CHEMICAL WARFARE

Evening Post, Volume CXII, Issue 84, 6 October 1931, Page 8

CHEMICAL WARFARE

FUTURE POSSIBILITIES

Speaking in the Town Hall last night at the people's meeting to support the Disarmament Conference, to be held at Geneva on 2nd February, 1932, the Leader of the Opposition (Mr. H. E. Holland) said that every war must be written out as a means of settling disputes between nations, or civilisation would have to face the possibility of its own destruction. In any conflicts in the future, said Mr. Holland, chemical warfare would play the larger part. Chemical warfare had played a large part in the Great War, but the possibilities of chemical warfare in the late war would be proved to have been as nothing compared with the possibilities of chemical warfare in the clays of the future. The Great War was fought on the sea, under the sea, on land, and to some extent in the air by means of mechanical devices, but mechanical devices to-day were something greater than the world had ever known, and in the war of the future there would be no protection for the non-combatant, no protection for the women, and no protection for the child. It will be the nations as a whole that will be menaced, and, as I have said, unless humanity ends war, then war is going to end civilisation. (-Applause.) It would be far better if we could beat every sword into a plough-share" and every spear into a priming hook, and use our chemical researches for greater productive purposes rather than for the destruction of human life. "However, we all have to await the Conference at Geneva. There are great possibilities there."