TOPICS OF THE DAY.

Waikato Times, Volume 121, Issue 20269, 11 August 1937, Page 6

TOPICS OF THE DAY.

Enforcing The Peace Covenant. “ I think we are right in saying that there shall bo a force behind the Covenant of Peace, and that we believe that the true way is to find security, not in national armaments, but in the collective force at the service of the conscience of the world. I see very curious headlines in papers. One that I saw the other day was: ‘Conciliation or Sanctions?’ The ‘either or’ fallacy is one of the chief causes of human error. When a man says ‘either or,’ the average human being does not usually stop to ask himself if there is no third alternative, and the answer to ‘Conciliation or Sanctions?’ is both. No one, I suppose, wants to renounce conciliation. Every believer in the League of Nations desires to refer all questions to the arbitration of reason and law, and to go on discussing them up to the last minutes of the eleventh hour. But we go on to say, at least, I think we do, that we must remove the temptation to resort to the brutal decision of war by having a collective force so formidable, so certain in its action, that even a madman would hesitate to challenge it.” —Dr. Alatthews, Dean of St. Paul’s. “Mind” and Empire. “ Lord Baldwin nailed his colours to the mast,” says the Oxford Times, “ when he came to speak of the secret of the Empire’s strength. “ Freedom, ordered freedom within the law with force in the background and not in the foreground, a society in which authority and freedom are blended in due proportion, in which both State and citizen are both ends and means. It is an Empire organised for peace and for free development of the individual in and through an infinite variety of voluntary associations.’ The political system which holds our complex Empire together and gives it its,foremost place in the world, has surely never been better described. ‘Small minds and a great Empire go ill together,’ Burke said. Our Empire’s greatness and indivisibility are the fruits of our full acceptance of tho sacred principles of liberty.’’