GENERAL SMUTS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 18 January 1939, Page 9

GENERAL SMUTS

STILL A LEAGUE OF NATIONS MAN. PRINCIPLES: THAT MUST PREVAIL. Let me confess at once that I am and remain a League of Nations man, says General Smuts, writing in the ‘■Listener. - ’ Some say it is dead, but I say this helpless infant was born to lead the world to peace. The machinery of the League is experimental and may fail, but its principles are rooted in what is best in human nature and experience, and in the end it must prevail. What other alternatives are there before us? The alliance system has once more broken down. Will the axis system, already working so unequally between its partners, prove more lasting? In the great crisis the old diplomatic methods even another experiment of personal mediation through Lord Runciman, proved equally unavailing. In spite of all these methods and expedients. Europe was rapidly and surely drifting on to the rocks. What proved successful in the end in saving the peace was the personal intervention of the British Prime Minister, his personal contact with the German Chancellor, and finally the meeting of the four supreme European leaders at Munich in conference. If the League Covenant could have functioned in this case, there would have been none of all this extraordinary accompaniment of public excitement.