THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 14, 1908. THE REAL GUARANTEES OF PEACE.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXI, Issue 3018, 14 October 1908, Page 4

THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 14, 1908. THE REAL GUARANTEES OF PEACE.

The real guarantees of peace, says a London newspaper, "The Nation," are intelligent, contented and powerful peoples. While, it saya, we would not force upon the Peace Movement any merely economic interpretation of history, we would encourage them to a clear recognition of the fact that the problem of peace is nothing less than the problem of democracy, in its political, industrial and moral aspects. Intelligent, contented, and powerful peoples arc the real gurantees of peace, and internationalism, like every other government, must be broad-based upon the people's jvill. Many new assets for peace are discernible —the reduced pressure of population for outlets in most civilised countries, with improved mobility for those who wish to move, a wider identity of international interests in great business undertakings, the increasing damage

and expense of wars, the ruinous scale of warlike preparations. These rational checks, however, it is agreed, will not suffice unless they are accompanied by changes in those ideals of national greatness and prestige which have lured nation after nation to destruction. These changes of valuations are necessarily gradual, but they need not be slow. Most of the groping of past ages towards partial peace has been blind, or at best but dimly conscious. With every rise in the intensity and the social area of consciousness the peace movement may gain an accelerating pace. It may even move on to a new plane of internationalism with more formal and more real guarantees of peace than hitherto were possible, until it lays the corner-stone of a true society of nations. Naturally, continues "The Nation," we feel disappointed at the tardy progress made by Governments in utilising the Hague Conference, and its Tribunal. But this ought not to hide the fact that we have had the manifest beginning of a great future instrument of international justice, while the growing willingness of nations to bind themselves by treaty to submit their differences to arbitration is a direct product of the same pacific tendency. Again the internationalising of trade and travel, with its elaborate machinery of postal and telegraphic bureaux, its railroad and monetary systems, the growth of Congresses, Parliamentary, economic, scientific, humanitarian, artistic, and recreative, each with its little permanent framework, form a to the art of international government even more important than the formal political arrangements of internationalism. Such cities as Rome, Paris, London, Dresden, the Riviera, and at least one country, Switzerland, have already become in thought, fact, and feeling, international places. Every decade brings new cities, and areas of country into the same category. In this real community of life and in the ever-growing stream of commerce have we not a sure source of sympathy and a sure bond of interests such as will in time make war a moral impossibility? And yet it would be foolish, in laying stress on these pacific facts and forces, to ignore dangers, some of which appear to spring from the very facility of intercourse among nations. Not merely among the more brutal and ignorant sections of our people, but among certain schools of thinkers and statesmen, : the belief in physical force as the basis of government and the ultimate source of national security is so fixed that they regard internationalism as a flimsy barrier destined to collapse at once before the rush of popular passion or even before the stern dictates of statecraft. The article concludes as follows: —"The spokesmen of the sinister views assure us that we are under a delusion in supposing that world-peace, even in the distant future, is practicable, or that the eternal hostilities of great nations and races can be over-ridden by cosmopolitan sentirnentalism."