The Daily News. TUESDAY, JUNE 18, 1918. THE TRUE ROAD TO PEACE.

Taranaki Daily News, 18 June 1918, Page 4

The Daily News. TUESDAY, JUNE 18, 1918. THE TRUE ROAD TO PEACE.

Tlie! fact is beginning to dawn upon tlie world that there is no short and easy road to universal peace. The world is divided into a vast number of nations, races, and peoples, each recognising but the smallest obligation to help its neighbors, and entertaining all sorts of ignorant, domineering, and covetous ideas about them. Each has slipped into the habit of regarding one another not as friends and neighbors, but as enemies and rivals from which they have to protect themselves by armaments and war. Only through the agony of the war is the world coming to recognise its common humanity. In the last number of the Round Table the only way to the attainment of universal peace is pointed out, in language as impressive as it is logical. It says that it is the recognition of the world as essentially a single Commonwealth of many Nations, in the triumph of the sense of trusteeship towards the backward and the weak over the desire to dominate or exploit, in the growth of healthy democracy everywhere, and in the appreciation of the fact that peace in the international sphere sphere can only be attained by the same means as in the national, by the supremacy of justice, that the real hope of lasting peace lies. Reaction from the war may save the world from its horrors for a time, but nothing but the practical determination among a sufficient number of nations that the world as a whole shall be a place in which all peoples shall have equal rights and equal opportunities, so long as they respect the laws which protect them all, will bring into being effective securities for | peace. But there is one first condition of any progress towards ! universal peace, and that is to win the war now. Winning the war does not necessarily mean dramatic victory over the Germanic hosts, but it does mean victory for the principle that might is not right, for which thf Allies stand. It means the complete establishment of those conditions which were laid down by the British Prime Minister and the President of the United States- duriiuj tiie

first fortnight of 191—conditions which imply the total failure of the militarist dreams and promises of expansion, and the total victory of justice and freedom. If there is ever to be an effective League of Nations, it will exist in order to protect the weak from wrong and to vindicate international right. If the present League of the Allies, which now includes a majority of the great States of the world, and is in itself the nucleus of the League of Nations, does not succeed in completely re-establishing justice in Europe, what later league is likely to do so ? A weak peace would in itself be the destruction of all possibility of any League of Nations. The writer truly says that' there is no use in hoping that through compromising with justice now we can gain lasting peace. If the present rulers of Germany can prove that under their leadership Germany has been able not only to withstand the world arrayed in arms -against it, but to impose its "will both: upon its allies and in "some degree upon.Europe as well, is it likely that the German people will turn against them? Seeing that they will not only have incurred the enmity of all their neighbors but will have-succeeded in despoiling them, is it likely that they will disarm and trust to conferences and treaties for their, future? And if they decide to rely upon their-own strength for their Safety instead of upon treaties and leagues of peace, is it likely that, exhausted as they are, they will start by attacking a Government which has brought them safely and with some measure , 0 f victory through the war whieh-alonc could >-'iot them with any degree of com -nee through the difficulties of .('construction and which would not hesitate to use machine-guns against the impious revolutionaries who would seize , the-citadel ,of its power?