Makers of War

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 449, 3 September 1928, Page 13

Makers of War

People, Not Rulers Archbishop and Pact “VAGUE AND INDISTINCT” (Special to THE SUN) CHRISTCHURCH. Saturday. “Like the Mayor, I can’t work up any enthusiasm for the Peace Pact, because I know perfectly well how easy it is to go ahead of the sense of the masses of the people. It is not the rulers who make the war. but the people, and one doesn’t know what is behind these documents.” Archbishop Julius expressed this opinion of the Kellogg Pact at a meeting of members of the Christchurch branch of the Navy League last evening. “When this happens,” he asked, in speaking of the Pact, “what do you want with a navy? Well, I must honestly confess I couldn’t scrap it. These efforts are for the present purely tentative. They fail not because they haven’t gone far enough, but because the basis is quite unreliable. We don’t know if the Pact is going to be signed in America. It is very vague, very indistinct, and it is very hard to understand how any nation can be prevented from going to war if it chooses. On that ground we are not ripe for scrapping our navy.

“War is like a fever, a frenzy, and you will never -know when that frenzy will lay hold of people. “The weakness on our part was provocative of the Great War, and indeed it has been said that if our Navy had not been weakened the war would never have come. If it had been stronger at the start I have no doubt the war would have ended much more quickly.” “ FIGHTING ANIMAL ”

Archbishop Julius opened his address by saying that he could really speak from both bides of the question: “I could stand in the Navy League Halt for one thing,” he. said, “and urge increased armament and a large Navy, and on the other hand I could stand in the Square and say. ‘let us have no armament at all! Chuck your blessed Navy away! We don’t want it at all!’ ” The Archbishop went on to say that man was a fighting animal, from those ancestral days when he fought for his wife, for women had always been and were still at the bottom of all fighting. “Whether we ever shall get the nations to live at peace together,” he continued, “I can’t say. Since the war a new spirit has sprung up. Up to that time we were content to look jealously at our neighbours without any thought other than of a treaty. To-day we are faced with a very definite movement towards peace. First of all we have the League of Nations, which has disappointed many people; then there was the Locarno Treaty, and again the hopes of men have run high with the signing this week of the Pact. Well, no flags have been flown and the bells have not rung out except in Wellington, where they are a bit more energetic.” INSTRUMENT OF PEACE

The speaker said that he was not sufficiently convinced of the goodwill of the nations to trust them. “I love the cultured American,” he said, “and I love»the honest American worker, but I downright hate the commercial expert and the astute American who can make his almighty dollar at whatever cost.”

He characterised the Navy as a wonderful instrument of peace, and when he looked on those great ships he recalled how often they had been used to avert war. Ho thought they stood more for peace than for war, and the time was not ripe for the breaking up of that splendid institution of peace. Then again he thought that the Navy gave the finest training in the world, and the British naval officer was one of the finest men one coiild meet anywhere—courteous, kindly, pleasant, cheery, and helpful to everybody. The Navy was, and had been for long years past, a great police force, and he could not help feeling that the time would come when it would be used solely for that purpose. “If we don’t find the hand of God in the British Navy,” Archbishop Julius concluded, “well, I don’t know where you will find it.”