THE GERM OF WAR.

Taranaki Daily News, 24 November 1921, Page 2

THE GERM OF WAR.

(To the Editor.) Sir, —While admitting that the Washington proposal for a world wide naval holiday is full of hopeful possibilities, and that if carried into effect there will probably be no great racial laud slide for some considerable , time, I venture the opinion that the great underlying forces which make war possible still remain. No matter from what standpoint the question is approached by the peace idealist, he always finds timself up against the law of race hostility. W’hether race antagonism is a divine law or not, might be debatable, but that It is a law which must be taken into account in any comprehensive study of history will be admitted; in fact, the trail of the battlefield takes us back to the threshold of creation. Nature prevents loss of species amongst the lower animals by the infecundity of hybrids, and she seems to have protected race types amongst men by race antagonism. So far as the individual is concerned, nature places no value on that consciousness we call life. Was this what Tennyson had in his mind when he asked: Is God and nature then at strife Ttat nature lends such evil dreams, So careless of the single life. So careful of the type she seems? The economic difference between two or more races can always be adjusted, but time I has given us no known method of breaking down race barriers, and until these barriers I are demolished world peace Is a poet's dream. I The present peace proposals imply a stagnant east and a stationary west, but the east is not stagnant, and If the west can devise any scheme other than the gun or Its equivalent to counteract the overflowing cradles of the east, then it will have discovered some force hitherto unknown to man.—l am, etc., FRANK BELL. Toko, November 20.