LEAGUE OF NATIONS

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 1, Issue 85, 8 November 1939, Page 6

LEAGUE OF NATIONS

PLEA FOR RETENTION

CHANCE FOR EFFECTIVENESS

In a letter to "The Times," Professor Gilbert Murray, the distinguished Australian-born Oxonian, pleads for the League of Nations to be retained as the foundation of

whatever authority it may be desired to set up after the war to secure just dealing and the rule of law in international affairs.

The League's roots, he writes, "are too widely and deeply fixed to be torn up;, its r.on-political work, together Avith thai of the Court and the 1.L.0., far 100 valuable to be thrown away. Besides, one must needs build on existing realities, not in the air. More than this one can 'hardly say. It may be that certain amendments of the Covenant giving more effectiveness to Articles XI, XVI, and XIX, together with some greater realisation by Governments of their collective duty, may be as much as is needed, or as much as can be obtained. It may be that at last we can form inside the general League a real Federation of Europe, in-which sovereignties shall be less recalcitrant, frontiers convparatively unimportant, and no nation's development threatened by the arms of its neighbours.

"The general principle is plain. It is the principle for which the League of Nations Union was granted its Roj'al Charter and has received the support ol the leaders o£ all churches and all parties. It is the only system by which the Germans can haw absolute equality with other nation.-;

and 3 r et no power of terrorising 'hem. The form in which it can r<e realised will depend on the course ')(' events hitherto unknown and unpredictable."