16 NOVEMBER 1929, Page 2

General Smuts on World Peace On Saturday last General Smuts

delivered the second of his Rhodes Memorial Lectures at Oxford, his subject being World Peace. His thoughtful and eloquent survey—with every syllable of which we are in agreement—should confound those critics who were dis- appointed that a chief architect of the Mandates system made no reference to it in his lecture on the development of Africa, He emphasized rightly the vast change in the human attitude to war which can confidently be rated as the most important historical event for centuries.. Not all have sloughed the old Adam—that was hardly to be expected. Even Lord . Bryce _appa- rently was sceptical in. 1918 as to the possibility of the nations suffering- any such limitation of their sovereign rights as is essential to the success of the League concep- tion and methods. But we have already travelled a long way, and it is the institution of Geneva which more than any other influence has made this mental progress possible. The United States has done more than her share by throwing into the pool of pacific effort the Peace Pact and all that it implies. We must once more .thank. Heaven—and Sir Austen Chamberlain—that the Protocol, i.e., . the organization of war for the sake of peace, was thrown overboard.