LEAGUE OF NATIONS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 27 October 1939, Page 7

LEAGUE OF NATIONS

BASIS FOR INTERNATIONAL LAW. A PROFESSOR’S PLEA. LONDON, October 5. In a letter to “The Times,” Professor Gilbert Murray, the distinguished Aus-tralian-born Oxonian, pleads for the League of Nations to be retained as the foundation of whatever authority it may be desired to set up after the war to secure just dealing and the rule of law in international affairs. The League’s roots, he writes, “are too widely and deeply fixed to be torn up; its non-political work, together with that of the Court and the 1.L.0. far too valuable to be thrown away. Besides, one must needs build on existing realities, not in the air. More than this one can hardly say. It may be lhat certain amendments of the Covenant giving more effectiveness to Article XI, XVI, and XIX, together with some greater realisation by Governments of their collective duty, may be as much as is needed, or as much as can be obtained. It may be that at lastwe can form inside the general League a real Federation of Europe, in which sovereignties shall be less recalcitrant, frontiers comparatively unimportant and no nation's development threaten ed by the arms of its neighbours., “The general principle is plain. It is the principle for which the League of Nations Union granted its Royal Charter and has received the support of the leaders of all Churches and all parties. It is the only system by which the Germans can have absolute equality with other nations and yet no power of terrorising them. The form in which it can be realised will depend on the course of events hitherto unknown and unpredictable.”