POLICY AT GENEVA

Hokitika Guardian, 13 September 1932, Page 6

POLICY AT GENEVA

SIR lAN HAMILTON’S COMMENT.

LONDON, September 10.

Reference to the Disarmament Conference was made by General Sir 130 Hamilton, who was one of the principal speakers at the reunion of the Royal Naval Vounteer Reserve Association in London.

“As a sincere hut, I hope, sane lover of peace, I want to make a ’protest on behalf of soldiers and sailors against the complete misunderstanding both of fighting and war mentality which is being exhibited by the highbrows assembled just now at Geneva,” said Sir lan Hamilton. “To hear eminent lawyers and politicians splitting hairs as to the difference between an aeroplane bomb and a cannon ball is really too sad when you, pause to think of the hotel bills these fellows are running up. We don’t need conferences costing thousands of pounds to tell us that you may aim at a colonel and. shoot an old woman—it’s often been done.

“Then again, their war mentality. Have they really so little imagination —so bad a memory? Is it possible they can really be so blind to believe that when a nation is fighting for its life it wiil hesitate to use its ordinary civil aeroplanes for .‘bombardment from the air? Would they expect a drowning man who lias clutched a straw to leave hole! of it if you shouted at. him through a megaphone: ‘That’s private property’? “If our children want to fight they wil fight, and fight with club's and baffle-axes if 'there's nothing better to hand. The thing is to break the bad habit, not to try to legalise and regulate it. It ever we are to have peace in this world there is only one sane way in which at least to make a beginning—abolish conscript and you break the teeth of war.

“It is enough to turn the white angels of Heaven as black as crows to see the great nations solemnly pretending to disarm, and all the time forcing millions of young people, by law to learn how to fight and how to go to war. This Disarmament Conference appears to me, in fact, a pretty ghastly joke.”