Mr. CAHAN:

Mr. Speaker, I did not vote; I am not paired. I came in at the latter part of the discussion, and when the vote was called I was attempting to read the bill. Having read it, I say I would vote against the bill because I believe it to be utterly beyond the powers of this parliament to pass.

Mr. GLEN:

Mr. Speaker, I am mentioned

as one of those who did not vote. I did not vote because I had no opportunity of giving the vote I wished to give. We on this side of the house were never asked whether we were in favour of the motion or not.

Mr. STEVENS:

Hear, hear.

Mr. GLEN:

Had I been asked if I was in favour of the motion, I would certainly have voted for it.

Mr. McLEAN (Melfort):

Before there is any attempt to enforce the rule that has been referred to, I should like to draw to the attention of Your Honour the fact that last session under somewhat similar circumstances you ruled that, it being then the custom in the British house not to insist that members who were in their seats should announce the manner in which they would vote, you would adopt the same practice here. Having so ruled last session, I fail to see why there should be a change made now.

Mr. BENNETT:

That is not the rule.

Mr. SPEAKER:

There were so many rulings made last session that I cannot exactly recall the circumstances to which the hon gentleman refers.

Mr. DUNNING:

I wish to say, Mr. Speaker, that while I voted on this motion I was paired with the hon. member for Lincoln (Mr. Chaplin), but I was under the impression that on this occasion I was not bound by the pair.

Mr. BENNETT:

Quite so.

Mr. WARD:

Mr. Speaker, had I been given an oppprtunity to cast my vote as I desired, I would have voted for the motion.

Mr. THORSON:

I am in the same position as the hon. member for St. Lawrence-St. George (Mr. Cahan). I came in after the discussion, and I am of the same view as he-I would vote against the motion.

Mr. SPEAKER:

The hour for private bills and public bills being exhausted, the house will now revert to the debate on the motion respecting the treaty for the renunciation of war.

Mr. CHURCH:

Mr. Speaker, this afternoon I spoke for twenty minutes and I quoted the first article of the peace pact. Now-

Mr. SPEAKER:

Order, please. I cannot hear the hon. gentleman.

Mr. CHURCH:

This is article II:

The high contracting parties agree that the settlement or solution of all disputes or conflicts of whatever nature or of whatever origin they may be, which may arise among them, shall never be sought except by pacific means.

Very charming and very laudable words for a pact with the people of the United States! The ink was scarcely dry on this treaty when the three great powers publicly and otherwise showed what they thought of all this nonsense. Only yesterday the British ambassador at Washington, Sir Esme Howard, in an interview announced that another disarmament conference would be called shortly, to which the overseas dominions would be invited to discuss another note, if you please, between Great Britain and the United States for the reduction of naval armaments. I do not know if he is speaking for the British cabinet. How many more of these notes or pacts are we to have ratified by Canada?-a separate nation and a separate country. Because that is all we are. We are a separate nation without an army or a navy to protect us.

The note sent out by the United States was treated with a great deal of levity by the United States and by many newspapers, so much so that in the United States senate, Senator Burton denied the necessity for naval parity between Britain and America. He pointed out the peculiar needs of Great Britain for a powerful navy and many light cruisers. He ridiculed the suggestion that the British navy might be used against the United States. The proximity of Canada, he said, was one of the many potent reasons why Great Britain would never attack the United States. He pleaded with the senate not to make " a mockery " of the multilateral treaty by providing for increased armaments.

Is Canada to play America's dual role as peacemaker and advanced war voter all along the line? The Kellogg note is a sham, for every war is a war of self-defence, and notes cannot alter facts nor acts of parliament change economic laws. The Kellogg note, like its ancestor the Monroe doctrine, is a mere myth and has produced more distrust than ever and one result of it will be a design to rob England of her naval supremacy. The note will deceive only those who are as blind to the real situation in 1929 as they were from 1909 to 1914. It seems to me after the

stormy career of the Kellogg note in Europe and America, the said note should be referred to a psychical clinic for investigation as to what it contains. It needs a tonic.

