LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
China and the UN
SIR,—Discussions about the representatiOn of China in the United Nations have revealed a misconception of the nature and purposes of the United Nations. It is not a select club of mutually agreeable governments, but a world organisation, in which Member States should be represented by their effective governments. If some of them are in disagreement with others, it is all the more important that they should be inside and not outside. Nations will always quarrel; in the past they have quarrelled violently, by the threat or by the use of force. One of the benefits which the United Nations has conferred upon the world is the facility and inducement which it offers to disputants to quarrel across a table rather than across a battlefield. But you cannot quarrel across a table with someone who is not at the table.
It is therefore much to be hoped that the reluctance of Americans and others to sit at the same 'table as delegates of the Peking Govern- ment will be overcome; for, if our quarrels with that Government are not to be conducted in a civilised fashion, they will be continued and intensified by those savage methods, which will have to be abandoned if civilisation is to survive.—Yours faithfully,
LEONARD F. BEHRENS.
119 Barlow Moor Road, Didsbury, Manchester, 20.
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