THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. FRIDAY, OCTOBER 11, 1907. THE CONCERT OF EUROPE.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXX, Issue 8553, 11 October 1907, Page 4

THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. FRIDAY, OCTOBER 11, 1907. THE CONCERT OF EUROPE.

The London Spectator is concerned about the weakness of the Concert of Europe, which, it declares, has lost the support of universal opinion. If Europe at large or the peoples of the other great States were only as anxious as the people of England are tD remedy the injustice and misery under which the black folk of the Congo suffer, the remedy would be found at once without any war or any derogation to "the monarchical principle," which cannot justify the selling of a great -mass of subjects to make a profit for individuals. It would for example, be impossible to resist a resolution by every Parliament in Europe that the condition of the Congo State was disgraceful to Christianity and fatal to the just reputation of the diplomatic services. It is quits to exaggerate the effective force of public opinion, but quite as easy to minimise it till it becomes merely an excuse for tolerating all the great rimediable abuses which still discredit the diplomacy of the civilised States, and like so many other facts around us, suggest that we are all living under a regime of inferior and conscienceless men. Surely it must be possible for the rulers o? the European Concert to devise a plan by which, wi flout making a breach of the peace too probable, they might secure on occasion that broad tranquillity without which there is no certainty even of the continuance of peace. The dangers raised by the question of Morocco may yet- wrap Europe in ilamos. Those created by the atrocities in Macedonia may end in war throughout the Near East, while those involved in £he cruelties of the Congo may cne day help to produce a massacre of all white men by all negroes, who, in the Congo at least, are outraged by the men who ought to be their protectors beyond what tven the lowest human nature can endure without revenge. The old five Powers were better than the Concert, for they did put down the slave trade, and in that way gave a great i blow to slavery itself. Yet slavery

did not concern them except from that moral point of view which the members of the Concert now seem unable to recognise or denounce as sentimental.