ARMS AND THE MAN

With the growing realization that the pre-war point of view is incompatible with the desires of civilized people, there arises the question of how these desires may be properly fulfilled. Professor Alfred Zimmera, present Godkin Lecturer, offers an answer in an interview published elsewhere in this issue. Next summer in the Geneva School of International Studies of which he is a faculty member, five hundred students and professors of forty different nation alities will begin their seventh season establishing cultural and intellectual contacts between nations.

It is obvious that this trend towards establishing friendly relations between individuals, if carried out an a sufficiently large scale, is a sound basis for international peace. The shop-keeper of Germany will not murder the shop-keeper of France over a glass of bear: nor will the student of today, if he has anything to say in the matter, gas the man with whom he walked the streets of Heidelburg. However, fellow students have fought each other in the past, and the thought of friendly hands across the sea has too often been used to cover a new armament program to arouse boundless enthusiasm now. Personal contact and friendship, if confined to educational circles alone, has not in the past and probably will not in the future shake the foundations of petty and selfish patriotism. Nevertheless, while supposedly enlightened nations are busily engaged in determining the size of future engines of destruction, these voices from Geneva are worthy of recognition and at least a tempered skepticism.