THE PACT AT LOCARNO

New Zealand Tablet, Volume LII, Issue 50, 16 December 1925, Page 43

THE PACT AT LOCARNO

' "Sumetliing at last seems achieved the note- : of doubt will be removed as soon as we axe assured that" Great Britain and the Continental Powers are determined to abide by the pact (says America). When England, France, and Germany sign an agreement not to make war until the last means of avoiding hostilities has been found useless, the world can congratulate itself that much of the bitterness which poisoned the conferences of 1918 and the subsequent year, has disappeared. For that new spirit of conciliation, in humble gratitude we thank Almighty God. • Perhaps the position of Germany can now be' discussed without fear of exposure to the accusation of disloyally to one's own country. It may even be that the very men who drew up the terms at Versailles, are now beginning to realise that what they demanded was and is impossible. We need not raise the question of what nation was responsible for the war, or upon what Government rested the responsibility of at last touching the match that set the world in flames. If there was glory enough to share, much the same may be said of the responsibility. There had been precious little of justice and charity in any European chancellery for more than a century. Justice was forgotten; charity was held to be an ignoble weakness. Expediency and diplomacy, which are often fine phrases for deception, were supremo, lor the world of politics had decided that it could make headway well enough without Almighty God and His law. What happened in 1914 was not the result of the act of a crazed fanatic, but the inevitable working out of a godless statecraft to a godless end. Whether or not Germany's was the supreme guilt, it was no step toward international peace to compel the new German Government to wear the penitent's sheet and to confess that her people had fought for ends that were plainly and objectively unworthy. As the late President Wilson well said, our quarrel was not with the German people, but with the Government that had ceased to represent them. To ask that people, now living under a Government of its own choice to stand before the world as a . nation of unrepentant malefactors, was not statecraft. It was not even good sense, for it placed a bar against the growth of what all, presumably, desired—international peace. It was in this mind that Pius XI bade the nations remember that in dealing with Germany not only justice but charity was indispensable. The peace party which branded sixty million people dwelling in the heart of Europe as a nation of criminals was in reality a war party.