I should like to read to the house the views of some of the greatest writers and economists in the motherland. For instance, the editor of the English Review in the November issue holds the Kellogg note up to ridicule and scorn in these words:

Ten years ago the central empires, which pursued with a fatal diligence the philosophy of force, were beaten to their knees. Europe was dominated by a coalition of peoples fundamentally peace-loving. Russia, the black sheep of the victorious allies, had gone down in defeat. England, France, and America dominated the scene. Here was a chance, it seemed, for a new start; for here, we assumed, were three nations each content with their place under the sun. To-day, what do we see'/ America, arch-organizer of peace, has exacted a heavy tribute from Europe which she is using to finance a vast programme of naval and military expenditure. Having increased her army and navy, she comes to Europe to preach disarmament-not to Russia, which maintains millions of men under arms; not to Italy, which pursues with almost devastating candour an openly agressive nationalism; not to the Balkans, where there is no more sign of peace to-day than in 1912; but to France and England and Poland; to France, who can see the Italian army openly manoeuvring along her frontier but who is yet reducing her own army by two-thirds; to Poland, already once invaded by Russia; to England, who has surrendered voluntarily the two-,power naval standard. Leagues, covenants, pacts and disarmament conferences have become the diplomatic weapons of the new Real-Politik as pursued by at least three great powers. The chief abettors of the campaign, watched with cynical amusement by the armed nations of southern and eastern Europe, have been the so-called progressive press and the intelligentsia in this country. If they are satisfied with their handiwork, they are either fools or knaves. Europe is drifting toward war because certain European pressmen and statesmen refuse to face facts. Let us state the facts plainly!. It is not yet too late.

The first fact is, as Mr. J. 0. P. Bland points out in his article in this issue, that you can have national sovereignty or a supernational sovereign authority, but you cannot have, as we pretend to have, a supernational power without either sovereignty by right or authority based on force. The league, in plain English, is merely an international post office, and as constituted can never be anything else.

The second fact is that the scale of armaments is a matter for each nation. Armaments are not the weapon of the strong but the refuge of the weak; negotiations about armaments mean, in the long run, a scaling up, not a scaling down. The nation which accepts a maximum armament is sacrificing its freedom of action and must place that maximum high, and the maximum becomes the minimum. The third fact is that every pact which is propounded widens the danger area and adds to the risks of war. The fourth is that open diplomacy is a fraud, not only because it places nations at

International Peace-Mr. Church

the mercy of formulae, which mean one thing and appear to mean something else, but mainly because it prevents plain speaking between nations. Burke said truly that you cannot indict a whole nation, but you could not practise open diplomacy honestly without doing so. Lord X. can say "no" to Count Y., but Ruri-tania cannot say "no" to Cisalpania. A world, however, where the direct negative cannot be employed is a world where the trickster will flourish and honest man will be fleeced. There is only one reason why I do not speak more plainly, and that reason is the justification of my argument.

Now let us see what Bernard Shaw has to say in regard to this wonderful mock parliament known as the League of Nations, which is doing more to create strife than any other agency I know of. In my opinion they should change the name from League of Nations to League of Humbug, because that is all it is. In an article entitled "The League of Nations -A First Visit Impression" Bernard Shaw has this to say:

When my presence at Geneva during the annual assembly of the League of Nations was mentioned in the Press, I received several letters, of which the following is a fair sample:

"I cannot help being rather surprised and shocked to read that you 'sit on the bench of mockers and hyprocrites' ... In this country every little child knows that the League of Nations is only a bluff and nothing but an instrument for the policy of the Allied forces. ... I really am at a loss to understand why you don't feel your responsibility as a Mental Tutor of the World, when taking such a step as taking part in the comedy of Geneva, which is a tragedy for every country that does not find mercy in the eyes of the -world's High C Finance."

This letter is not a statesman's utterance. It is a crude expression of the popular impatience which sees no more in the league than an instrument for the instantaneous extirpation of war, and is ready to throw it on the scrap-heap the moment it becomes clear that no such operation is possible, and that the big powers have not, and never have had, any intention of relinquishing any jot of their sovereignty, or depending on any sort of strength and security other than military.

Roughly and generally it is a fact that the pacifist oratory at the Assembly is Christmas card platitude at best and humbug at -worst. The permanent departments of the league have to fight hard to defeat the frequent attempts to sabotage it by the big powers through their deciduous members.

