The Sun MONDAY, JANUARY 23, 1928 CAGING THE DOVE

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 259, 23 January 1928, Page 8

The Sun MONDAY, JANUARY 23, 1928 CAGING THE DOVE

IT lias been said, as a cold statement of fact that there is far more killing-power in Europe and in the world to-day than existed when the League of Nations was formed. A maze of statistics need not be used to emphasise the assertion. Even in its moderate form the truth about international preparation for war is appalling. In Europe alone there are ten million trained men available for highly organised slaughter in modern warfare. Every country in the group of European nations, excepting Great Britain, has compulsory lnilitary service. By reason of the lessons of the World War each nation could now, in record time, if the dire necessity arose again, put one man out of every ten men in its total population in the field. Then experts say, with a note of pride in their voices, that science and invention have become so efficient and resourceful as to make the war-machine more formidable than ever for inflicting death and destruction on a gigantic scale. Apart from heavy artillery and machineguns, we should have swarms of airplanes, fleets of armoured tanks, innumerable mechanical monsters, bombs by the billion, and deadly recipes for poison gas. These, and other things besides, are what the peacemakers at Paris nine years ago called the peace-effectives of the new and better world after the greatest of all wars. It is really not surprising that they are not blessed in the history of our experience. And now, the greatest peacemaker of them all screams loudest for a mighty navy and power to rule the seas. The United States, whose only provocation for the building of more gunboats to-day takes the grotesque form of rum-running craft along its “dry” coasts, will not be content with anything less than a multimillion dollar naval construction scheme. And the* American love of bigness threatens to inflate the project to the dimensions of a billion-dollar bubble. It looks as though the American nation was not long enough in the World War to learn the folly of preparing for another one. And it has forgotten the ironic fact that it was Woodrow Wilson who would have no Peace Treaty without the Covenant of the League of Nations as a, potent instrument for universal peace. There are times when great wealth distorts a nation’s as well as an individual’s judgment. One does not care lightly to take Mr. Lloyd George nowadays as a dependable authority on anything,, except the art of political oratory, but there was wisdom m his recent comment in the House of Commons that “the two countries that did most of the blithering about fteace —Great Britain and the United States of America—have increased their expenditure on armaments,” so that they are not in the moral position to enforce disarmament in Europe until they cut down their own expenditure. Since the peace of the world depends in the first degree, if not yet wholly, upon the maintenance of peace between Great Britain and the United States, it is to be deplored that they have taken the leading places til the naval armaments competition. It is true that Great Britain has pruned this year’s naval construction programme very severely, but it would have more conducive to more moderation on the other side of the Atlantic .if the British policy of reduction had been disclosed impressively at the Geneva Conference last year, when there was too much talk about parity in cruiser strength and not enough about mutual desire for peace. There are only two great rivals on all the seas to-day, and since war between Great Britain and America is “unthinkable” in any circumstances, why compete with each other in the construction of fighting craft? The best place for the building up of world peace is at Geneva.