WAR WITHIN THE FRAMEWORK OF THE LEAGUE
[To the Editor of TILE SPECTATOR.] Sin.,—Before this letter reaches you the die may be cast, and one member of the League of Nations may be engaged in hostile operations against another ; in other words, to adapt a current phrase, we may have war within the framework of the League. As Lord Cecil pointed out in his .speech last week calling for intervention,. the League of Nations can hardly survive another shock ; "collective security " will have perished.
The League of Nations has done much beneficent work ; the control of noxious drugs, the repression of ".white slavery" will occur to us all, and it is certainly capable of developing more. But can it prevent war by finding any substitute for it ? That is the question I have always put to my friends of the League of Nations Union, and with your leave I will put it again. • That the world progresses—a theory passionately held in the nineteenth century—is now a subject for debate. But one thing is certain, the world does not stagnate, but like everything in the universe, animate and inanimate, is subject to change. Birth, life and decay is the natural sequence and the universal law, from the stars above us to the humblest of living things, and this is true also of races and nations. In this case war has been the test of virility. What is proposed to take its place ? By force France acquired Tunisia in 1881. Now France with a declining birth-rate finds an equal number of Italians to Frenchmen
in her colony. Italy has an in- creasing population ; where is she to find her outlet without war ? It is impossible to believe that France would relinquish Tunisia at the bidding of a Council or committee sitting at Geneva, and Italy has turned to what she thinks an easier conquest. All my sympathies and probably those of your readers are with Abyssinia, but let us realize Italy's necessity and the working of the inexorable law of change.
One word in conclusion to the members of my own and other Christian communities, who have been the foremost supporters of the League, though it was founded on a non- religious basis and has since welcomed the power which is conducting a ruthless persecution of Christianity. Christ did not come to send peace on the earth, and if war is ,necessary to the Divine law of change, can it be always wrong ? Let
us pass by the very outspoken Thirty-seventh Anglican Article of Religion and ask whether the Christian Church Us a whole has taught that it is.
There are many things connected with the Divine laws Which seem beyond our comprehension. Why, for instance, Should slaughter be the rule in the animal world so that sentient beings prey and are preyed upon in an ordered Sequence? Why is nature "red in tooth and claw" ? But to attempt to answer these questions would be to go far beyond the discussion before us.
United University Club.
ATIIELSTAN RILEY.
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