The Lost Peace

THIS is one of the soundest, most clearheaded and informative of the many books published recently on the absorbing and complex subject of why peace has become a lost horizon and how it may be restored in our time on a firmer basis. Harold Butler is a veteran British civil servant who became Director of the International Labor Office at Geneva, one of the most promising and successful of the post-war ventures in coöperation between countries.

One senses throughout the book two influences that add up to a pretty good sense of balance: the internationalism of Geneva and the peculiarly British quality of keeping one’s feet firmly planted on the ground. The result is a survey of the past and the future that is imaginative without being fantastic, and sober in its evaluation of realities without being stodgily conservative.

While expressing the belief that close understanding between the English-speaking peoples is one of the surest guaranties of future world order, the author sets his face against any such scheme of political fusion as is embodied in the Union Now project. Nationalism, as he says, is the most potent political passion in Europe, and he puts his finger on one of the baffling problems of our time when he observes: ‘At the moment when nationalism was becoming out of date and unworkable in the economic field, it was flourishing with unprecedented luxuriance in the political field.’

Mr. Butler offers several suggestions in connection with the making of the next peace. He criticizes the settlement after the last great war as too exclusively political in character, and suggests that this time considerations of economic and social reconstruction should take precedence over the drawing of frontiers and other political details.

Mr. Butler watched the dissolution of European peace and order during the thirties from the central point of Geneva, and expresses the belief that it was the devotion to peace at almost any price in the democratic countries that was one of the primary causes of war, since it encouraged the dictators to pursue a career of conquest. W. H. C.