CAN ANY PEACE PACT KEEP THE PEACE?

77

My point is not to excuse Japan but to question whether the peace
machinery is sufficient to deter any country, even our own, from
hostilities if the urge is sufficiently strong. Could the Kellogg Pact,
for instance, conceivably have prevented the South African War?

-----, of the British Embassy, tells me that his father was literally

stoned in his own village for advocating peace at that time. The
Jameson Raid was quite as outrageous a procedure as the Japanese
action of September 18, 1931, and the British themselves would have
condemned it if it hadn't been for the Kaiser's telegram to Kruger.
That telegram, trivial incident as it was, furnished the match that
set the war fever ablaze. These things will always create in every
country a war psychology, tending to override all other considerations
and needing no military propaganda to inflame it.

Situations and circumstances similar or analogous to those men-
tioned will with almost mathematical certainty arise in future.
Hostilities are steadily occurring and will continue to occur in spite
of the Kellogg Pact, the Covenant of the League of Nations, and all
the rest of the machinery so laboriously and studiously created. If
the world allows Japan to break those covenants with impunity, not
only will the peace covenants themselves lose their force and sanctity
but the stability of treaties everywhere will inevitably suffer. They
are suffering already in many parts of the world as a more or less
direct result of the failure or inability of the world to call Japan to
account. What are we going to do about it ?

Moral sanctions ? When a nation is beset with a war psychology,
the moral obloquy of the rest of the world is a negligible force, except
that it tends to strengthen, not to weaken, that nation's warlike
temper, as witness the situation in Japan to-day. It will always be
questionable, furthermore, how long the unanimous moral obloquy
of the world can continue, for eventual breaks in the solid front are
practically certain, induced by self-interest.

Then if moral ostracism is ineffective, or likely to be ineffective,
what more can we do ? How can we implement the Kellogg Pact ?
Certainly not by force of arms, which would be contrary to the very
principle for which the Kellogg Pact stands. The great war to end
wars has signally failed in that particular purpose. If other world
wars are the only method of protecting our peace structure, then we
had better abandon that structure here and now, because civiliza-
tion itself will be in jeopardy. Severance of diplomatic relations
would be futile unless followed by other steps. Arms embargoes
are generally ineffective in practice. In the present case they would
simply aid the aggressor. There remains an economic and financial
boycott. Probably futile in practice. In the present case, an
economic boycott would simply cause Japan to occupy those parts
of China whence needed supplies could be obtained, with the re-
sultant risk of a general world conflagration. Financially Japan
cannot even now obtain a loan abroad ; she has tried and failed,
but she still carries on.