human action is more lawful than this crime. The position is so illogical as to be untenable. Outlawry of war offers a way out of this dilemma: it would isolate the flame as far as possible, remove it as an honoured institution from our midst, set it apart, progressively diminish its supply of financial fuel, and, pending its ultimate extinction, make if more difficult for the most foolish moth to burn its wings. Europe is old and America is young; hence the great psychological difference between them, which only some simple formula of world-wide application can*bridge. The proposal to outlaw war is such a formula, it will not bring immediately a millennium, but it will appeal, both in Europe and America, to millions of men and women who have heads as well as hearts, and will see in it a common indispensable first step. More cannot be expected from any plan which attempts to regulate the elemental passions and virile vices of mankind."