Aprit 28.
The Rev. H. G. Newsham, in trying to straighten out an apparent conflict of opinion on the attitude of the British undergraduate toward war, has raised an issue which is far more important than the interesting picture of Mr. 0. M. Green parading Fleet Street with a swordstick and pistol in protest against the fetishes of Scotland Yard. Mr. Newsham, unlike Mr.
Green, is not afraid of Sir Austen Chamberlain's grave. suggestion that we shall have to do some hard thinking about the implications of collective security, and whether It is any more than a pretty phrase adorn a meaningless thing Mr. Newsham recognizes that Sir Austen is not throwing collective security overboard but insisting that it shall be better ensued and better protected. Reaching ground common to most intelligent people it may be said that no-one wishes to sce another "world" or "European" War for the simple reason that, as Mr. Stanley Baldwin has pointed out, it would mean the complete collapse of civilization as at present understood. Now, whether the League of Nations has been ill-conducted or has failed 1o full the tasks assigned to it may be a matter of opinion. Mr. Newsham's inquiry is why it should bbe thought necessary to ridicule the League. There is a curious freak of thought which has puzzled many people. It possibly arises from that brahminical superiority which certain officials of the League and certain devotees of the League of Nations Union have seen fit to adopt. It may represent a resistance to that brain-gloriousness which Mr. Wyndham Lewis recent ly pilloried when, in discussing how far the principles of intellectual freedom had been breached in England, he remarked:
A repressive "left-wing" orthodoxy has for long existed in Great Britain, Freedom to view except one of a tendency has been, if not dis allowed, so much discouraged a5 10 make it not worth any bright boy's while {o transgress, A tendency only, of course, is what is required of you—nothing out and out, which would alarm the public, You must be "detached" you must be one of the "Friends of Russia," not one of the Wild Red Men in person.
Mr. Newsham, like Sir Austen Chamberlain, stands between these two extremes. He secks to discover the means whereby the collective international treaty but chen? plunges the country into a ya? war to preserve the Island oft to the Union Jacko. 'The othe' less pacific, demands die. adherence t the League ani Covenant but ridicules the tant forces, refuses to recognise necessity for maintaining then resolutely declines to give its wat tenance to armed action in tion with the collective system
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.