The Sun 42 Wyndham Street, Auckland, N.Z. DISARMAMENT FIASCO

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 116, 6 August 1927, Page 8

The Sun 42 Wyndham Street, Auckland, N.Z. DISARMAMENT FIASCO

NONE of our readers will say or think now that we wrote recklessly or carelessly on June 21, and again on July 11, wjien it was asserted in this column that the taradiddles at Geneva about naval armaments limitation would yield nothing better than pious intentions and excellent diplomatic palaver. It was not prescience that dictated the prediction; plain common sense supported a forecast of failure. Those who would have real.disarmament must first of all have peace in their hearts. So the Three-Power conference has ended in polite failure, the representatives of each one of the trio expressing regret and bestowing thanks all round for patience, courtesy and that charming goodwill which anybody would hold toward the whole world amid the tranquil beauty of the Swiss shrine of universal peace and idealism. It might be unkind to say now that the hollow result of the conference is an ignominious failure. The delegates certainly tried hard with transparent honesty to find a common basis of naval armaments limitation, but at no time in the course of their wordy battle about cruisers were they actuated by the spirit of sacrifice which inspired the five Great Powers at Washington some six years ago to agree upon a laudable measure of disarmament and thus thrill all nations with a new emotion and the hope that, at last, the world was to know the joy of Enduring peace. On that historic occasion the voice of the late President Harding, whose invitation to' Great Britain, Prance, Italy, and Japan to join America in a noble effort at minimising the enormous disbursements, in the rivalries of armaments was accepted with avowed pleasure, rang around the universe like the sound of a celestial trumpet. “ Gentlemen of the conference’’ (declared American statesman), “the United States welcomes you with unselfish hands. We harbour no fears; ice have no sordid ends to serve; ice suspect no enemy; we contemplate or apprehend no conquest. Content with what we have, we seek nothing which is another’s. We only wish with you that finer, nobler tiling which no nation can do alone. Our one hundred millions want less of armament and none of war.” Time has proved again (as it proved so mockingly in respect of the Wilsonian idealism) that America often speaks with two voices. On this occasion the dulcet note of the celestial trumpet has become the strident bray of a war bugle. The unselfish nation that harbours no fears and has no sordid ends to serve or enemies to suspect demands naval parity with a nation that lias a coast-line of millions of miles to protect and the sea-borne commerce of the world’s greatest Empire to maintain in the security of peace. Nothing is to be gained from discussing the casuistry of the naval disarmament fiasco at Geneva. It is more necessary to make it a subject for international meditation and prayer. Next to the wickedness of an economic system which grinds the faces of the poor and makes earth the playground of the cheat and the crook, there is no greater mockery of civilisation than provocative competition in armaments and preparation for war within a decade after the most ruinous conflict in history—a madness of rivalry that has staggered enterprise and laid encumbrances upon prosperity and posterity for a hundred years. It is to be regretted beyond temperate expression that the representatives of three Great Powers at Geneva could not agree to prove their love and lofty avowals of peace and goodwill toward one another by adopting a programme of naval disarmament. The question is not altogether a material problem. It is also a moral problem. In addition to perpetuating the international expenditure of £200,000,000 a year on naval armaments, the failure at Geneva will tempt nations to think of war and forget that they should (in the words of President Harding) “be more concerned with living to the fulfilment of God’s high intent than with agencies of warfare and destruction.”