Economic and Military Armaments

Abstract

IN the eighth Richard Cobden Lecture entitled “The Common Menace of Economic and Military Armaments” delivered on May 25 and now published (Cobden-Sanderson, Ltd., Is. net), Prof. W- E. Rappard, discussing the relations between economic and military armaments, points out that as military armaments have contributed to the development of economic armaments, so the latter in turn have promoted the extension of military armaments by emphasizing the claims of the national State as against the rights of the individual and of mankind, and thereby increasing the tension in international relations. Both economic and military armaments are largely the legacy of past wars or the fruit of antici pation of future wars. Their primary source, however, is the doctrine of political nationalism which leads nations to look upon their own State as a universe in itself and therefore to disregard the rights of all others. A further source is in the present depression and in the efforts to overcome it by thorough-going State intervention.