THE GREATEST RESULT OF THE WAR.

Taranaki Daily News, 7 May 1917, Page 6

THE GREATEST RESULT OF THE WAR.

A SEA LEAGUE OF AMERICA AND BRITAIN. DECIDING THE WHOLE TENDENCY OF CIVILISATION. , London, Feb. 10. Will the greatest .result of the war be a Sea League between Great Britain and the United State,;? Mr. J. 1.. Garvin thinks it will, and, writing in .the-Observer, he outlines the great possibilities of such a union of the English-speaking peoples. "Let no one suy that there is no moral process to be discerned in the course of history or that' modern investigators into the truth of actual happenings and concrete facts can ignore that wonderful psychic sway of action and reaction by which the most formidable organised powers, when in effect those of tyranny and evil, have evoked, against themselves, unsuspected, spiritual, conquering Boreas out of the depths of the soul of man," writes Mr. Garvin.

''Sooner or later that which has sought to live by the sword has perished by .the sword. To stamp that lesson 911 tiit world's memory, so that it never shall be effaced, must be our chief purpose in this quarrel. As the moral process has worked in the past against every dynastic or racial attempt at universal dominion or ascendancy, so now, only more so. "If we bear ourselves well in the next sis months the Kaiser will prove such an architect of other people's fortunes as Hie \rorld in all its endless play of contradiction between intentions anil events has never yet known." AN UNPARALLELED DRAMA. And this is the way in which Mr. Garvin thinks that the Kaiser may be "architect of other people's fortunes": "We can only say to the Kaiser's latest policy that 'this mr.kes Shakespeare smilo.' America is on the verge of war. but not yet over the top. The pubmarinu menace is at work against our marine communications, like a knife slashing at a network. These two things together are an unparalleled drama in the life of the English-speaking world.

''They are like to draw the two mighty stocks together in a league of kinship and freedom, renewing for ages that groat patent of tlieir blood whereby they have traversed the seas and peopled so many shores. Formal or unwritten, that pact of Empire and Republic to keep for ever open in war and peace their common patli across all the wet highways of the world would realise a bolder vision than the most fervent brother of the Pilgrims' Clubs on either side of the Atlantic had dared to dream until one short week agn. "The Sea League of America and Britain would make botlf invulnerable. It would ensure the fall of any conceivable aggressive combination against which they might lean their double weight. It would decide the whole tendency of civilisation in the twentieth century and probably the destinies of mankind for a thousand years. Thoughts like these were as familiar as true in the minds of a minority of idealists of me oiaer school, both in the United State;, and at home.

"The light had .often seenied more and more obscured fiy the complex economic strivings and international rivalries of our own time. But now, unless we mistake, it is revealed anew never again to ho hidden. It will act with increasing influence to unguessed purpose on the lives of a hundred and sixty millions of English-speaking people, and on that third part of,the world which is within tlieir influence.

THE NEW CONSEQUENCE. "We believe that this moral reunion and practical co-operation between the United States and our own United Empire will come about. We believe it will come about, because it is life and death to them both to have free communication afloat and to eliminate once and for ever the future possibilities of such a peril as now threaten the very nerve centres of their common traffic. If we are right historians will remember the new consequence as by far the greatest result of this war.

"Tho union of the English-speaking world in one cause can break that terrorism for ever by sea and land, while offering hopes for all civilisation which (he victory of the present Allies alone could never bring about. This is the issue which President Wilson has to decide one way or the other.

"America is the sole judge of what her own honor and duty may or may not require; it is a responsibility as solemn, as momentous, as ever yet rested on tho ruler of a great people." AMERICA HAS COME IN. "America has 'come in.' To what event?" asks the Nation. "To a conflict which now threatens the starvation of the -greater part of Europe. Had the same territory beftn visited by a much earthquake whose shock extended from London to Petrograd—the, European world, Tltm' and 'anti-llun,' would have been united in a common effort of succor and restoration. It is now torn in twain because its present visitation is moral as well as physical. It is a sundering of t wills and tempers so complete as to shatter nil tho elements of the social order, and to threaten to convert tho most fertile lands of Kurope into a scene of actual desolation. "In the main this society of nations was originally broken up by" the attempt to introduce into it an Imperalism which it had long out-grown. With the c-ntry of America, the balance sets definitely to the- side of Democracy, and we may also look forward to a re-knitting, in time, and after a long period of exacerbation, of the broken ties of civilisc-l living. Henceforward Western democracy is safe, and its ideas must definitely permeate the central and.the Eastern European world, THIS MORAL ENCOUNTER.' "In this moral encounter, America comes in with the necessary equipment for success," adds the Nation. "Unle;s Germany's assumption is that by neit June she will have cut off the world's maritime commerce from these islrci, and thus severed the main artery of the Entente, she must realise that she cannot win. She cannot fight America's brains and money and numbc-rs, and her force of centralised and organised industry, which stands out as' the chief rival of the German Cartel. And she lias nothing with which to meet America's great reinforcement of the moral of the Allies."

"The League of Nations is made. It has lost its last neutral and gained its first champion. America will not come in to share the rancours and the hatreds, the appetites and the ambition, of the vrar. She will come in to emphasise its ; character as a straggle to realise the idea, .pf.publio iseMvC