Whilst I was there the press was keeping the public amused, not to say gulled, by gossip about the assembly meetings, at which nothing happens but pious speeches which might have been delivered fifty years ago. It -was so impossible to listen to them, or to keep awake during the subsequent inevitable translations, that the audience had to be kept in its place by a regulation, physically enforced, that no visitor should be allowed to leave the hall except during the five minutes set apart for that purpose between speech and translation. Fortunately, the young ladies of the secretariat,

who have plenty of dramatic sense, arrange the platform in such a way that the president, the speakers, and the bureau are packed low down before a broad tableau curtain which, being in three pieces, provides most effective dramatic entrances right and left of the centre. When a young lady secretary has a new dress, or for any other reason feels that she is looking her best, she waits until the speaker-possibly a Chinese gentleman carefully plodding through a paper written in his best French-has reduced half the public galleries to distraction and the other half to stertorous slumber, when she suddenly, but gracefully, snatches the curtains apart and stands revealed.

That is all the League of Nations is. Bernard Shaw continues:

A very able administrative official, whose heart and soul are in the league, told me that he has been at Geneva eight years, and never attended one of these assemblies yet. He expressed no intention of remedying that hiatus in his experience.

Then at page 528 of the same issue he says:

I stress this because, as a matter of fact, Mr. Kellogg has been duped into taking a stealthy stop backward towards war under the impression that he was making a colossal stride towards peace. By the original covenant of the league, the powers were bound not to make war until they had first submitted their case to the league; that is, without a considerable delay. Since then the big fighting powers have been trying to extricate themselves from this obligation and recover their old freedom to make war without notice whenever they wanted to. Their first success in this direction was the Locarno agreement, the second the Kellogg pact. Both of them established conditions under which the covenant might be violated; and the Kellogg pact put the finishing touch by providing that the powers might go to war at any time "in self-defence". What this means can be appreciated at once by the fact that the German attack in 1911 was, perhaps, the most complete technical case of self-defence in military history. Germany's avowed enemy, Russia, having mobilized against her. But, indeed, since such excuses for war became conventional there has never been a war which lacked them. Of all the wars which Commander Ken-worthy, in his significant book, "Will Civilisation Crash?" has shown to be on the cards, including, especially. a war between the British Empire and the United States, there is not one that could not be and, if it breaks out, will not be, represented as a war of self-defence on both sides. Mr. Kellogg had better have privileged wars of aggrandisement or revenge, because any power claiming the privilege would at least have been in an indefensible moral position. The only possible policy for the league is steadfastly to ignore all the much-advertised proceedings at Locarno and Paris exactly as it was itself ignored on both occasions, and insist on the covenant as still binding.

So far as the league is concerned, it runs coupter to the Monroe doctrine. The Kellogg pact does not apply where war is waged in self-defence. But all wars are wars of selfdefence. At page 139 of the February issue of the English Review the editor says:

International Peace-Mr. Church

America has ratified the pact after an amazing debate, unreported over here, in which the pact was energetically defended on the ground that it committed no one to anything, and left the United States with a free hand to interpret the Monroe Doctrine as, when., and where she liked. The debate was not reassuring for lovers of peace. It disclosed a very strong determination on the part of America to do what she wanted in her own good time, and a healthy contempt for the status quo, to preserve which, as we had imagined (or rather as others had imagined), was the whole object of the pact. The object, of course, as we have said all along, was to leave the United States free to do what she wanted without risk of interference. To the pressure of wealth there is one answer only, and that answer is force. That the United States know this well enough is shown by their vast expansion of armaments. They anticipate the answer with singular accuracy. They are, however, to be heartily congratulated on their diplomacy, if we take the Machiavellian standpoint. The increase in expenditure on armaments since 1914 by the United States (alone of all the countries in the world) .substantially exceeds 100 per cent, but she has succeeded in persuading progressives of all countries that she alone is the real lover of peace. And she does not even belong to the League of Nations! How is it done?

The past ten years have shown that open diplomacy has been a flat failure, and at page 6 of the January number of the English Review there appears the following:

The international politics of the last ten years have been most notable and will be chiefly remembered for the failure of open diplomacy. With President Wilson's ideal of open covenants no one will quarrel, but the attempt to arrive at them openly has been a disastrous failure. Almost every embitterment of national feeling in the last ten years has been due to the public discussion of international arrangements. The decade of conferences has ended in an atmosphere of disillusion, in growing armaments, in a tangle of pacts, treaties and understandings. Happily there are signs that public opinion will soon enforce an ending to this orgy of folly. Statesmen inevitably lag behind, but they will not be allowed to do so indefinitely. The risks of another war are altogether too great. We must have ten years' silence if we are to have for the first time in our generation ten years of peace.

Mr. DEPUTY SPEAKER:

Mr. BOURASSA:

You would suppress the department in a year.