HOW galling to the humanity to be made to witness twice the painful orgy of man-slaughter on a global scale within a short span of twenty-five years. Two of us may not agree as to the different factors responsible for these social conflagrations. But none will seriously dispute that on ultimate analysis the predisposing cause shall always be found to be the appalling disparity between the economic resources that different nations happen to enjoy. As between individuals so with nations it is the hiatus between the strong and the weak that makes one throttle the other. Inequality inter-se nations has invariably disturbed the world peace. Yet every one of us ardently desires to put a stop, if possible, to the recurrence of this blood bath, this cracking of the world economic fabric. Its social cost even to the spectator and the victor himself is undeniably immense. Bu; how ? What is the peace strategy that men have tried ? This pacifist desire for social security first found expression in the Covenant of League of Nations after the Great War of 1914-18, thanks to the imagination of President Wilson. The same de- sire has given birth to the United Nations Organisation now constituted after the World War No. 2. It augurs well that no less than forty-nine nations have signed this embodiment of the international will to excommunicate the arbiter of force. Before hopes could be entertained that the Organisation would prove an effective machinery to preserve world tranquility from shocks of social insecurity that base nature of humanity is so prone to generate, the international atmosphere is highly charged with grave misgivings indicating that perhaps the same destiny awaits to overtake the ULN.O. which the child of President Wilson had to encounter, Desire to maintain and promote peace is neither insincere nor unnatural. Why does the machinery devised prove or tends to prove repeatedly ineffective 2?) Cryptic answer would be Power-Politics. The leaders, the top-dog: whether of professed democracies and republic: or of the much-denounced totalitarian state! all have imperialist imagination and ambitions.

The two wars might and do differ in the scale of their destructiveness, the sweep of their extent, the intensity and duration of. their havoc but their general pattern remains distinguishably alike. They were mainly clashes between two competing powers, each contending for the establishment of its own hegemony over the other. Ideologies and principles are, of course, invoked to make the best of the situation. Before Mr. Churchill came to power a statement is attributed to him that “ England shall not go to war unless her direct interests are involved.”

 Roughly speaking three principles inspired the building of the League of Nations. The first was the self-determination of nations, the principle of giving to every ethnological or cultural unit of humanity a homeland, a place with right to work out her destiny unhindered. For it was rightly felt that League of Nations could only function as a League of free nations, te, an association of equals, not of the strong and the weak. The second principle considered so essential for social security was the democratic constitution of the member states. A dictatorship is more readily prone to tread the war-path than a democracy.

The third principle of social security was, embodied in the institution styled as International Labour Office, set up to secure a minimum of economic security for workers: throughout the world, The I. L. O. did splended work, nobody will deny.

How were those principles honoured? More perhaps by breeches than by observance. These fundamental principles were clouded in the Peace Conference—that camouflaged piece of battle for power and ascendency—and later on either torpedoed one by one or deliberately forgotten. The equality of nations remained only an embellishment for the text of the Covenant. Powers never condescended to put it into practice. It was used only as a device to justify dismemberment of Germany or to buttress the claim of Iraq for political divorce from.

Turkey. The rattle of Indian chains was too faint to be heard by the protagonists of self-determination. But no-body would gainsay the peace-building power of the principle. There were Groups, Blocks or Combines of Big Powers but never a League of (equal) Nations. Big Powers negotiated about the very life of many a small power with the representatives of the latter cooling their heels in are anteroom. The League merely endorsed the doings of Big Powers, rather than discussed them, who misappropriated the instrument devised for collective security for their own game of power-politics. The detailed story of haltingly applying economic sanctions against Italy and then suddenly lifting them for the prevention of her attempted rape on Ethiopia is a brilliant essay on bona fides of one of the Big Powers. To Sir John Simon the War of Ethiopia was not worth one British warship. The League failed to check Japanese aggression against China, of Franco’s gangsterism against Spain, Hitler’s against Austria. Why? The three principles which could give birth to collective security had already been thrown to the wind. The international instrument was impotent to castigate any of its members for its non-allegiance or open defiance. To enforce law and order in between states requires, on the one hand, some measure of erosion of national sovereignty and, on the other hand, an international machinery backed by a force ‘greater than that of any other national state. Power points to Combines and Blocks of big states; peace to a union of small states, none being dangerously big or powerful to throw the