The Daily News. WEDNESDAY, MAY 14, 1919. WORLD RECONSTRUCTION.

Taranaki Daily News, 14 May 1919, Page 4

The Daily News. WEDNESDAY, MAY 14, 1919. WORLD RECONSTRUCTION.

Those who have merely read the clauses in the Peace Treaty relating to ports, waterways, railways and aerial navigation without conception of the far-reaching import these transport problems have on world reconstruction and world peace will have missed the key to the only possible solution of cooperative world government in the future whereon alone can a solid foundation of peace be maintained. Just as the framework of national life is transportation, giving corporate unity and strength, so it be with international life. Transportation touches reform at every point. Agriculture, housing,' health, industries, commerce, the distribution of commodities produced in various parts of the world, the dissimination of information, . and the participation by ,all the nations in the multitudinous productions and activities that make for international progress and welfare are all dependent on transport. The more perfect the system of co-ordination and development the more successful will be the result. Moreover, a poliey of world-reconstruction—-a policy of reconciliation and cooperation broad enough and vigorous enough to apply the lessons of the great war catastrophe, and even to make it a means of redemption—alone presents a frameWork on which peace and security can be successfully weaved. By that, all the sacrifice and sorrow may be made worth while, all the stupendous burdens remaining may be mitigated, the immense perils averted that still threaten world peace, and social peace, our own ultimate safety, that of our friends and every single thing we are supposed to have won in the war. What the world needs now is a productive and harmonious energy between nations equal to their destructive energy in their recurrent paroxysms of man-kill-ing—a policy of peace effort on a war scale. The whole world, on the largest basis, must try a new way of working together between nations if they are ever to escape from the old doom of warring together. There must be some system of mutual service, otherwise a return to mutual slaughter. It is in this direction that the League of Nations can and should be of infinite service if developed along the right lines, and its incorporation in the peace terms, taking as it does the first place, would seem to indicate that the League is to be regarded as the mainstay of the peace structure. There has recently been published a book written by the editor of the Observer (London), Mr. J. L. G-arwin, entitled "The Economic Foundations of Peace; or World Partner ship as the Truer Basis of the League of Nations," a work that. • should be destined to throw much helpful light on world reconstruction. ■ Referring to the supreme] importance of the transport ser-l vices the author contends that thequestion of communications is really the nerve of the whole argument. He shows what happened

to man when he ceased to be a mere footfarer and got the means of movement by the horse, the camel, the wheel and the keel, demonstrati"" z that all man's political progress followed until he came to his steam and electricity by land and sea, and at last to his flying—developed in the war as much as fifty years would have advanced it otherwise. Mr. Garvin "asserts that traffic is stronger than and that human flight is 1 a practical agent more absolutely certain to transform civilised and non-civilised intercourse than anything that has yet been known, while he shows how it is going to make a sure and speedy end of American isolation. The keenest and most imaginative, historical mind can only dimly assess the contribution which man's mastery of the air will make to the vigor and fulness pf human life. Together with the wireless telegraph and telephone, the aeroplane and, not less, the airship are mustard seeds of unpredictable, growth. No race has more at stake than the British in a successful air policy, for reasons commercial, strategical and political, while as an aid to science its seope is illimitable. The impossibility of social reform without transport reform does but indicate the desire of economic necessity. New means of communication and the world interest of war have now set on foot throughout the nations a new con seiousness of themselves and each other. Physically and politically, within the limits of the world and the countries composing it, distances have shrunk. Democracy in every great nation is taking a new grip of itself in the determination to raise to a higher power the political and economic organise tion of national life, and therefore of the world's. In this movement self-mterest bids us keep our place. In a constellation of physically greater units, our own the small repository of great destines, must burn with a fiercer and purer energy than before, or we haad for extinction. Efficiency, hitherto left to the criteria of the individual becomes the direct concern of the State. The commonplace oi the hour is that the greater distribution of wealth, which we aim at, must be welcomed by a greater flow of more economical production. There are, states Mr. Garvin a thousand problems at.Home and abroad, but there is only one key which unlocks them all. It is "Partnership"— a new way of working together. If, he adds, that key is not applied, it would be better not to have to live in the world that will be.