6 FEBRUARY 1932, Page 1

News of the Week

China and Geneva

THE League of Nations Disarmament Conference, for which preparation has been made for years, Is sitting at Geneva. Close by, the Council of the League, the supreme body whose existence was to be the guarantee that the nations would henceforth voluntarily settle their disputes by peaceful means, is in Session. The latest ingenuities of civilization make it possible for these bodies to know what is going on from hour to hour all over the world, and by the bitterest irony the news that we are all most eager to hear is news that brings from the other side of the globe tales of fighting, bloodshed and violence. China and Japan, whose representatives are at Geneva, after many weeks of one-sided use in Manchuria of military power, which could not be called peaceful, are engaged in unabashed fighting, some of it most brutally involving non- combatants in the worst manner of the worst moments of the Great War, with precisely those outrages which the World vowed should never sully its face or murder its inhabitants again. Small wonder, then, that men of little faith point their finger at the meetings at Geneva as saying, Peace, peace, where there is no peace,