An International Air Police Force

Abstract

LORD DA VIES continues his vigorous campaign for an international police force in a new booklet entitled “Force and the Future” which deserves notice as a shorter and more incisive statement of the argument of his larger work, which we have already noticed in review. He also brings it up to date by arraigning the Government on several counts for holding up the League of Nations and failing to provide it with the means of enforcing its will. The discussion of these is clearly out of place in these columns, but it is germane to science to point out that, as time goes on, opinion seems definitely to be settling on the air as the sphere of action in which international co-operation is most appro priate, feasible and urgent. A well-thought-out plan for a European air police has lately been sub mitted to the League of Nations Union by Rear-Adm. R. N. Lawson xand should be carefully con sidered by the government experts and everyone who is anxious to move in the direction of greater security and union among the nations. If not imme diately practicable in the form of police, it clearly is so in the form of greater facility and safety in trans port and communication. Started in this way, as the International Postal Union was in the middle of last century, a union or bureau associated with the League of Nations would secure a much more efficient and economical way of utilising the air for peaceful purposes, and indirectly sidetrack the horrors of bombing from the air which Lord Davies and many others have held up to us as the inevitable result of man's latest conquest. Were the air used habitually for its obvious purpose of bringing the nations easily together, it would soon seem as mad and monstrous to use it for destruction as for the barber to cut your throat when you sit down to be shaved. While man has free will, one cannot abso lutely rule out the possibility of the wildest actions, but one can make them, by controlling habits, improbable to the highest degree.