A Symposium Against War
Challenge to Death. By Philip Noel Baker, Gerald Barry, Vernon Bartlett, Edmund Blunden, Vera Brittain, Ivor Brown, • G. E. G. Catlin, Guy Chapman, Mary Agnes Hamilton, Gerald Heard, Winifred Hoitby, Julian Huxley, Storm Jameson, J. B. Priestley, and Rebecca West. Foreword•by Lord Cecil. (Constable. 6s.) Challenge to Death is a symposium 'against war. You may dislike symposia (I do) ; they are too often scrappy to read, and always difficult to review. But this is a remarkable one, because; as the title-page shows you right off, it brings together a really outstanding collection of writers. . Of course there are differences between them. like Mr. Philip Noel Baker or Professor Catlin, write as experts on this or that side of the subject ; with others it is more obvious thit they are eminent writers in spheres removed from it ; and some others again almost invite the question, what they are doing in such exalted company at all. But, take it all round, here is a very considerable book, and one which deserves to be read by everybody who can face reading a symposium.
We are not told who edited it, but it bears the marks of good editing. The argument moves in a sequence. It begins by a series of papers discussing the situation of today —the problems which the peacemaker must face and the human factors of which he must take account. Starting out with two admirable essays—" The Twilight of Reason," by Miss Storm Jameson, and " The Roots of War," by Professor Catlin, this part of the book contains some of the most thoughtful writing. Next come papers on a few aspects (too few) of the collective organization of peace through a League. And lastly there is a series on some of the broader bearings of the collective method—one by Miss Rebecca West on " The Necessity and Grandeur of the International Idea " ; one addressed to extreme pacifists and called " No Peace Apart From International Security," by Mrs. M. A. Hamilton ; one (full of alert and penetrating suggestion) on " Peace through Science," by Professor Julian Huxley ; and one by Mr. J. B. Priestley on " The Public and the Idea of Peace." Mr. Blunden's contribution is a sonnet-sequence (not on quite his best level) at the end. It' is impossible to read such a collection without being deeply impressed by the quality, the sincerity, and the volume of the thinking for peace that is going on in England now.
It is beyond question much more considerable than it was, say, six years ago. Is there any Great Power on the Continent (setting aside Russia, which for various reasons is difficult to bring into such, comparisons), about which the same could be said ? Conceivably, though doubtfully, France ; most certainly not Germany, Italy, or Poland. The fact is that to get on the Continent anything like effective support for views like these one has, outside France, to go to the small neutral countries, such as Holland and the nations of Scan- dinavia ; from whom the peacemaker may indeed derive moral backing, but to whom he can look for no other support at all. Lord Cecil, in a Foreword less good than much which follows it, talks of " the almost unanimous determination of the peoples in opposition to war." Such a phrase seems sheer nonsense, when applied to the peoples of Germany, Italy, Jugoslavia, or Hungary (to mention no others) ; and_ touse it can surely only mislead us. Similarly he dwells on the importance of insisting " on the publicity of inter- national debate." But what view of anything done at Geneva (no matter what) has the - German or the Italian newspaper-reader any chance of forming, except that which his Government wants him to form ?
Thinkers and writers of the calibre of many here one would expect, when they address themselves seriously to a problem of so much moment, to be conscious of its extreme difficulty, its many-sidedness, the need for qualifying one consideration with another. And so in fact they are—so much so that at times the reader may even be a little fogged and ask himself what definite conclusion emerges. Yet in fact several do emerge—for one, the principle that you cannot have assured peace without a system of collective security ; for another, that you cannot have it without overcoming our present economic failure. As Miss•Storm Jameson puts it "-Plovrty and war grow in the same soil and have the same smell.. . If we cannot get rid of poverty With its dead weight of the irresponsible and the repressed, we cannot eliminate war." Perhaps one might illustrate it even more baldly than that. There is only one immediate source for all today's war-appre- hension -in- Europe ; it is the rearming of Germany under bellicose Nazism. And but for the world economic crisis, which first assailed Germany at the end of 1929, this would, humanly speaking, never have happened ; Germany would have continued pacific and republican, and Nazism have remained marooned in the hopeless backwater, where it had stuck down to that date. But to get world economies right now is plainly a long job ; and there is all too much danger that war may come before we have done so.
The weakest'section of the volume is the middle—the papers dealing with features of the collective system. There are too few of them, and too many are by one writer—Mr. Noel Baker ; who, though an undoubted expert, has been too much identified with particular sides and schemes in League politics, on his own or Mr. Henderson's behalf, to stand above the Geneva tneUe and attempt such a re-shaping of outlook and tactics as the present situation may appear to demand. Pro- fessor Catlin seems to me much nearer the bone, when he suggests that the chief effective potentiality for keeping peace in the rest of the world is a combination of the United States and Great Britain, and that even that must be ruled out between Honolulu and Singapore. The truth is, surely, that when the United States withdrew from the Versailles Treaty and the Covenant of the League of Nations, the bottom fell out of both Treaty and Covenant, each of which in almost every feature (including such features as the famous voeu about disarmament in the Treaty, and Articles 16 and 19 in the Covenant) depended vitally on American League-member- ship. The Powers thus left stranded did right, of course, to go on with the League ; but nothing is gained by promoting illusions about it. No amount of " League-mindedness " among little nations can' ever redress the deficiency, powerless as such an aid must be in any clash between Great Powers. Not only so, but to talk and argue as if the part which the United States and Great Britain could have played together can ever be played by Great Britain alone, is to drive a most dangerous wedge between idealism and practical politics.
Dr. Norman Maclean's book is, by comparison, a slight structure, but it is eloquent as well as earnest, a sermon with strong feeling at its back and not a few touches of Highland vision. Some churchman was complaining the other day that sermons on the League of Nations were too frequent. It' would have been a wiser complaint, that they are often not good enough ; and here many a clergyman might find Dr. Maclean helpful. The actual policy which he favours is that of Lord Davies—an international authority imposing its decisions through an international air force ; and a summary of this, in an appendix, has been contributed by Lord Davies
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