The Daily News. MONDAY, MARCH 20. NATIONS AND ARBITRATION.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIII, Issue 266, 20 March 1911, Page 4

The Daily News. MONDAY, MARCH 20. NATIONS AND ARBITRATION.

Evidently the nations are not yet entitled to wear the halo of a blameless existence, and the earth seethes with discontent, preparation for gigantic slaughter, crimes, strikes and ill-will. If you take the ordinary daily paper you mu3t note that much of its news is a record of bitterness. The item about ''contingent Dreadnoughts" is not exactly angelic in its inference; the position ill Mexico is not peaceful; the news about the aggressive "Little Brown Man" cannot be taken as soporilic; the Clapham Common murder shows that man is crawling to tlie light but slowly; and the olive branch was not waving worth a halfpenny when one boxer in Sydney killed another. There is a cheerless paragraph about a bank-teller against whom misappropriation is alleged; another bit of the gruesome story of the Camorristi j a dreary item about robbing the till; and ' a reported sneer from Germany that Britain is not sincere in her desire that arbitration shall supersede war in the arrangement of international quarrels. Peace societies, with wonderful optimism, suggest that the time may come for the universal waving of the white flag; great personages are showing that crime may be more or less eliminated by scientific application; the eugenists are hopeful that in time a new clean race may be evolved out of the sable particles they have to work on; and, altogether, the man of ideals is asked to look beyond the darkling cloud towards the argentiferous background. The evolution of a race, each unit of which subscribes to the theory that all the human passions shall die and universal peace reign, is, as far as the mere groper after truth may see, impossible. Nations do not make war, and if a universal referendum of the civilised nations were taken, the glad possibilitij r is that "there sliall be no more war." The nations that believe they have been civilised for centuries arc war-worn and "sick of slaying." They prepare to slay, however, because universal doubt in the integrity of a potential rival compels it. It is humanly possible that each of the civilised nations might obtain their desires without recourse to force of arms, but awakened nations with the precedents of the past as their only guide still conceive there is no way to their respective goals but the "stern arbitrament of war." Thus, if we think anything about the matter at all, we are forced to the conclusion that the nations that rule the earth would seize any real opportunity that might be presented to rule it peacefully. We talk learnedly about federation, and the defensive, if peaceful alliance of the white people of the globe would be the only sure method of stilling the ambitions of the others. To bring about the universal brotherhood of man—and we mean white man — nations and individuals must be forced to think. Individuals do most of the thinking for the crowd, and individuals make war which involves nations. Mr. Norman Angell has been thinking for the nations, and has lately produced a new edition of bis argument for peace under the title of "The Great Illusion." The author attacks the idea that man's pugnacity must always stand in the way of international agreement and that the warlike nations are the only nations that possess the necessary virility to win in the struggle for life. Mr. Angell shows that the warlike nations do not in- | hnrit the earth, that warfare does not make for the survival of the fittest or the most virile, and that the struggle between nations is not a part of the evolutionary law of man's advance. "Struggle is the law of survival with man, as elsewhere," says Mr. Angell—but it is the struggle of man with the universe, not man with man. "Dog does

not eat dog"; even tigers do not live on 1 one another; they live on their prey. The planet is man's prey. Man's strug- | gle in the struggle of organism, which is V human society, in its adaptation to its environment, the world—not tile struggle between different parts of the same organism. The writer continues: ''The error here indicated arises from mistaking the imperfect working of different parts of the same organism for the conflict of individual organisms. Britain to-day supports forty millions in greater comfort than it supported twenty a little over half a century ago. The individual in his sociological aspect is not the complete organism. He who attempts to ' live without association with his fellows dies. Nor is the nation the complete organism. If Britain attempted to live without co-operation with other nations, half the population would starve. The completer the co-operation the greater the vitality; the more imperfect the cooperation, the less the vitality. If Russia does England an injury, it is futile to kill Russian peasants. The real conflict is not English against Russians at all, but the interest of all law-abiding folk—Russian and English alike—against oppression, corruption and incompetence. . . . Where the co-opera-tion between the parts of the social organism is as complete as our mechanical development has recently made it, it is impossible to fix the limits of the community, and to say what is one community and what is another. The interdependence of modern nations is the growth of little more than fifty years. One must not overlook the Law of Acceleration. The age of man on the earth is variously placed at from thirty to three hundred thousand years. ! He has in some despects developed more in the last two hundred years than in all the preceding ages. We see more change now in ten years than originally in ten thousand. Who shall foretell the developments of a generation?" When man understands the elemental reasons set down with such lucidity there can be no more war. The logic of it all is that mankind are brothers, each one depending on the other, wherever the individuals may be—and that it is foolish to kill the brother on whom we lean.