At yesterday meeting of the Rotary Club, held at the Metropole Hotel, Professor Harold D. Lasswell, of the Departmentt of Political Science at the Chicago University, gave a talk on "World Politics and the Sino-
The Professor said—The present Sino-Japanese crisis has become acute at a time When civilian institutions in the two nations and throughout the world ate in desperate need of curative years of peace and recovery. If the existing emergency is permitted to cdreen from bad to worse, it may be doubted whether civilian: institutions are equal to the strain, The upshot may be the rise of the garrison state to displace the civilian state. In the garrison state the generals are jon top, private business ceases to exist, civilian officials lose their influențe, and party officials fall into insignificance, A grim though often veiled struggle for survival is being waged around the world between civilian skill and military skill. Private business already exists or) sufferance in the Japanese Empire. It has been stigmatized as unpatriotic by the younger officers' groups. Tf this crisis is long drawn out, if tension rises to the breaking point, the first' victim may be the business men.
Should bad deepen into worse, the outlook in China for the preservation and the strengthening of civilian elements is no better. Should the authority of the Chinese state be relegated to the interior provinces, the hammer of adversity would no doubt beat political institutions into the rigid shell of the garrison state.
If the crisis spreads, the Soviet Union may become involved. Already the Soviet Union is vexed with bitter internal strife between the ci¢itian leaders of the party and the military leaders of the Red Army. In war, the generals may win, Garrison states in Asia would com-promis security and undermine the prestige of) civilian institutions everywhere in the word, Business states like Grea} Britain, the United States, and Frange would suffer a new peril, party supremacy in states like Germany and Italy wontd endure other blow
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.