Wairarapa Times-Age MONDAY, JULY 27, 1942. WINNING THE WAR AND THE PEACE.

Wairarapa Times-Age, 27 July 1942, Page 2

Wairarapa Times-Age MONDAY, JULY 27, 1942. WINNING THE WAR AND THE PEACE.

the end of the war yet to be broughl into sighl and with great, grim and deadly bailies on I lie outcome of which much depends at present being I'onghl in Kiissia, I'igypl, al sea and in. other areas of conflict it may nol be easy Io assess and appreciate at their full importance Ihe essenlials of nalional and international post-war policy and organisalion which were discussed in recent speeches by the American Secrclary of Stale, Mr Cordell Hull, and the British h’oreign Secretary (Mr .Anthony Eden). The supreme importance of being prepared in good lime to win the peace as well as the war will nevertheless be apparent to all who have given serious thought Io tin; outcome of the war of 1918.

Nothing is better established than I,hat our own nation and others -which won that war lost the peace that followed, and that as a result the world -was introduced to a new series of calamities, of which the last and greatest. I Ims far is the war now being fought. Winning the peace would have entailed the development and extension, in 1919 and the years that followed, of a new conception of international morality—a conception finding expression in the establishment ami enforcement of a reign of law and of conditions of co-operation between nations in economic and other affairs.

To that primarily moral achievement the world found itself unequal in the critical years that followed the last, war. Wearied by their war efforts, and clinging, some of them, to the hope of isolating themselves from future world disorders, the nations, instead of entering into what might have been an age of security and increasing plenty, plunged in the first instance into a vortex of economic disorder. Hectic and illusory boom conditions in some countries gave place speedily to unemployment on a colossal scale, the outcome of an unparalleled paralysis of production and distribution in producing and manufacturing countries alike.

At the same time, no effective curb was imposed on the development of gangster dictatorships, committed to brutally savage and predatory aims. In their failure to establish a reign of law and in allowing the direction of economic affairs to degenerate into a welter of confusion and of mutual impoverishment, the nations which might have led the world into a better age presented these dictatorships with an opportunity of which they have made and are making the most.

Against bitter memories and against the grim ordeal the world Is now enduring there is' to be set the redeeming fact of a great and growing awakening to the only conditions in which there can be any hope of establishing order, peace and security in the world. Unlike the late President Woodrow Wilson and others who strove valiantly but vainly, after the last war, to establish a reign of law, Mr Hull and Mr Eden are effective spokesmen for their own nations and many others, assured of powerful and far-reaching support in their declaration that the aggressor nations must be disarmed and controlled until it is fully deal 1 that they can be depended upon to follow a law-abiding course.

On the essential facts there is broad agreement' throughout the United Nations and it is now recognised widely that the need for combined action, co-operation and sacrifice will not end with the war. Positive safeguards of peace, when it has been established, must imply, amongst other things, the maintenance, possibly over a long term of years, of forces able and ready to suppress at its inception any new attempt at lawless aggression.