INTERNATIONAL MORALITY

Wairarapa Times-Age, 4 August 1938, Page 12

INTERNATIONAL MORALITY

CODE OF FAIR-DEALING I believe that to bring international morality into conformity with the code of fair-dealing which is acknowledged in private life and to resist the whole body of pestilent doctrine that teaches that there are two different and conflicting standards of conduct in private and in international affairs is the only way to bring order into the world and eventually to save civilisation, writes, Mr J. A. Spender in the “Yorkshire Observer.” “Boycott all treatybreakers,” say some, which means dividing, the world into saints and sinners, and putting ourselves on the side of the saints, adds Mr Spender. There will then be an impassable gulf between ourselves and three at least of the Great Powers. There will also be no way of winding up any of the questions on which the League of Nations has failed, unless the sinners publicly repent, which they are very unlikely to do. Even so, it would not be easy to keep a consistent line. For example, I am always being asked by my French friends why we accepted so complacently the ‘flagrant breach of treaty by the Germans when they remilitarised the Rhineland, and yet were so angry when the Italians marched into Abyssinia—a question which it is not very easy to answer to the satisfaction of Frenchmen. To some extent we must pass a sponge over the past, unless. the quarrels of these times are to be interminably prolonged. Treaties and negotiations there must be unless we give up the cause of peace in despair.