OUTLAWRY OF WAR.

Waikato Times, Volume 103, Issue 17385, 23 April 1928, Page 4

OUTLAWRY OF WAR.

The proposal for Hie outlawry of war which seems to have captivated America us being a more effective means of bringing übout universal peace than Hie League of Nations is not perhaps fully understood. Dr. Charles C. Morrison, who has made a most careful study of international affairs, gives a very complete account of Hie proposal in his book, “The Outlawry of War.” It, is the first book dealing with the subject io be published in Britain, and if will be of great interest, Io everyone who realises that the abolition of war is the great- problem confronting civilisation. In his foreword Dr. Morrison writes; “Until the appearance of flic proposal for the outlawry of war, the peace movement was lacking in a comprehensive and clear insight into the nature of the thing it was out to destroy. War has been approached in a sort, of mystical mood, its essential nature has not been thoroughly considered and objectively defined. As a consequence the peace movement has been characterised by an almost, blind empiricism. Lacking the chart and the rudder of a reasoned understanding of war, our peace programmes have, represented reactions to a sort of obscurantist stimulus just to do somettiing, with the result, that they have for the most part gone wide of Ihc mark or have confused the essential issue by dragging in irrelevant, controversies which preclude agreement and inhibit decisive action. If this hook has any merit at all, it will be found in four theses: One, that the problem of. war must be disentangled from all other controversies, and, thus isolated, brought directly before the nations for a yes or no decision; a second, lhat war is an institution —legal, established, sanctified, and supreme; a third, that it can be abolished only by disestablishing it, by casting it out. of the legal system of nations in which it is entrenched; and the fourth, that its disestablishment can be made effective only by establishing in its place an institution of peace conceived not. under political but under juridical categories. This can be done only by a basic change in international law. A general treaty denouncing war as a means of settling international disputes would crystalise in legal form the moral will of the civilised peoples of the world.”