Mar. 31.
Uf Mr. Sparke invented his inversion of a well known phrase in his speech at the Zero Club—"War hath—her victories no less than peace he is certainly to be congr lated. It contains a truth too easily forgotten. No one do-fends war; no effort should be spared to avert it. But in compensation for its horrors, it brings out certain clear-cut virtues both in nations and individuals which are liable to become blurred at other times.
The world is greatly and rightly set upon securing itself against another Armageddon, but it does not by any means follow that merely to proclaim the universal desire for peace will result in getting it, Nothing is more conspicuous now: days than the false standards and confused thinking in respect of art, religion, right and wrong, and personal and national responsibility. Take, for instance, the conventional condemnation of imperialism. But those who join in the ery seem completely ignorant that the sense in which they use the word was invented by the Bolsheviks for purposes of propaganda against countries which they wished to destroy; whereas, throughout history, imperialism, though having its faults like all human systems, has generally been conspicuous for making two blades of grass grow where only one grew before. The present Naval Conference in London is a striking example of inaccurate thinking, to use no harsher phrase, It has been hailed as a great effort for the Promotion of peace. But every nation entered the conference with an unequivocal statement. that its ships were not to be cut down below a certain figure deemed requisite for national security, Peace, that is to say, with very large mental reserva: tions. If they had said frankly that they proposed to save money on building men-of-war in order to spend it on something else, there would have been no round for criticism and the conference would probably have stood a better chance of success, If we really want to secure peace, we shall have to aim very much deeper than the abolition of certain instruments of war, at nothing ess, in fact, than a radical change of human nature, of which at present there is little apparent evidence and which is certainly not to be got by fid-dung with externals, Coming back to Mr. Sparke's phrase, it can at least be said for war and the profession of the fighting man—who, by the way, is usual ly the last person to precipitate war—that they deal in realities and that they inculcate, as a necesnury part of themselves, discipline, obedience and subordination of self to the common cause, virtues which just now seem' conspicuous by their absence, when nine novelists out of ten preach the supreme right of every individual to "express" himself or herself regardless of anyone else, and when lecturers on infant-welfare seriously assert that, if the child turns on the tap and floods the bathroom, he must on no account be reproved but must immediately be given something else on which to exercise his inquiring mind.
In speaking of novels one would also thank Mr, Sparke for his allusion to the "peculiar sort" of war books which have rely been so prevalent. "All Quiet on the Western Front" set the example for an extraordinary outpouring of war novels, or rather treatises, of a kind one had never been before.
Their precise purpose was. obscure and they were pervaded by a morbid hysteria which appeared wholly untrue to life ax judged by the men one knew intimately who had been all through the war. At first these books were received with the enthusiasm easily bestowed on the new and unusual, But terly there have been signs of a strong revulsion of feeling against them. Perhaps it means that the old values and virtues are beginning to reassert themselves. They must in time, AcriN¢ on information received from Tientsin, the Peking thorities seized a score of toxes containing some 7,500 Ib. of heroin and other narcotic drugs consigned to a Japanese firm in the former capital, says the Chinese press. The value was estimated at $100,000,
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.