To "The Times" Jast month Sin Charles "Grant Robertson, Vice-[Ctiancellor of Birmingham University, emphatically pointed out the spread of the phifsophy of violence through-four the world and its "subtle, sub-ver sive and concurrent effect" on every form of activity. In words which have been widely quoted he concluded:
The real crisis to-day Is whether the League of Nations can, and will, administer a decisive defeat to this Philosophy of violence. and register 2 victory for the principles and ideals which the Covenant enshrines.
All the special pleading in the world cannot get away from this clear-cut logic. Dr. Gilbert Murray reinforces it'with the comment:
The Covenant. the Kellogg Pact, t International Court are. all part ofa {reat worldwide movement for "the Brescription of open, Just. and benour= ble relations between nations" and "the establishment of the understand= Ings of international law as the actual ule of conduct among Governments." The success of that movement Is not merely 2 vital interest for the British Empire, with its enormous and fis extreme vulnerability, but is cause for which, I believe, millions men and women throughout the lvilzed world would be willing to die.
No-one studying the trend of public opinion in Great Britain can be blind to the fact that strenuous opposition would be raised to war, unless. events showed that no alternative existed. This aversion from war is not yerely the outcome of bitter re-feet experience. It arises too from the conviction that once the armed argument be adopted, discrimination between truth and falsehood becomes }s0 dificult to achieve that the very principles championed are likely to be obscured. Yet as the world observes the amazing spectacle of a nation Jet loose at the command of a dictator to whom all argument and fall reason is directed in vain, it can-hot but feel that it is confronted by. menace which, if not faced and over Jcome, will involve another catastrophe of perhaps fatal import to existing civilization. There will be no general security and, as Dr. Murray adds "no security for the rule of law righteousness between nations." Dr. Murray ie admittedly a thinker of the advanced school, a pacifist, as the Jargon of some would have it, but he Jat least will be acquitted of any desire unduly to magnify an international crisis,
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.