WORLD PEACE

Otago Witness, Issue 4030, 9 June 1931, Page 34

WORLD PEACE

THE MOST TELLING FACTOR RUGBY, June 4. The Foreign Secretary (Mr Arthur Henderson), delivering the Burge Memorial lecture in London to-night, on “ Consolidating World Peace,” declared that in respect to every forward policy in the last 12 years, the public opinion of the nations had always been ahead of what the Governments were prepared to do. As it had been with moral disarmament, so, he was convinced, it would be with physical disarmament as well. His only fear was that the peoples would not understand the chance with which next year’s Disarmament Conference presented them, and they not make their Governments understand that their delegations to the conference could not be too bold or go too far. “ My own fear is that the nations will not show the Governments in time that they can count upon their support for all reductions in armaments, however drastic, to which the conference may agree.” The world must be organised for peace, as it had been organised for war, and the peace-makers must direct the forces of public opinion towards a deliberately planned and carefully concerted effort, if the awful calamity of another world tragedy, fought under still more terrible conditions than the last, was to be averted. Mr Henderson referred to the strengthening of the general authority and prestige of the League of Nations, and declared that the day was near, if it had not alreaady come, when it should be unthinkable that a nation should refuse to submit its quarrels either to the League Council or to arbitration. Experience suggested that world peace could no longer be guaranteed by armaments, and that modern warfare could no longer be localised. Terrible as the last war had been, any further war must be infinitely worse. “ Make no mistake, unless by successive, and it may be by gradual, stages, we can bring about disarmament of the world, innocent people will then be victims of deadly attack from the air.”