DURABLE PEACE

Evening Post, Volume CXXXVIII, Issue 56, 4 September 1944, Page 3

DURABLE PEACE

PRACTICAL STEPS URGED

Twelve hundred and fifty-one prominent Protestant'clergymen and laymen from every State in the United States of America addressed recently to President Roosevelt, Congress, and the people of the United States an appeal that practical steps be taken immediately to form the nucleus of a general world organisation as envisaged in the Moscow Declaration and the Connolly resolution adopted by the Senate. Such an international organisation, said the signers of the appeal, is needed now "to promote unity of political 1 and diplomatic decision by the prinI cipal^ United Nations and consistency with such aspects of the moral law as (have been proclaimed by the Atlantic Charter and other. declarations of the United Nations." Expressing the belief that the time is at hand when a concrete beginning should be made in this .direction, the signers emphasised that if international organisation is to achieve a just and durable peace it must from the beginning be planned to become universal in membership and curative in purpose. : ■ The Protestant appeal was issued through the Commission on a Just and Durable Peace, set up by.the Federal, Council of Churches of Christ in America, with a constituency of 25,000,000 people. The signers of the appeal subscribed to the Six Pillars of Peace enunciated a year ago by the commission as the political propositions that are essential to the setting up of a peace based on moral law. In line with the position taken by the commission, the signers declared that "the international organisation which is established should have not merely the task of seeking physical security, but responsibility to deal regularly with conditions which contain the seeds of future war." : "It should be designed," said the appeal, "to.seek the change of treaty conditions which. may develop to be unjust and provocative of war, to bring within the scope of international agreement those economic and financial acts of nations which have widespread international repercussions, to promote the attainment of autonomy as a genuine , goal for dependent peoples, and to assure for people everywhere a regime of religious and intellectual liberty. "We appeal to the President, the Congress, and the people of the United States to work vigorously for practical steps which will initiate such an organisation."